THE MOST DANGEROUS GAMES
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Who Killed This Man Who Saved So Many Rhinos and Elephants?
UNHAPPY VALLEY
Who Killed This Man Who Saved So Many Rhinos and Elephants?
MARGOT KISER
02.11.18 1:55 PM ET
NAIROBI, Kenya—Esmond Bradley Martin was found dead on February 4, a stab wound in his neck and the floor of his home covered with blood. The famous white-haired American wildlife activist and expert on the illegal ivory trade had been murdered within the confines of his estate in Langata, a posh suburb of his adopted country’s capital.
So far Kenya’s police have pursued two lines of investigation: a robbery gone wrong; a planned murder linked to Martin’s efforts to circumvent the illegal trade in wildlife.
Now a third possibility—that Martin was killed as a tactic in an attempted land grab—has come to the attention of The Daily Beast.
On that quiet Sunday afternoon, the 76-year-old veteran of East Africa’s “wildlife wars” and his wife, Chryssee, had just shared a curry lunch with friends at Nairobi’s National Park. They returned home around 2:00 p.m. Chryssee went for a stroll in the wooded forests of their 20-acre, park-like property. When she returned to the house, she discovered the body of her husband on the second floor, a deep stab wound to his neck.
While foreigners don’t die by violence here in Kenya as often as media coverage can make it seem, their murders are prominent and so get a big share of attention.
Martin joins the ranks of prominent activists and researchers who have met violent ends while defending or observing Africa’s wildlife in Kenya and elsewhere on the continent. Particularly well-known cases are the murders of gorilla researcher Diane Fossey, and of Joan Root, an activist who died trying to save the ecosystem of Kenya’s Lake Naivasha. One thing these murders have in common is that they remain unsolved, the killers never brought to book.
Other cases include the killings of Julie Ward, a British tourist murdered in the Maasai Mara in 1988, and Tonio Trzebinski, an artist killed in 2001.
While Kenya’s police force has struggled to overcome its reputation for corruption and ineptitude, the list of unsolved murders remains long.
The Kenya government’s promise to investigate the murder of Chris Msando, the Independent Electoral Boundaries Commission’s acting information and communications advisor, has so far been unfulfilled. And the list of instantly cold cases, with the killing of Martin, may have just grown.
A specifically relevant precedent was the murder in August 2017 of 51-year-old Wayne Lotter, head of a wildlife conservation NGO. He was shot dead in Tanzania as he drove to a hotel from Dar es Salaam’s airport. Lotter’s foundation reportedly funded an elite Tanzanian anti-poaching unit, responsible for the arrest of major ivory traffickers including China’s Yang Feng Glan, known as “the Queen of Ivory,” and a slew of inglorious elephant poachers. The only item the unknown assailants took was Lotter’s laptop.
Because of Martin’s work, which often involved going undercover in remote locations around the world, the media were quick to link his murder to his activism and investigations. But others think that it was unrelated to his career. They argue that Martin was not the kind of target to draw such brutal intervention by traffickers of ivory and rhino horn.
Doubters say, sure, Martin knew who all the kingpins were. He knew how the networks operated. But he never named names. And he was 76 years old! Why would he be killed now?
Furthermore, his recent work showed the contraband trade has been shrinking. His “Decline in the Legal Ivory Trade in China in Anticipation of a Ban” (PDF) was published by conservation group Save The Elephants just last year. The report was co-authored by consultant Lucy Vigne, and showed that 130 licensed outlets in China had been reducing the quantity of ivory items on display for sale, and cutting prices to improve sales.
Police say the killing looks like no more than a botched robbery. Yet close friends and neighbors point out that little or nothing appears to have been stolen. One, who visited the scene and asked to remain anonymous, said there appeared to be no struggle on the house’s ground floor where Martin kept his office. The considerable presence of blood on the floor above, along with the presence there of the body, indicate that that is where the murder took place.
It was in the ground floor office of his house that Martin spent many hours writing reports about the ivory and rhino horn trade. Sources say the office appeared not to have been touched at any time during the attack, as if the records of his investigations were not of interest.
So, does Martin’s murder fit the profile of other apparent assassinations?
One security expert who declined to speak for attribution told The Daily Beast no. “Bumping off [Martin] with a knife in his house on a Sunday afternoon doesn’t sound like a hit.” This Kenyan investigator—with over 30 years’ experience in wildlife management security and aviation—adds, “The traditional hit in Kenya is performed with a gun, far from home or the office.” Furthermore, “Esmond was an academic. His work did not involve direct law enforcement.”
While Martin’s work led him to strange and remote places, from Lagos to Laos, it remained abstract and probably irrelevant for most wildlife criminals.
Esmond Bradley Martin hailed from the monied class of the U.S. East Coast establishment. He was the great grandson of Henry Phipps, the Pittsburgh steel magnate and partner of Andrew Carnegie. Martin and Chryssee first arrived in Kenya in 1967, and built the home where he was murdered.
