Inside ODM’s appeasement policy towards Al-Shabaab

After Garissa and the opposition’s victory in Nigeria, Raila Odinga’s policy on Al-Shabaab is at the centre of a new row with the government.

The central plank of the opposition’s plan is to ratchet up pressure on the government to pull out Kenya’s 3,000-plus soldiers serving in Amisom, currently authorised under Resolution 2182 (2014) of the UN Security Council. Jubilee is determined to stay put.

In diplomatic parlance, this policy is known as appeasement or giving political or material concessions to a belligerent or enemy power.

In examining the rise of the opposition’s appeasement policy since 2008, one confronts “two Raila Odingas”.

The first Odinga (2008-2013) is a brave, bold and non-calculating archetype of the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, who, echoing Marcus Tullius Cicero centuries before him, declared to the British people besieged by the Nazis in May 1940 that: “I have nothing to offer [you] but blood, toil, tears and sweat.”

The launch of Operation Linda Nchi (“Protect the country”) nearly four years ago epitomised this spirit. On October 16, 2011, as Kenya’s Premier and co-principal in the Grand Coalition Government, Odinga backed the decision to dispatch the KDF to Somalia.

Diplomacy had failed, including a UN intervention (1991-1994) and no less than 16 peace conferences between 1991 and 2011. Al-Shabaab incursions into Kenya’s territory increased, forcing Odinga to act.

Al-Shabaab’s raids into Garissa, Wajir, Mandera and the northern coast of Kenya started as soon as the militia was formed in 2006. They attained an alarming degree in July 2011, when its landmines and Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) claimed lives of uniformed personnel in Mandera.

TRAVEL ADVISORIES

To finance its insurgency, the militia kidnapped Kenya’s civil servants, aid workers in Dadaab camps and tourists in Lamu as a source of heavy ransom.

As a result, Western governments issued travel advisories to their citizens, threatening 40 pc of Kenya’s foreign earnings from tourism.

Faced with a restive Parliament and a media accusing it of laxity, the government invoked Article 51 of the United Nations Charter and took KDF troops into Somalia.

This was a game-changer: By September 28, 2012, the KDF had reduced Al-Shabaab from a conventional force to a guerrilla force, dislodged it from Kismayu and other towns in southern Somalia, liberated over 300,000 square kilometers and over 175 kilometers inside Somalia, thus emboldening Amisom.

As a spark of strategic thinking, on February 22, 2012, after serious behind-the-curtains diplomacy, Kenya got the United Nation’s Security Council to adopt resolution 2036, expanding Amisom’s troop ceiling from 12,000 to 17,731 and allowing Kenyan forces to re-hat and become part of the African force under the African Union Command. This exit strategy enabled KDF to avoid the risk of running straight into Somali nationalism as Ethiopia had done in its 2006-2009 incursion to fight the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), which eventually gave birth to Al-Shabaab.

With its 3,664 troops, Kenya became the fourth largest troops contributor to Amisom — after Uganda (6,223), Burundi (5,432) and Ethiopia (4,395) — Africa’s new and most successful collective security system known as “Africa Peace and Security Architecture” (APSA).

GREATEST CONTRIBUTION

Arguably, Kenya’s presence and leadership in Amisom is perhaps the greatest contribution by the Kibaki-Raila détente to Africa, which is increasingly becoming an albatross around Jubilee’s neck.

The second Odinga (2013 – the present) is a Neville Chamberlain prototype. As Churchill’s predecessor and history’s best known appeaser, Chamberlain ruefully misjudged the threat posed by Adolf Hitler, made huge concessions — including signing the disastrous Munich Pact in 1938 — to avoid war with Nazi Germany and naively declared that: “I believe it is peace in our time.”

History has judged appeasement as a bad policy that emboldened the Nazi extremists, allowing Hitler’s Germany to grow too strong and threaten humanity.

From whatever angle one looks at it, Kenya’s withdrawal from Somalia will be a strategic victory for Al-Shabaab and strategic defeat for the country with no guarantees that the militia will halt its attacks on the country.

The ripple effects of a KDF retreat — including a possible fall of Mogadishu and a chance for Al-Shabaab to pursue its irredentist dream of a “Greater Somalia” by seeking to annex parts of Kenya, Ethiopia and Djibouti — will erode Kenya’s credibility on the continental stage for generations to come.

APPEASEMENT POLICY

And history might judge Raila as the leader whose appeasement policy emboldened the militants, possibly enabling it to establish a Caliphate in Kenya and the Indian Ocean rim.

After Garissa, appeasement is morphing into an ugly and high-stakes affair.

Currently, Nairobi is trying to verify information around an “intelligence” document doing the rounds on social media allegedly authored by Iran Ministry of Intelligence, which alleges that Odinga is funding Al-Shabaab and “setting up the current regime by working with militants” as an electoral ploy “to make the government appear weak.”

ODM has denied the claims, but government pundits are apprehensive of a “Nigerian Script” underpinning the opposition’s Al-Shabaab policy. “Mr Odinga seems to have gained considerable political mileage from the issues arising from insecurity especially in alleged terror attacks in a manner almost identical to (President-elect) General Muhammadu Buhari’s situation in Nigeria,” says the dossier.

Al-Shabaab’s seemingly enthusiastic embrace of the opposition is not helping matters. Nairobi is not taking lightly Abu Mus’ab’s claim that Al-Shabaab had the capability of overthrowing the Jubilee Government if Kenya’s opposition supported their cause of getting the KDF troops out of Somalia.

Prof Kagwanja is Chief Executive, Africa Policy Institute, and former government adviser