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Kenya has urged the United Nations to remove a camp housing more than half a million Somali refugees within three months, as part of a response to the recent killing of 148 people by Somali gunmen at a Kenyan university.
Kenya has in the past accused fighters of hiding out in Dadaab camp which it now wants the UN refugee agency UNHCR to move across the border to inside Somalia.
“We’ve asked the UNHCR to relocate the refugees in three months, failure to which we shall relocate them ourselves,” Deputy President William Ruto said in a statement on Saturday.
“The way America changed after 9/11 is the way Kenya will change after Garissa,” he said, referring to the university that was attacked on April 2.
Al Jazeera’s Mohamed Adow, reporting from Garissa in Kenya, said that Ruto warned that if the UN fails to remove the camp, the government would do so itself.
He also quoted Ruto as saying that the move was necessary to secure its border with Somalia, which Kenya has failed to do so because of the camp’s impediments.
The complex of camps hosts more than 600,000 Somali refugees, according to Ruto, in a remote, dry corner in northeast Kenya, about an hour’s drive from Garissa town.
The camp was first established in 1991 when civil war broke out in neighbouring Somalia, and over subsequent years has received waves of refugees fleeing conflict and drought.
The United Nations puts the number of registered refugees in the chronically overcrowded settlements of permanent structures, mud shanties and tents, at around 335,000. The camp houses schools, clinics and community centres.
Macharia Munene, professor of international relations at USIU-Africa, said the logistics of moving hundreds of thousands of refugees across the border would be “a tall order”.
But he said there were now safe areas within Somalia from where al-Shabaab armed group had been chased out by African Union forces in recent years.
“Kenya is in an emergency situation . . . Each country has an obligation to look after its people first,” he said.
Funerals of the students killed in the campus attack were taking place across the country. Pictures of their grieving families dominated the media, reminding Kenyans of the attack.
Ruto said Kenya had started building a 700km wall along the entire length of the border with Somalia to keep out members of al-Shabaab.
“We must secure this country at whatever cost, even if we lose business with Somalia, so be it,” he said.
Last Tuesday, Kenya closed 13 informal money remittance firms, hawalas, to cut off funding to suspected fighters. Ruto said any business that collaborated with al-Shabaab would be shut down.
Al-Shabaab has killed more than 400 people on Kenyan soil in the last two years, including 67 during a siege at Nairobi’s Westgate mall in 2013, damaging tourism and inward investment.
Last Monday, the Kenyan air force launched air strikes against al Shabaab targets in Somalia, a country where it has been militarily engaged against the armed group for several years.
Meanwhile, one Kenyan student was killed and 141 injured in a stampede yesterday on the campus of the University of Nairobi when students mistook several accidental explosions for an extremist attack, according to an official.
One male third-year student was killed in the crush of students, Peter Mbithi, Vice Chancellor of the University of Nairobi, told The Associated Press. The injured students have been taken to hospitals for treatment, he said.
He said an electrical transformer exploded and students thought it was an attack by Islamic extremists like the April 2 attack by Somalia’s al-Shabaab rebels on Kenya’s Garissa University College in which 148 people were killed.
Mbithi said many students were injured when they jumped from upper floors of their dormitories.— Al Jazeera
Bongani Moyo
Online Reporter