His talent for detail was evident soon after he arrived in Kenya. In his first book, The History of Malindi, published in 1974 (PDF) he traced the rise and fall of retail and service industries such as tourism and fishing. As one reviewer noted with more than a hint of sarcasm, “It is no trouble to Dr. Martin to measure the diameter and length of mangrove poles used for various purposes … more studies with such valuable minutiae are needed.”
Friends say his interest in the wildlife trade began as he learned about the various items being ferried on dhows from Mombasa to the Middle East, one of these items being rhino horn from Kenya bound for Yemen, where the then plentiful horn was used for dagger handles.
Martin was famous for his mop of hair, which was as white in the ‘90s when I first met him as it was when I last saw him a few years ago. Both times we discussed—over tea—the ebb and flow of the illegal wildlife trade.
He and his colleague Vigne often investigated as a pair. They’d go to remote places posing as buyers, one of them chatting up a shopkeeper while the other took inventory of wildlife products out for sale. His views and prowess were sought in the House of Commons, and by the most prestigious wildlife charities. The U.N. made him its special envoy on rhino conservation.
Dan Stiles, a Kenya-based American consultant for wildlife trade related NGOs knew Esmond and Chryssee for almost 40 years and carried out several ivory market investigations with him.
“It could have been more than a botched robbery, but unlikely it was carried out by angry ivory traffickers,” Stiles told The Daily Beast, adding, “Esmond was a dearly loved and respected member of the conservation community and he will be greatly missed.”
If a botched burglary doesn’t seem to add up to a motive for murder, and if this killing wasn’t related to Martin’s work, what else could it have been related to? The third possibility is land—a highly charged, emotional issue in Kenya.
This country is changing fast. Wilderness has disappeared, wildlife has declined as livestock has increased, and grassland rapidly turns into dust. The changing climate has made droughts deeper and more frequent. These chronic factors are exploited by politicians and others to escalate tribal and economic rivalries (sometimes disguised as Islamic terrorism) and to incite violence.
In the months leading up to Kenya’s recent presidential election, violent land-related incidents increased, especially in Laikipia to the north, where several large wildlife conservation ranches are located. Such properties—potentially useful for grazing and other profitable forms of development—are the focus of those who’ll go great lengths to accomplish land acquisition. The attacks on noted conservationist, Kuki Gallman, on her 98,000 acre ranch last summer is one such instance.
While it may seem strange to deem Martin’s 20 acres in Langata such a parcel, the property’s proximity to Nairobi magnifies its per-acre value. The nearby district of Karen, looking out on the Ngong Hills, was home to Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen) author of Out of Africa. Langata, which has as its stellar denizens the likes of photographer Peter Beard, was once considered Kenya’s Wild West. These days, churches and strip malls line the main arteries coming out from the city.
In the days following Martin’s death, I stopped in front of his driveway. He’d been known for keeping this property’s gate unlocked. Now, access was blocked by that massive, ornate metal gate, an “M” perched at the top. But no such barrier could stop the ear-splitting sounds of jackhammers that seemed to be emanating from within, or very near to, the Martin property. When I drove toward the other side, a section of what appeared to be pristine forest had been sealed off. It was closed for construction.
A Langata resident provided The Daily Beast with a copy of an injunction to stop “the proposed construction [beside Martin’s property] of a church and associated facilities for religious purposes.” The petition resulting in this order, was filed by the Karen Langata District Association (KLDA). Bradley Martin was a member of the KLDA and an opponent of the church construction. Numerous residents pointed out multiple irregularities and violations in the building porject.
The cease-and-desist order was issued two days after Bradley Martin’s death, but seems to have had no effect.
A known member of the congregation of this proposed church, which is Seventh-Day Adventist, is Kenya’s current Minister of Internal Security, Fred Okengo Matiang’i. His name appears as one of two parties being told to halt construction. The other name is that of Zablon A. Mabea, the former Commissioner for Lands. So, despite the injunction, the construction continues.
Martin helped fund the effort to block the church’s installation. One Karen resident who spoke to The Daily Beast on condition of anonymity said that Martin was especially vocal in his opposition to the construction.
Very little was stolen by whoever it was who killed Martin. His phone was still on him. His safe was cracked, but gold and gems were still in it, according to the neighbor, who theorized someone organized the attack to make it look like a botched burglary. According to the London Times the only things taken were cash and property deeds.
Many critics of the government argue that close ties between the security apparatus and politicians account for the country’s high incidence of unsolved murders. “This puts us in a conundrum. You’ve got a stop order and you’re supposed to use the police to enforce the stop order—but the head of the police is involved with this church,” as one opponent of the construction put it.
Rumors and speculation continue to swirl. More than one neighbor of Martin’s reported that he’d received ongoing threats over the years relating to his land. Several years ago his night watchman was murdered.
“Esmond’s heart was like an unlocked gate,” said longtime friend and lion conservator Tony Fitzjohn.
Neighbors and their watchmen agreed on one point, Esmond should have kept his real, iron gate locked.
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LAPSSET PLANS final feasibility report April 20 2016
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Kenyatta Wins Big in Kenya–But U.S.-Style Election Skullduggery Taints the Results | The Daily Beast
UHURU!
