POLITICS-KENYA: Refugees Ordered to Hand Over Weapons

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru

NAIROBI, Jun 22 1998 (IPS) - Kenyan’s Minister of Home Affairs has ordered refugees living in the country to hand over illegal weapons or risk tough action from the government.

The order, given by Minister Sharrif Nassir at the weekend, targets about 200,000 refugees mainly from Rwanda, Burundi, Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), formerly Zaire. Nassir did not give a deadline for the handing over of arms.

Kenya has been increasingly concerned about refugees smuggling guns from neighbouring countries into the East African nation. No one has any idea how many guns are in the hands of the refugees in the country.

Last month at a two-day meeting held in Wajir town, on the border with Somalia, seven ministers and legislators from the North East Province of Kenya, where the three Dadaab refugee camps of Ifo, Dagahley and Hagardera are located, urged the government to re-open a military camp in the province to counter insecurity.

Refugees in the area have complained openly about roving groups of bandits who terrorise them. “They terrorise, loot property and rape women,” a refugee just back from Ifo told IPS on Monday.

Women refugees are targets of the bandits, because they often walk 10 to 20 kilometres daily to fetch firewood. More than 74 rapes were reported in the camps in 1997.

To combat this, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) plans to buy 1.5 million U.S. Dollars worth of firewood this year. The UN refugee agency also spent 740,000 US Dollars last year to purchase vehicles for police around Dadaab.

Arms within the refugee communities have led to several violent clashes in the past. For example, in June 1996, 26 refugees were shot to death and 18 others wounded when rival Sudanese refugee factions clashed, following a gun battle at Kakuma camp, on the border with Sudan. The situation was contained only after the Kenyan government moved in a police force to keep peace in the camp.

Kenya’s government also is concerned that the proliferation of arms among refugees also could lead to clashes with nationals in some parts of the country who have armed themselves against cattle rustlers.

Unconfirmed reports here say Pokot nomads in the Rift Valley province of Kenya possess over 4,000 guns to defend themselves against the rival Karamoja cattle-rustlers from neighbouring Uganda.

Many trace the roots of the present cattle-rustling in the Pokot area to the fall of the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in 1979. That year, the Karamoja ransacked the military barracks in Moroto, on the border with Kenya, turning the gun on their Pokot and Turkana kinsmen in neighbouring Kenya.

The government distributed guns to the Pokot in 1980 to protect themselves, but instead, the guns were used by Pokot youth to raid the rival Marakwet of Kenya, and for conducting cross-border raids into Uganda.

A top government official in Isiolo town, Japeth Serem, on Saturday ordered people holding illegal firearms and ammunition in his district, on the border with Ethiopia, to surrender them before the end of June.

He was quoted by the official Kenya News Agency (KNA) as saying on Sunday that only nine firearms have so far been surrendered to the government in Isiolo.