‘Mass graves’ fiasco shows perils of human rights extremism

As Thomas Jefferson, one of the architects of American democracy, once quipped, “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”

One event would have made Jefferson smile in his grave: The recent report by Northern Kenya leaders led by Mandera Senator Billow Kerrow that “mass graves” had been discovered in Mandera County.

A mass grave is a smoking-gun proof of crime against humanity by a government or a group.

Therefore, the discovery of a mass grave — defined by the United Nations as a burial site that contains three or more victims of execution — is to human rights activists what the discovery of oil or gas is to entrepreneurs.

But the sensational report on “mass graves” will certainly become the most embarrassing fiasco in Kenyan human rights history.

The storyline of the Kenyan “mass graves” ignominy is familiar.

On December 8, 2015, 10 Somali lawmakers reported that herdsmen had discovered “mass graves” in Mandera County.

The legislators claimed that 25 bodies were buried in shallow graves.

They accused the Kenya Defence Forces (KDF) of carrying out the killings in its campaign against the Al-Shabaab terror group.

While vowing to seek the assistance of the UN Rapporteur for Human Rights or the International Criminal Court to investigate the matter, they also called on President Uhuru Kenyatta to appoint a special tribunal to investigate the killings.

No new bodies were found after two days of heavy digging out of the alleged 15 sites of “mass graves”.

Only the lone body of a woman, 29-year-old Isnina Musa Sheikh, was found.

THE END GAME

Senator Kerrow apologised for the alarming reports that caused anxiety and panic.

The lesson from the “mass graves” saga is clear.

A fiddle-faddle style of leadership with no regard for reason, facts and truth can prove extremely expensive for fragile democracies facing an existential threat of terror.

Apparently, the endgame of the “mass graves” claim was to force the hand of the government to pull its troops from Amisom and out of Somalia and Northern Kenya.

Sympathisers of Al-Shabaab extremists in Kenya will not rest until Kenya withdraws its troops from Somalia and Northern Kenya.

The “mass graves” debacle has pushed the pressure to get the KDF out of southern Somalia to a fever pitch.

This war rests on two planks. First is the allegation that the Kenyan security forces are involved in extrajudicial killings or disappearances.

“The victims are picked up in Mandera town both at night and in broad daylight by KDF officers and then disappear,” Kerrow alleged.

Disappearances are widely associated with authoritarian governments.

If the excavations in Mandera had yielded new bodies, the government would not have escaped the tag of a despotic and militaristic regime.

Focus in the debate on disappearance should turn to helping Kenyan families whose children have disappeared to join extremist movements.

ISIS has been putting up posters calling for girls across the world to participate in “jihad al-nikah” or to voluntarily offer themselves as sexual comforts to men fighting to establish Islamic rule.

The “disappearance” of Kenyan boys and girls has brought tears to relatives.

It has also become a new security headache to the Kenyan Government.

Therefore, politicising such disappearances is heartless and reckless.

JIHAD LOYALISTS
There are reports galore of Kenyan girls joining Al-Shabaab or ISIS as Jihad brides.

In April 2015, the Kenyan authorities arrested a 19-year-old Tanzanian woman, Ummul Khayr Sadir, a medical student at the Khartoum-based International University of Africa, alongside her two 19-year-old Kenyan companions, Khadijah Abubakar Abdulkadir and Maryam Said Aboud, both students at local universities.

The three university girls were arrested in El Wak town on the Kenya-Somali border as they headed for Syria via Somalia and Turkey to become jihad al-nikahs.

In May 2015, two 20-year-old girls who had disappeared from their home in Nairobi’s South C Estate, Salwa Abdalla and Twafiqa Dahir, shocked their relatives when they sent messages back home saying they were in Syria.

These are possibly the first confirmed cases of Kenyan girls who have joined the ISIS.

Isnina, the woman whose body was found buried in a shallow grave in Mandera’s Lathe village, was an Al-Shabaab sympathiser and most probably a jihad al-nikah.

She cooked for the militants at their Bulla Hawa camp before she fled into Kenya and opened a tea kiosk in Mandera.

One theory is that Isnina fell to the Al-Shabaab. This is possible.

Iraq is littered with mass graves of women who volunteered to be Jihad wives but were killed because they were considered too old to be sex comforts for ISIS fighters.

A RAFT OF VICES
The second allegation is that the Kenyan security forces are targeting an historically marginalised ethnic and religious minority group.

When the reports of “mass graves” first appeared, the hashtag #StopKillingSomalis started to trend in Kenya and internationally.

However, blaming every death or disappearance that occurs in the region on the government misses the point.

The region has remained a cesspool of all genres of violence including terrorism, banditry, rampant criminality, small arms proliferation and deadly inter-clan feuds.

Mandera has continuously experienced fierce inter-clan clashes especially between the Garre and the Degodia clans, which claimed 77 lives and displaced over 18,000 households in August 2014.

The “mass graves” fiasco reminds us that truth and facts are necessary for responsible leadership.