Kenyatta Wins Big in Kenya–But U.S.-Style Election Skullduggery Taints the Results
MARGOT KISER
08.12.17 12:01 AM ET
LAMU, Kenya–Kenya’s election has come off without major disturbances, and on Friday evening Nairobi time, the nation’s Independent Electoral Board and Boundaries Commission declared a winner in the country’s presidential race. Uhuru Kenyatta, the incumbent, secured 54.2 percent of the vote.
All the same, a number of election-cycle oddities go unexplained—including the novel involvement of foreign big-data and PR consultancies who’ve played significant roles in electoral upsets in both the U.S. and U.K.
Tuesday, election day, the seafront here in Lamu, a UNESCO World Heritage site, was deserted. Shops and schools were closed. In the town square a long line of men–including red-cloaked Maasai–stood chatting quietly. Women waited in a separate queue, noticeably shorter than the men’s.
Countrywide, more than 15 million voters, or 78 percent of Kenyans registered, cast their ballots for the presidency, governors, members of parliament, senators, members of county assemblies, and county women representatives.
While all seemed calm in the campaign’s closing days, tensions had run high. Two previous elections were blighted by violence amid accusations that they had been rigged; in 2007, a disputed vote pushed Kenya into a bloodbath that left at least 1,200 people dead and 300,000 displaced. Memories of cars burning in the streets are never far from Kenyans’ minds.
Analysts were also worried about the Islamist group Al Shabaab, which had threatened to disrupt the elections.
The government deployed more than 150,000 security personnel, including wildlife rangers, to protect 41,000 polling stations.
This year’s election was a continuation of the long-running feud between the Kenyatta and Odinga families. Kenyatta, son of Kenya’s first president following British colonial rule, was seeking to retain his position. His opponent, Raila Odinga, also the son of a leader of the independence struggle and former prime minister, had run for president three times and lost. As Odinga is 72, this year’s election likely marked his final bid for Kenya’s presidency.
In this race President Kenyatta ran his pro-business campaign on a record of pushing forward major infrastructure projects, such as the Standard Gauge railway, rural electrification, a massive Indian Ocean port and logistics hub—these and other global-scale development projects in East Africa largely funded by Chinese interests.
Odinga casts himself as defender of the poor and oppressed, and is an abrasive critic of fraud and corruption.
The day after the elections, all seemed okay. Aside from isolated incidents of shootings by police—two protestors in poor neighborhoods of the capital and of Kisumu, in Western Kenya—there were no reports of major violence.
On day two following the vote Kenyatta was reported holding a comfortable lead with above 54 percent of the vote, Odinga trailing, with about 45 percent. These figures were provided by the Independent Electoral Board and Boundaries Commission.
Then Odinga contested the outcome, calling it “a complete fraud” and “fake results” that resulted from hacking that commandeered the entire electoral network and manipulated the results.
Shortly before today’s announcement of the results, the opposition doubled down on its objections. Odinga’s campaign announced that it “will not be party” to the outcome—and campaign officials refused to sign off on the election papers.
While the election’s outcome seems to most clear-cut, more mysterious is what was going on in this campaign for the country’s presidency before the vote and behind the scenes—including psy-ops and big-data manipulations reminiscent of resent elections in the West:
Weeks before the vote, a Twitter account with the handle @TheRealRaila tweeted “Liar Raila [Odinga] represents corruption, violence, and tribalism while Uhuru stands for unity, peace, and progression.” A month ago @TheRealRaila posted a video called “Raila 20/20,” a look into a post-apocalyptic Kenya three years into an Odinga presidency. The video’s images were cartoonish and grim: martial law, collapsed infrastructure, aid organizations forced to leave, no clean water, women giving birth in the streets, Al-Shabaab attacks all over the country.
Next, a man armed with a machete broke into the country estate of the vice president, William Ruto, wounding a guard. The siege ended after 18 hours, although the intentions and fate of the intruder remain unclear.
Then there was the curious case of the document leaked from Kenya Defense Forces. On July 28, opposition candidate Odinga revealed a set of plans, apparently leaked by sources within the KDF, and asserted that these documents revealed a plot by the military–”Operation Dumisha Utulivu”–to subvert the electoral process. The documents were verified by a KDF spokesperson as authentic, then, weirdly, Kenyatta’s staff backtracked, saying they were “quoted out of context.”
The leaked papers, provided to The Daily Beast by a former KDF officer, show secret meetings between President Kenyatta and KDF regarding possible operations targeting Nairobi hotspots such as slums.
The plan includes liaising with “RF”–regime-friendly–employees of Kenya’s largest power company and its largest communications provider, Safaricom, to arrange power shut-offs and severing of mobile communications.
The documents also list tools and weapons used in election-related operations: 120 tear gas canisters, close signal frequency jammers, power-line termination tools, stun guns and chainsaws.
A former senior U.S. Defense official long based in Kenya told The Daily Beast, “This looks like normal [crowd control] operational planning. I don’t see anything here that supports a ‘subvert’ hypothesis.” In actions to curb civil unrest, he said, chainsaws are standard equipment, at times used to clear trees felled for roadblocks, but on an inventory they can look very sinister.
