Stop Recruitment of Somali Refugees, Rights Group Urges Kenya
October 22, 2009
NAIROBI, Kenya
Deception Used to Enlist Refugees to Fight in Somalia
The Kenyan government should immediately stop the recruitment of Somalis in refugee camps to fight for an armed force in Somalia, Human Rights Watch said today. Kenyan authorities have directly supported the drive, which has recruited hundreds of Somali men and boys in the sprawling Dadaab refugee camps as well as Kenyan citizens from nearby towns.
Since early October, Somali recruiters claiming to act on behalf of Somalia's Transitional Federal Government (TFG) have operated openly in the Dadaab camps in northeast Kenya, near the Somali border, to enlist young refugees in a new force intended to fight in Somalia. But military recruitment in these camps contravenes the principle recognized in international law that refugee camps should be entirely civilian and humanitarian in character.
"Permitting recruitment of fighters in refugee camps undermines the very purpose of the camps - to be a place of refuge from the conflict," said Georgette Gagnon, Africa director at Human Rights Watch. "Kenyan authorities need to immediately put a stop to this recruitment drive targeting Somali refugees."
The recruitment drive is also targeting Kenyans around the towns of Dadaab and Garissa. The Somali armed group al-Shabaab has also sought to recruit fighters among Somali refugee communities and Kenyans.
Human Rights Watch investigations have found that recruiters for the new force have used deceptive practices, promising exorbitant pay and claiming that the force has United Nations and other international backing. They have urged teenage refugees to lie about their ages and to join without informing their families. Former recruits say that their cell phones were taken from them before they were transported to the training center.
Top Kenyan officials including the foreign minister have categorically denied this recruitment drive is taking place at all, but in fact it is operating with direct Kenyan support, including government transport vehicles and guards.
The Dadaab camps, built to house 90,000 people in the early 1990s, are now home to over 280,000 refugees, mostly from Somalia. It is the largest concentration of refugees in the world. More than 50,000 people have arrived in the camps since January 2009. Many are fleeing the bloody conflict between Somalia's weak TFG and various armed opposition groups, including al-Shabaab, some of whose leaders have publicly linked themselves to al-Qaeda.
Human Rights Watch has documented war crimes and serious human rights abuses by all sides to the conflict, which has caused thousands of civilian deaths, tremendous destruction of civilian property, and massive displacement. The Kenyan government strongly supports the TFG and has become increasingly apprehensive about the possibility of attacks on its soil by al-Shabaab.
This month, Human Rights Watch researchers visited the Kenyan town of Dadaab and the three refugee camps that surround it-Ifo, Dagahaley, and Hagadera. They interviewed more than two dozen people, including young men and boys who had been approached by recruiters, parents of young men who joined the force, individuals involved in the recruitment effort, and community leaders in the camps.
Recruiters began circulating in the refugee camps in early October. According to local community leaders and a recruiter working in two of the camps, they have recruited at least several hundred refugees. Many recruits are promised an initial payment of between US$400 and $600 for the military training itself, to be followed with a generous monthly salary upon deployment to Somalia. Most of the recruiters are telling prospects that they will be deployed to fight alongside the transitional government's forces, either in the Somali capital, Mogadishu, or in southern Somalia.
The recruiters operating in the camps are themselves refugees who have been promised generous payments by the coordinators of the drive. Recruiters have also been operating in the town of Dadaab, seeking to enlist ethnic Somali Kenyan citizens into the same force. Residents and local officials in Garissa, the provincial capital of Kenya's North Eastern Province, and surrounding communities said that recruitment is also taking place among their own young men and boys.
The recruitment program is being coordinated by a small group of Somali nationals who are living and operating openly from a hotel in Dadaab. The team is allegedly headed by two prominent individuals from southern Somalia who had ties to the administration of the former president of the transitional government, Abdullahi Yusuf.
Recruiters hire private cars to transport young men and boys to one of at least two isolated staging locations near the town of Dadaab. From there they are loaded into Kenyan military and National Youth Service trucks and told that they are being taken to a Kenyan government facility at Manyani, near Mombasa, for military training. Two sources - a young man who went searching for a recruited relative at the Manyani training center, and a government official with knowledge of the recruitment program - told Human Rights Watch that this facility is a Kenya Wildlife Service field training school. The school provides paramilitary training to anti-poaching rangers as well as other branches of the Kenyan security forces. Police personnel for Somalia's transitional government have also undergone training at the facility in the past.
International Law Prohibitions on Refugee Recruitment
The principle that refugee camps should be "exclusively civilian and humanitarian in character" is derived from international humanitarian, human rights and refugee law and is embodied in the guidelines of the UN refugee agency and UN Security Council resolutions.
Guidelines of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) aim to prevent the military recruitment of refugees in camps and settlements. The refugee agency's executive committee has called upon all countries to "ensure that measures are taken to prevent the recruitment of refugees by government armed forces or organized armed groups." Ensuring the civilian character of refugee camps is essential for efforts to protect refugees, since the military use of camps-and the refugee population-by armed forces and non-state armed groups can make the sites vulnerable as military objectives and place the civilian population at increased risk.
