Why Kenya must now focus on Responsibility to Protect

The recent Saba Saba rally rode on a new wave of criminal/ethnic violence and terrorism, which is giving pre-eminence to the emerging international norm of the “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) in Africa’s security debates. Two recent events have thrust the issue of citizen security to the fore.

Internationally, the future of security in Africa was robustly debated in a recent multi-national workshop on peace operations in Africa jointly convened by the Washington-based Africa Centre for Strategic Studies and the United States African Command and attended by military strategists, peacekeepers and security practitioners and scholars from America, Europe and Africa held in Lilongwe, Malawi, from Thursday to yesterday.

Internally, the capacity of Kenya’s newly democratised state to provide security and to protect its citizens was put to test by the protest politics in the build-up to the opposition’s Saba Saba rally. The rally, however, became a triumph of peace, reason and democracy.

After Saba Saba, Cord has hoisted insecurity and the presence of the Kenya Defence Forces (KDF) in Somalia as the main planks of its “referendum strategy”.

Although security is not one of the referendum issues spelt out in the new Constitution — which include the Bill of Rights, the Sovereignty of the People and the functions of Parliament and devolution — the opposition’s 13-point resolution has listed insecurity and the withdrawal of the Kenyan troops serving in the African Union Mission in Somalia (Amisom) as possible referendum questions.

In the light of ubiquitous military interventions in Africa, Cord’s focus on security dovetails into the debate on the future of Kenya’s sovereignty.

Military interventions

Recent foreign military interventions in Africa are morally anchored on the “Responsibility to Protect”. The doctrine is based on three pillars: 1) states have responsibility to protect their citizens from atrocious crimes; 2) the international community has the responsibility to assist failing states to fulfil their primary responsibility to protect; and 3) the international community has the responsibility to intervene, including by military means, where states manifestly fail to protect.

Critics view the norm as an open cheque for powerful nations to intervene in African countries.

As such, Cord’s new security strategy is challenging the government’s security thinkers at two levels. In the build-up to Saba Saba, the opposition invoked terrorist attacks and the killings in Lamu and Tana River from June 15, 2014 as evidence of the government’s failure to protect its citizens.

As such, the rally came as the ultimate test for the ability of the government to guarantee security.

Ahead of the rally, Cord leader Raila Odinga prayed on the responsibility to protect, insisting that “the Government must provide security to all Kenyans who will attend the rally”.

The rally was a triumph for the government in three ways. Unlike the Saba Saba of the early 1990s where the government used tear-gas to disperse and prevent people from assembling, this time security officers — who were also served with breakfast at the rally’s venue — secured the environment from riotous mobs and terrorists.

Second, calm prevailed, even in areas predicted to be flashpoints of violence such as Naivasha, Kisumu and Mombasa. No less than 15,000 officers secured peace at Nairobi’s Uhuru Park. After the rally, people dispersed peacefully.

Politically, the rally failed to unfold as the Tsunami that was earlier predicted. The relatively low turn-out denied Cord the “CNN effect” it badly needed to boost its claim to popular support as the genuine “voice of the people”, a prerequisite for its mass protests. The government’s main challenge now is to dismantle the architecture of “informal violence” across the country and to counter terrorism robustly across the country.

Direct implications

The opposition’s call on Kenya to withdraw its troops from Somalia has direct implications for Kenya’s role in global peace-keeping, and its responsibility to protect beyond its borders. Somalia is not the only country where Kenya is contributing troops, technical support or both. It is supporting over 10 United Nations and African Union peace missions in Africa.

Although Kenyan troops entered Somalia in October 2011, today Kenya’s 3,000-plus soldiers have been placed under Amisom command. Kenya is one of a dozen countries providing troops and technical support to Amisom’s 22,000-strong UN-sanctioned force.

The pressure on Kenya to pull out its peacekeepers from Somalia has negative implications for Kenya’s pan-African orientation.

Kenya is at the heart of Amisom, responsible for intelligence and logistics alongside Uganda (operations and engineering), Burundi (plans and communications) and Sierra Leone (training) among others.

Its capitulation to the pressure to exit would put at risk the entire African mission and the gains made so far in counter-terrorism in the region.

It also raises serious questions about the opposition’s pan-African policy.

Oddly, while other countries saw the September 2013 Westgate attack as a wake-up call to intensify the war on al-Shabaab, Kenya’s opposition has used the attack to ratchet up pressure on the government to exit Amisom. Ethiopia responded to Westgate by integrating its troops in Somalia to Amisom.

Sierra Leone has contributed 850 troops to Somalia. America has also established a military co-ordination cell in Mogadishu at the request of Amisom and the Somalia government, the first since the Black Hawks Down incident in 1993.

Cord’s call is inadvertently playing into al-Qaeda’s and al-Shabaab’s propaganda campaign to have African troops pulled out of Somalia, potentially returning the country to the status of a safe haven for terrorists.

At Uhuru Park, the government may have fulfilled its responsibility to protect, but extending this protection to every inch of Kenya is the best guarantee for its sovereignty in the age of interventionism.

Prof Peter Kagwanja is the Chief Executive of the Africa Policy Institute