The same day that Odinga made his allegations, a top election official in charge of voting technology disappeared. The body of Christopher Chege Msando,was found a day later, disposed of in a forest outside the capital. It showed clear evidence of torture, including the severing of the victim’s hands.
As the Independent Electoral Boundaries Commission’s acting Information and Communications Advisor, Msando had key knowledge of passwords and information components to be used for recording and transmitting results of the election.
The word on the street today, and one must take it for what it is worth, is that Msando’s digital “passwords” were in fact biometric—his fingerprints would gain access to the electoral data.
In his statement disputing the election’s outcome as a fraud, Odinga specifically cited hackers drawing on information and data access extracted from Msando before his murder.
Then, just four days before the election, an American consultant monitoring vote fraud for the opposition was deported. John Aristotle Phillips, CEO of Washington-based political technology firm Aristotle International Inc., and an advisor to the Odinga campaign, said that on Monday unidentified and armed Kenyans broke into his apartment, handcuffed him, and threw him in the back of a sedan.
He said he was driven around for hours in the murky streets of Nairobi, and compelled to watch videos depicting scenes with torture. His colleague Andreas Katsouris was also abducted and put in a separate car. Both were driven to Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, and told that they were being deported because they lacked the correct visas. Phillips later told the Wall Street Journal that when his captors began asking him what he knew about hacking he feared a fate similar to Msando’s.
While this rash of bizarre occurrences did fuel speculation, rumor, online conspiracy theories and “fake news” items that were consumed voraciously by Kenya’s tech-savvy population, it’s hard to say how much influence, if any, these late-campaign events had on the vote.
No doubt trying to influence the vote was the incumbent government’s strategy advisor, the “big data” firm Cambridge Analytica (CA) owned by American billionaire Robert Mercer. CA is the outfit that is supposed to have helped engineer last year’s big electoral shocks, the Brexit vote in the U.K. and the Trump victory in the United States.
In his 2013 campaign Kenyatta hired Cambridge Analytica to correlate online data via 47,000 on-the-ground surveys in order to compose a profile of the Kenyan electorate. Armed with those data Kenyatta’s campaign devised a strategy for this year, based on voters’ top concerns—jobs and tribal violence.
CA also is reported in the Kenyan press to have been working closely with a team from the British-based PR firm BTP Advisers to help re-elect Kenyatta.
BTP’s appointment in 2013 to help the current government retain office followed closely on an indictment of Kenyatta by the International Criminal Court, for the post-election violence in 2007.
The foreign companies’ participation in Kenya’s election this year has incited all manner of new speculation.
Mark Pursey, CEO of BTP, told The Daily Beast that reports of his company shaping Kenyatta’s 2017 re-election campaign are “fake.” “We declined. The 2013 campaign was fraught with tension due to the President’s case with the International Criminal Court,” said Pursey, referring to the charges brought against Kenyatta.
Pursey takes credit for that case being withdrawn. “It was entirely built on sand; there was little evidence to begin with.”
He said he could not be credited for the “Raila 20/20” video, which he described as “stupid” and “pathetic”: “An election campaign is a marketing campaign. If you are going to deconstruct the opposition you have to make it credible.”
The video’s content echoes slogans heard and seen in the anti-Clinton campaigns of 2016.
In any case, the Twitter feed carrying “Raila 20/20” drew scant traffic— a little over 400 followers, and nearly nothing in the way of likes or retweets. Maybe this is a promising sign that voters in Kenya have already gotten savvy about such misleading online content and election chicanery. Kenyans, with ample historical motivation to be cynical about politics,may be more on their guard about such stuff than Americans and Brits.
Mohamed Bwana, like most of his neighbors here on the Swahili coast is Muslim, and voted for Kenyatta because the president had kept his promise to put money in the county bursary for scholarships, without which Bwana could never afford to put his kids through school. At least one voter was clear-thinking, spin-immune, non-tribal, and cynicism free.
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Trip to Lamu port, dredger and proposed site of coal-fired power plant March 3, 2017
On bridge of a Chinese dredger near Lamu port.
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My article Big Game: U.S. Secret Hunt for Jihadists in a Kenyan forest | The Marjan Centre | War and the Non-Human Sphere | King’s College, London
https://themarjancentre.wordpress.com/
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Big Game: U.S. Soldiers’ Secret Hunt for Jihadists in a Kenyan Forest
AMERICA’S SHADOW WARS
Big Game: U.S. Soldiers’ Secret Hunt for Jihadists in a Kenyan Forest
The United States is waging secret warfare around the world. The operations in and around Kenya’s Boni National Reserve on the Somali border are some of the most mysterious.