The refugee agency recently distributed a bulletin in the camps warning that refugees who join an armed group risk losing their refugee status. It also warned that family members may be permanently disqualified for resettlement if they support the efforts of a relative to join an armed group. The young men interviewed by Human Rights Watch appeared to be unaware of this.
False Promises and Claims of UN Backing
Many recruiters for the force have been telling young men in the camps and nearby towns that their effort is backed by the United Nations, the United States government, and the European Union. Some are even saying that recruits will be deployed as part of a new UN force in Somalia. One elderly Kenyan Somali man in Dadaab whose 20-year-old son joined told Human Rights Watch that, "My son is educated and he told me that the United Nations is recruiting an army. So I gave him my blessing and he has my total support." Officials from the UN Political Office for Somalia, the US government, and the European Commission, in interviews with or statements to Human Rights Watch, all denied involvement.
In addition to the $600 promised for undergoing the military training, most recruiters are promising a similar amount in monthly salary after the recruits are deployed to Somalia. While most recruiters tell the young men that they will be sent to fight in Somalia, some promise that they will only be incorporated into a civilian police force that will never see combat or that they will be employed as guards at UN or African Union installations.
Recruits are poorly treated. After the first leg of their journey from their homes, many find themselves stranded in an open expanse of desert without food, water, or shelter, sometimes overnight, as they await onward transport. Human Rights Watch researchers traveled to a staging area near Ege one late afternoon and found a group of nine young men who had been sitting in the scorching sand since morning waiting to be picked up. They had neither water nor food throughout the entire day.
Recruits also soon hear that salaries are to be as low as $200 a month, much less than originally promised. Human Rights Watch interviewed several young men who managed to return home after learning this. Many Somali refugee parents who sought to find their sons who had enlisted were not able to do so because they lack Kenyan government permission to leave the camps.
"Kenyan government-backed recruiters are luring young men with false claims of UN and other international support," Gagnon said. "Getting the recruiters out of the camps and publicly dissociating the UN from any involvement are first steps to shutting the program down."
Human Rights Watch is deeply concerned that children are being recruited. Some recruiters are encouraging teenagers under 18 to lie about their age so they can enlist. Human Rights Watch interviewed boys as young as 15 who had been approached by recruiters but did not enlist. However, several recruits told Human Rights Watch that they had seen recruiters persuade boys of 14 or 15 to lie about their ages. International law to which Kenya is a party and Somalia a signatory prohibits non-state armed groups from recruiting persons under age 18.
Kenyan Government Involvement
Kenyan government officials are directly involved in the unlawful recruitment drive of refugees from the camps. Publicly, Kenyan national and provincial authorities deny any government involvement. "We are not involved in any such operation - it is propaganda," the Kenyan military spokesman, Bogita Ongeri, told Human Rights Watch, saying that only Somali militia groups working independently and illegally have been recruiting in the camps. James ole Seriani, provincial commissioner for the North Eastern province, told Human Rights Watch that the reports could not be true because, "There is no way the government can recruit people at night. We only recruit during the day." The transitional government's president, Sheikh Sharif Ahmed, has also publicly denied his government is involved in recruitment in Kenya.
However, one Kenyan government official, who asked not to be identified because he feared repercussions, told Human Rights Watch that the team has been telling Kenyan Somalis whom they recruit "not to mention they are Kenyan." The source added: "They are given the names of specific parts of Somalia and told to say those are the places they come from."
The Kenyan military actively participates in the recruitment process. After being transported in small groups to staging points between Ege and Saredo, near Dadaab, recruits are driven onward on Kenyan military or National Youth Service trucks, usually after dark. Kenyan military personnel have turned away parents of enlistees within sight of the assembled recruits. The young men who board the trucks are required to turn over their cell phones and National ID cards (in the case of Kenyan citizens) or ration cards (in the case of refugees) if they have them. However, the father of one recruit said that his son had retained his cell phone and had called from the road to Mombasa.
Human Rights Watch interviewed a few young men who had escaped from the military trucks when they stopped late at night for food in Garissa. All said that they did not feel they could leave freely by that point. One group cut through the canvas covering the back of the truck and ran into town. One young man said that he traveled to the Kenyan Wildlife Service training school at Manyani to look for a relative but was turned away and briefly detained after persisting.
Kenyan authorities have made no attempt to stop the recruitment drive in the camps or in nearby towns. Parents, deserters, and community leaders said recruitment was brazenly taking place in tea shops and other public places. UNHCR has received several such complaints in recent weeks. And while police in Hagadera camp briefly detained a group of alleged recruiters who were brought there by angry community members, they were released within 24 hours.
One recruiter interviewed by Human Rights Watch said that he had operated openly and without fear of the authorities. "I was told that the Kenyan government was aware of this and I did not have any problem with the police," he said. "Our biggest problem was the parents of the recruits, not the police."
"Rumours of recruitment in refugee camps by Somalia's warring factions have been rife for years, but a Kenyan government-sanctioned program of this magnitude is unprecedented," said Gagnon. "The government's denials of its involvement are completely implausible."
Source: http://www.hrw.org