KENYA-POPULATION: Police Crackdown on Illegal Immigrants

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru

NAIROBI, Aug 8 1997 (IPS) - Thousands of Somali and Sudanese refugees, terrified by the police crackdown on illegal immigrants in Kenya, no longer hang out at their popular rendezvous along the busy Kaunda Street and Kenyatta Avenue here.

“It is too risky to venture out these days,” said Adam Abdi, a Somali refugee here. “You can easily be nipped by the police, even if you have a valid Kenya residence permit.”

Njuguna Mutahi of the Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHC) told IPS on Thursday that the current crackdown, which began on Jul. 18, was sparked by a visit to Kenya by the Rwandan vice-president General Paul Kagame.

Kagame, who visited Kenya at President Daniel Arap Moi’s invitation on Jul. 16, has been demanding that Kenya handover a number of alleged Rwandans who were involved in the 1994 genocide, in which up to one million people, mostly Tutsis and moderate Hutus, were slaughtered by hardline Hutu militias.

Two days after his visit, seven Hutus were rounded up by the Kenyan authorities. They included Jean Kambanda, the prime minister of the Republic of Rwanda during the massacres of April 1994, Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, a minister in the former government, and Hassan Ngeze, the former editor-in-chief of ‘Kangura’ magazine, which, in 1994, allegedly published articles and cartoons inciting violence and hatred against Tutsis and moderate Hutus.

The seven, who fled to Kenya soon after the fall of the late President Juvenal Habyarimana’s regime in July 1994, have been handed over to the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in the northern Tanzanian town of Arusha.

After the Rwandans were picked up, “the roundup then spread to include other refugees, who became innocent victims of the police operations,” said Mutahi.

Last week, Kenyan police admitted having netted some 600 foreigners suspected of being illegal aliens. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNCHR), 80 refugees of various nationalities have been transported to Kakuma camp in northwest Kenya.

Kenya hosts more than 230,000 refugees from Rwanda, Burundi, Somalia, Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire).

“The saddest thing about the roundup is the suffering of women, children and elderly persons who cannot withstand the harsh conditions of Kenya’s prisons,” said Mutahi.

Adding her voice to the matter, Connie Ngondi, the executive director of the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) Kenya Chapter, said her organisation condemned the manner in which the Kenya Police has been going about arresting Rwandan refugees.

“The ICJ Kenya Section is worried that the Kenya government is flouting the provisions of international law to suit political exigencies,” said Ngondi in a statement faxed to IPS on Friday.

“What is of concern is the fact that the government knew all along the whereabouts of these persons, even their homes, and did nothing to either expose them or bring them to book. If they are guilty now, they were guilty then, and the government is guilty of complicity in their guilt,” she said.

The London-based human rights organisation Amnesty International issued an international alert last month to prevent the Kenyan authorities from deporting innocent or bona fide Hutu refugees to Rwanda.

A protest was registered by Uganda last week against the rounding up of its nationals. Rebecca Kadaga, the Minister of State for Foreign Affairs in charge of Regional Cooperation, summoned Kenya’s ambassador, Peter ole Nkuraiyia, to urge Nairobi to either establish legal charges against the 100 Ugandan detainees or set them free.

The roundup has created panic among the refugee community here. “We live in fear. We don’t hang out along the Kenyatta Avenue to meet friends, exchange ideas and hear the latest news from the frontline in the Sudanese conflict anymore,” said a Sudanese refugee here.

The refugee, who refused to be named for security reasons, told IPS on Friday that the UNHCR demands that refugees stay in camps. “They only permit sick people seeking medical treatment or students studying in colleges or universities to live in cities,” he said.

What worries the refugees most is the recent remark by a top Kenyan government official that Kenya was “full of foreign spies and criminals masquerading as refugees”.