MARGOT KISER
02.08.17 9:03 AM ET
A short, bloody raid by U.S. Special Operations Forces on an al Qaeda base in Yemen in the second week of Donald Trump’s presidency was a fleeting reminder to the world that Americans are engaged in secret and not-so-secret wars around the globe. But most of the action is not as dramatic as the Yemen attack in which a U.S. Navy SEAL was killed, an 8-year-old girl died, and a $70 million aircraft crash landed and had to be destroyed. All that took place in the space of a couple of hours. But most of these wars are long grinds fought far from prying eyes in close cooperation with local forces that often are notorious for torture and other human rights abuses. And nowhere have those fights gone on so long, or in such obscurity, as in Africa. This is the first of an occasional series that will shine some light into those shadows.
LAMU, Kenya—Tucked into the northeast end of the country’s coast, the Boni National Reserve is a fairy-tale paradise, a resplendent ecosystem packed with elephantine baobab trees and hydra-headed doum palms. This mix of riverine forest and swampy grassland is home to some of the country’s largest herds of game, and to rare species like the wild dog, Somali lion, and reticulated giraffe.
There are no rhinoceros left here, but Doza Diza, 66, talks about seeing kifaru often. The safari word for rhino has been re-purposed by the locals as a name for the armor-plated Humvees whose machine-gun mounts recall the animal’s distinctive horn.
Tall, gaunt, and with a bad eye, Doza Diza wears a traditional Somali sarong and a Muslim skullcap. He describes himself as a former county councilor and crab fisherman.
These motorized rhino can be distinguished by color, he says. The dark green ones are vehicles operated by the Kenya Defense Forces, KDF, he tells me. Those painted the color of sand belong to the Americans.
Doza is an elder of his tribe, the Awer (also spelled Aweer). They are hunter-gatherers who seek out honey by following birds, talk to crocodiles and hippos in tongues the beasts are said to understand, and generally stick to their ancient way of life. The Awer are also Muslims, which is highly unusual among the world’s few remaining stone-age peoples.
They’ve long inhabited the Boni forest region, but slowly and surely their way of life is being stripped from them. Subsistence hunting was banned in Kenya in the 1970s, so any meat the Awer procure is illegal. Poverty further marginalizes them. And now the tribe is caught in the crossfire of the global war on terror.
***
How will the new administration in Washington deal with this and other semi-clandestine wars being waged by the United States around the world? Donald Trump has a penchant for former generals, with Michael Flynn, a longtime U.S. Army intelligence officer as his national security adviser, and retired Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis, a veteran of counterinsurgencies in Afghanistan and Iraq, who is now secretary of defense. Trump’s close advisor Steve Bannon also fancies himself a brilliant armchair general. But Washington is a long way from the Boni forest and the very special sort of battlefield it represents.
As The New York Times reported in October and November the United States has been escalating the “shadow war” inside Somalia with “the potential for the United States to be drawn ever more deeply into a trouble country that so far has stymied all efforts to fix it.”
The Times, quoting unnamed “senior American military officials,” estimated that “about 200 to 300 American Special Operations troops work with soldiers from Somalia and other African nations like Kenya and Uganda to carry out more than a half-dozen raids per month.” And it outlined a program in which private contractors employed by the U.S. also play a significant role.
But the shadow war inside the failed-state borders of Somalia is almost transparent compared to the activities here on the ill-defined edge of that war. There is a long history of countries on the fringes of conflict being sucked into war themselves, the most notable example being Cambodia during the Vietnam debacle. Whether Washington will help prevent such an outcome—or provoke it—is an open question.
***
The area in and around the Boni National Reserve is one of many places in Africa where American personnel are deployed with little fanfare and, indeed, as secretly as Washington’s representatives and proxies can manage.
Repeated and detailed queries to U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) for clarification of the American role here on the frontier between Kenya and Somalia were answered this month with a brief response explaining why not even a background briefing was possible: “As these operations are currently ongoing, and have elements of U.S. special forces assisting, we cannot comment at this time due to operational security reasons.”
A major part of the mission those U.S. special forces are “assisting” in this part of the continent is, in fact, to hunt down and kill members of the Somali group known as al-Shabaab who threaten Kenya’s security and, through the group’s close relationship with al Qaeda, are believed to threaten America’s as well.
The counterterror and counterinsurgency forces operating in the region would like the Awer to help them track the Somali guerrillas and terrorists. But that project is not going well in an operation reminiscent of many sorry histories around the world where local tribes and minorities have been instrumentalized, abused, and very often abandoned.
U.S. Special Forces (Green Berets), other Special Operations Forces of various stripes, State Department officials, the inevitable slews of American contractors, and spooks and commandos from countries with close ties to the United States, including the Brits, Israelis, and Jordanians, have all deployed here in an undeclared if not unmentioned U.S.-backed war.
Kenya’s government and its international partners—the heavyweights being the U.S. and the U.K.—are desperate to make this region safe for engineers, imported skilled workers, and, yes, tourists. But the current intense counterterror focus has been a slow build, and not hugely effective. For the moment, anyone who ventures into the Boni forest risks getting blown up by an IED.
Indeed, as if mocking attempts by the Kenyan government to establish the forest and its coast as a destination resort, al-Shabaab released a recruitment video in 2015 boasting about the bountiful game in the forest provided by Allah to sustain jihadi fighters.
