Memo to the police: Only a fool fights a fire with more fire and not water
What you need to know:
- Terrorism aims at forcing us to change our values. And that includes trying to make us as terroristic as them.
- When we suspend the law — as we have done with the targeting of Somalis and Muslims, including illegally executing some decidedly unsavoury characters — the terrorists succeed.
It is preposterous to suggest that criticism of the Kenyatta regime’s handling of terrorism means support for terrorism.
Indeed, it is outright dangerous, especially when this handling of counter-terrorism makes things worse, and is a cover-up for blatant incompetence and corruption in our security forces.
Criticism helps us see the pitfalls of actions and decisions, and burying our heads in the sand will not make us more secure.
Mismanagement of counter-terrorism — like the current swoop on the Somali — makes us more vulnerable and less safe. For with a police force that sees the Somali as ATMs, will not a real terrorist or sympathiser just pay the bribes to get out of the “dragnet?”
It is only those too poor to pay who end up in these dragnets, while the real terrorists get away to continue with their nefarious plans.
There are many ways of dealing with terrorism, but the idea that you fight fire with fire is foolhardy: You fight fire with water!
Demonising an entire community is foolish. Just 20 years ago, we witnessed the extremity of demonisation with the Rwandan genocide. We don’t want to get there, and we don’t want to radicalise even more a community that feels unwanted here.
Terrorism aims at forcing us to change our values. And that includes trying to make us as terroristic as them. So when we suspend the law — as we have done with the targeting of Somalis and Muslims, including illegally executing some decidedly unsavoury characters — the terrorists succeed. For we then, like them, revel in impunity.
Fighting terrorism can be done intelligently. In 2011, for instance, Anders Breivik launched terrorist attacks in Norway, setting off bombs that killed eight people in Oslo and then shot 69 others, mostly teenagers, just outside Oslo.
He hoped his attacks would lead to the expulsion of Muslims from Norway, ferment intolerance and reverse admirable gender gains.
REPORT THE CROOKS
The Norwegian Government reacted by re-stating its support for gender equality, multi-culturalism and for the growing Islamic population that is significantly Somali. It followed the rule of law and eventually Breivik was given the maximum sentence available in Norway — 21 years in jail — but with the possibility of extending it for as long as he remained a danger to society, effectively neutralising Breivik and his ilk.
Here in Kenya, we must first separate insecurity and counter-terrorism from refugee and immigration matters. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, there was a surge in violent crime in Kenya. It was blamed on Ugandan refugees and many were deported after swoops. And after 1986, most Ugandans went back when Yoweri Museveni took power.
But crime rates in Kenya did not fall after the Ugandans left, and neither did crime rates rise in Uganda.
Importantly, our police must end their culture of corruption: We need an urgent cultural transformation from the top-down, that prioritises accountability and transparency, and which enables good officers to report the crooks who have the run of the force.
Adding more cops is throwing good money after bad.
It took Georgia, for instance, about five years to totally transform what had been a corrupt, brutal and highly politicised police force when a new government took power about 10 years ago.
They sacked the entire police force, and re-started with a small group of young officers. They recruited afresh and vetted previous officers, instituting corruption charges against former senior officers who would be arrested in the full glare of TV cameras to show there were no sacred cows.
Ordinary citizens and junior officers got involved in identifying the corrupt officers as a new culture of zero tolerance on corruption was instituted.
The new force is smaller, better paid, well equipped and is now one of the most prestigious institutions, attracting only the best. So much so that today, many young people join the army first so that they can eventually transfer into the police!
If they could do it there, we can do it here too, but we need the requisite political will.