One ranch with a tourist concession that had been a haunt of jet-setters and celebrities (Kristin Davis, one of the stars of Sex in the City, had been a guest) found itself converted into a haven for al-Shabaab sympathizers in 2014. They stole food and medicine then torched the facility’s guest huts.
There is a long and bloody history behind such incidents, which we’ll look at in a subsequent installment of this series. But the short history has been the stuff of fleeting headlines for more than five years.
In October 2011, Kenya sent troops into Somalia. Since then al-Shabaab has carried out massive retaliatory hits on targets in Kenya resulting in more than 300 deaths.
Kenyan officials believe that after the spectacular 2013 Westgate Mall attack in Nairobi that killed at least 70 people, al-Shabaab retreated from Kenya’s urban areas and melted into the dense Boni forest—which sits on the coast, right on the country’s north-south border with Somalia and adjacent to what was once a Somali national park.
Officials say another massacre, the 2014 Mpeketoni attack, which left 48 dead, was staged from within the forest, and that the Garissa University attack of 2015, which left at least 148 dead, was organized within the enormous Dadaab refugee camp nearby (which the Kenyan government plans to shut down, further displacing more than 300,000 people).
Jaysh Aman, the al-Shabaab cell in the forest, reportedly was comprised of some 300 fighters in 2015, but its numbers certainly vary.
Following the Westgate attack (which was later the subject of an extraordinary HBO documentary) national and Western forces were in an all-out scramble to protect Kenya from further cross-border terrorism. After the Garissa attack, Kenya asked the U.S. and other Western nations for more and better assistance.
According to human rights groups, the counterinsurgency tactics that accompanied the build-up of U.S. assistance have featured mass police sweeps, arbitrary detentions, disappearances, and summary executions targeting not only al-Shabaab suspects, but alleged sympathizers and Muslim communities generally.
In October 2015 the Kenya National Commission for Human Rights (KNCHR) released a report documenting disappearances and killings of residents and suspects along the Somalia border and the Kenya coast. Worshippers were grabbed as they left mosques and Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) rangers allegedly shot dead cattle herders, most of whom are Muslim, in east Kenya (PDF).
During President Barack Obama’s visit to Kenya in July of 2015, he stepped into the fray, allocating $100 million for the Kenya Defense Forces for weapons, materiel, and vehicles. The allowance was a 163 percent increase in counterterrorism assistance over the previous year. Among Kenya’s purchases: a Boeing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle—a drone—at a price of $9.8 million. Each year since 2012 the Kenyan government has asked for security assistance from the West.
The most recent installment—approved by the State Department days after Trump’s inauguration, but still not through Congress—is a $418 million package that includes crop dusters converted for low, slow, high impact attacks targeting people on the ground.
The extent to which the Trump administration will continue or cut back economic assistance in Africa is unclear, with some reports suggesting those funds will be reduced. In one of several pointed queries the Trump White House sent to the State Department it said bluntly, “We’ve been fighting al-Shabaab for a decade, why haven’t we won?” But such questions offer little hint of a new strategy, apart from efforts to shore up Fortress America at its frontiers. Somalia was one of the seven Muslim majority countries whose citizens were banned temporarily by Trump’s controversial executive order.
Obama’s theme was known as “the 3-D approach” to the region’s conflicts—defense, diplomacy, and development. And in the two months following his historic visit to the land of his father, Kenya’s government announced that a “multi-agency” security force had been assembled to carry out counterterror measures against al-Shabaab.
The force consisted of paramilitary units within Kenya’s police, Kenya Defense Forces special forces, and various state agencies, including the National Intelligence Service, Military Intelligence, the Kenya Wildlife Service and Forest Service—all trained by Western police units and special forces.
***
On Sept. 11 of 2015, Kenya formally launched “Operation Linda Boni” (Linda Boni being Swahili for “protect the Boni”). The goal set a two-month timetable to drive the insurgents from the forest. It is still going on.
The first stage of this effort was cordoning off the Boni forest as a collection of “no-go zones,” and evacuation of all residents. Those who remained would be regarded as al-Shabaab sympathizers.
This branded the Awer, Kenyan citizens, as the enemy.
Security officials contend that Somali fighters have taken up residence, with their wives and children, deep inside the Boni forest.
Doza Diza and other Awer leaders say that is true.
They say al-Shabaab has coerced them into providing shelter in mosques and schools, logistical support, chiefly in the form of food and medicine, and have forced tribespeople to track game for them.
But the Awer also are quick to say that violence and threats against them come from both sides in this conflict.
Kenyan officials claim that Somali attackers burned the huts of the Awer, while the Awer say that Kenya Defense Forces (KDF) burned those shelters in an effort to force them to comply with the evacuation.
Doza reports that guerrillas took his people’s food and issued warnings not to reveal their whereabouts to Kenya security, “Otherwise, we’ll deal with you.” Aside from this, he notes, the insurgents are polite. “Al-Shabaab rob from us, but they don’t beat us or grab our land—the way Kenya forces do.”
Linda Boni has not only run long beyond its planned two-month timetable, it has extended far beyond the forest and its region into much of northeast Kenya.
In the process it has become apparent that the KDF’s counterterror tactics involve more than eradicating the al-Shabaab presence in the forest.
By the end of 2015, the KDF announced it was expanding its area of deployment into neighboring counties along the Somali border and south some 200 miles, to the Tana River, constructing additional police stations and military camps. The Baragoni camp on the southern fringe of the Boni-Dodori National Reserve expanded its area to 800 acres of ostensibly public land.
Kenya is building a 435-mile Western-funded security wall at the nation’s eastern border. On a visit to Kenya last year, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a big fan of walls in the Holy Land and in the U.S. as well, committed funds to the project. Kenya’s President Uhuru Kenyatta reportedly has suggested building a terrorist-only prison facility within the Boni forest.
Land grabs in northeastern Kenya are nothing new. In the ’80s the Kenyan government seized land during a counterinsurgency operations against ethnic Somalis inhabiting the area. Now locals—ethnic Somalis and Muslim communities generally—suspect that military expansion is an excuse to take more land in and around an area where the Kenya government, the Chinese, and several multinational companies have plans for an oil-related infrastructure mega-development.
The KDF concedes that the forest is a national reserve but insists it is gazetted as government land, not communal land.
Doza suggests that the only power able to help his people stop the abuses is the U.S. government—the people behind the people in the “rhinoceros” Hummers.
Since the Westgate attack, the KDF base at Baragoni has grown from a temporary camp to a permanent one, and by 2015 Kenya had deployed enough of its troops there with sufficient transport to foil a Shabaab attack aimed at destroying the Baure camp, which is 36 miles north of the Baragoni base.
(In that action a year and a half ago the KDF killed 11 militants, including an British man named Thomas Evans who’d been dubbed “the White Beast” in U.K. tabloids. The KDF paraded his corpse—along with others—in nearby Mpeketoni, where counterterror operations are headquartered. The British press subsequently posted video that appears to show the nighttime engagement filmed the day he died.)
But the reach of the Baragoni base stretches far beyond a few satellite camps.
***
Swaleh Msellem, a Swahili resident of Lamu Island, manages a petrol station at the Mokowe jetty a few kilometers across a channel on the mainland. Msellem, now 30, told me how one morning he’d docked his boat at the jetty where at least a dozen non-uniformed men, whom he claims were with the paramilitary wing of Kenya’s National Police Service, had been waiting for him.
Someone pulled a hood over his head and tossed him into a vehicle. Familiar with the area and its roads, he said he could tell he was driven some 40 kilometers away to the Baragoni military base, where he was detained in a shipping container and tortured.
Some of the techniques used on him were repeated mock drownings (a variation on waterboarding) and crushing of testicles. These were done, he said, to extract a confession that he planned a deadly attack in the nearby village of Hindi, soon after the Mpekatoni massacre. He denied this. The interrogators asked where the weapons were that were used for the attacks. “Which weapons?” he answered.
The KDF continued to grill him, insisting he had information. He told me that during that detention he was driven from Baragoni to an area nearby where he witnessed the execution of two al-Shabaab fighters by a firing squad. One afternoon he complained of feeling ill. Guards took him outside to a pond where he vomited. Through his loosened blindfold he was able to glimpse crocodiles on the berm of the pond.
Why were crocodiles being kept inside a military base, he wondered.
Msellem said soldiers later threatened that he’d be fed to the crocodiles like others had been if he didn’t cooperate. After two weeks he was transferred to the port town of Mombasa, to the south, and held several months at the infamous Shimo La Tewa prison in a wing reserved for terrorists. Msellem eventually was taken into court, where he was acquitted of all murder and terror-related charges for lack of evidence.
When I interviewed Msellem, he was grimly philosophical. Although he did not see or talk to any U.S. personnel, as far as he knew, he had no doubt they played some role behind the scenes. “The Americans are very complicated, aren’t they? On the one hand they are helping us by building roads, dispensaries, schools, but they also seem to want to kill us.”
In that one observation Msellem summed up the Jekyll and Hyde nature of the “3-D approach to U.S. Foreign Policy”: defense, diplomacy, and development.
A human rights report from the government-funded Kenya National Commission on Human Rights documents the abuse of Msellem (PDF), but does not cite it as having taken place in part (or at all) at Baragoni.
I spoke with Otsieno Namwaya, Africa researcher for Human Rights Watch, about the possibility of suspects being thrown to the crocodiles. He said he’d interviewed a local who was one survivor among four al-Shabaab suspects thrown in the Tana River behind a military camp. But as it was a single source he couldn’t report it. “This is Kenya—anything can happen,” he said.
For information from inside the Baragoni base, I spoke with a man who identified himself as a Western-trained Kenyan Special Forces soldier serving with one of the SF battalions. (Photos of him clad in fatigues and standing with fellow soldiers in a garrison in Somalia would seem to confirm his identity.)
This soldier described to me the process of “enhanced interrogation”—torture—used at Baragoni military base. He confirmed that people were detained in shipping containers, but said he hadn’t heard anything about suspects being thrown to the crocodiles.
He said that sometimes the National Intelligence Service detains and interrogates suspects at the nearby Manda Bay navy base. “But they [NIS] don’t force you to say anything,” he told me. “When you’re brought to Baragoni you’re forced to talk.”
According to a map I was shown and was able to examine at length, the Baragoni base is operated by Kenya’s Directorate of Military Intelligence.
It would seem prisoners taken in action have little hope of survival. “If there’s been direct engagement [with al-Shabaab] we capture them and they’re taken to Baragoni,” said the same soldier. “If they don’t have any useful information then they are being killed. Those that give information or say where the weapons will be are shot dead.”
By the time the soldier’s deployment ended, he said, several dozen detainees remained in the shipping containers with partitions. Former detainees and a law enforcement official said that as recently as July 2016 there were as many as 16 containers, each housing at least six prisoners.
The soldiers said some suspects were ferried by helicopter to an especially inaccessible area inside the Boni forest, where they were shot dead. Hunters from the Awer report finding human remains where they collect honey.
***
In November 2015, a Lamu resident I see often told me that Lamu County’s government was organizing a baraza—a meeting—between Awer elders and government representatives from Nairobi, to enable the tribespeople to voice complaints about the KDF’s actions. The baraza was to take place at a restaurant on the mainland. I decided to crash the event.
When I arrived near the entrance of the restaurant there was quite a crowd milling around. At least three dozen Kenyan soldiers and police stood guard, blocking the road to the venue. At the cordon, I observed uniformed military personnel, mostly white, driving sand-colored armor-plated Humvees, those that Doza Diza had called “kifaru.”
Officers on the ground were armed with what KDF personnel identified as U.S.-manufactured FN SCAR automatic assault rifles, a very high-tech killing machine capable of firing 625 rounds a minute. Indeed, they are the U.S. Special Operations Command’s newest service rifle. German, Belgian, and Japanese special forces also reportedly used this gun. Kenya reportedly is the only African nation where the U.S. has issued this type of weapon.
In addition, representatives of the Red Cross and Safari Doctors were on hand for the Mokowe meeting but had until recently been barred from the Boni forest altogether.
Also on hand were personnel with U.S. Civil Military Affairs, the guys who handle the hearts-and-minds component of counterinsurgency, building on experiences in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Central America. CMA is a key part of the Linda Boni effort focusing on wildlife and indigenous peoples. It sees to the building of the latrines, the roads, the schools, and medical dispensaries while “denying sanctuary” to insurgents.
Through USAID Civil Military Affairs has partnered with the Kenya Wildlife Service and rangers with wildlife conservation NGOs. KWS training is funded by USAID, and, after the 2013 Westgate attack, its rangers have been trained by Maisha Consult.
The only people present at the meeting who were up front about their identities were KDF officers, whom I spoke to on arrival. One guarding the perimeter identified himself as a GSU officer, referring to the paramilitary wing in the Kenya National Police Service. I asked him whether I could attend the meeting, shortly after which a blonde-haired blue-eyed uniformed soldier returned.
I explained I was a writer researching the Awer’s predicament.
“Are you an American?” he asked. I handed him my tattered U.S. passport. “Thank you, ma’am,” he said with an engaging smile, and left promising to return to let me know whether I could attend the baraza.
Others present, also heavily armed, wore civilian clothing—Dockers, polo shirts, and wraparound sunglasses. The locals refer to such armed Western personnel in casual wear as “sport sports.”
One source, within the U.S. government, preferring to remain anonymous, identified these figures as a U.S. Diplomatic Security Service contingent protecting American diplomats at the baraza.
I never did gain access. (Media outlets associated with the Kenyan government had been invited; international press had not.) Awer leaders who spoke at the meeting, including Doza Diza, said they were eager to tell the U.S. representatives they no longer wanted to deal directly with the KDF or Kenya government because those entities had failed to make good on promises of land compensation.
Locals told me that the U.S. Agency for International Development, USAID, had given each tribal elder 4,000 Kenyan shillings (about $40) to attend, and provided meals and transport.
As part of counterinsurgency strategy, such meetings are supposed to help build local security forces, legitimize local government, and ultimately delegitimize the insurgents. But as long as the locals believe the government is stealing their land, meetings are unlikely to have much of a legitimizing effect. And meanwhile the fighting continues.
A former U.S. Army colonel with long experience in civil affairs, who did not want to be named, added another layer.
“Special Operations Command (SOCOM) is a relatively lean organization and continues to rely on contracted support for administration, logistics, operations, intelligence, and physical security,” he told The Daily Beast. “Think the old Blackwater and Executive Outcomes.”
It’s not uncommon to hear about U.S. Special Forces on the ground in fragile states like Somalia and Iraq, but seeing them in a sovereign democratic state—Kenya—seemed unusual.
U.S. military presence in Kenya had been sparse until the 9/11 attacks. “Boots on the ground” in Kenya was practically unheard of. In Somalia it also was virtually nonexistent for more than 20 years after the infamous “Black Hawk Down” incident in 1993.
But clearly all that has changed.
—with additional reporting by Christopher Dickey
follow the author on Twitter @margotkiser1
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