Tag: Kenya

Kenyan and Somali governments agree Somali refugees to be repatriated

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

And, the UN High Commissioner of Refugees is not happy and stresses that it be a “voluntary” return!

UNHCR tents at Dadaab, the world’s largest refugee camp. Tents should be easy enough to move back across the border into Somalia!

The September slaughter by Somali Islamic terrorists at the Westgate Mall appears to have been the final straw for welcoming Kenya.

Here is the story at Capital News (emphasis mine):

NAIROBI, Kenya, Nov 11 – The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has stressed that the agreement for the repatriation of Somali refugees signed with the Kenyan and Somali governments on Sunday is based on the premise that the exercise will be voluntary.

In a press statement released on Monday, the UNHCR Representative in Kenya Raouf Mazou said, “It’s very important to underline that no one is forcing Somalis to leave Kenya.”

“The government and people of Kenya have tirelessly provided protection and assistance to Somali refugees for two decades. The agreement we signed on Sunday does not mean Kenya is no longer willing to do so,” he underscored.

[….]

Ever since Kenyan Defence Forces captured Kismayu, believed to be the operational centre of the Al Shabaab terrorists in Somalia, the Kenyan government has been pushing the UNHCR on the repatriation of Somali refugees.

The government has made it clear that the continued hosting of Somali refugees now comes at too high a cost given the spike in terror attacks on Kenya.

[….]

Being left without much choice the UNHCR now says it is focused on ensuring the repatriation exercise is carried out, “in safety and dignity.”

The agreement signed on Sunday will see the Kenyan and Somali governments as well as the UNHCR put in place a plan for the repatriation and reintegration of the Somali refugees housed in Kenya, establish how much that will cost and marshall those funds from the international community.

So, of course this means the US shouldn’t take another supposed Somali “refugee.”  Right!  In fact, it would be cheaper for America in the long run to help finance this repatriation then to take in thousands of needy Somalis as we did this past fiscal year.

Just a reminder, 7,608 new Somali refugees were resettled in the US in FY2013, here.

Kenyan officials say Westgate slaughter planned from refugee camp

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment
Dadaab, the world’s largest refugee camp. It would be pretty easy to hide out here and plan more attacks on Kenya. Some of the refugees arriving in America come from Dadaab.

Kenya is home to the largest number of Somali ‘refugees’ anywhere in the world.  Security officials are pointing a finger at refugee camps within their border as the planning area for the Somali slaughter of innocents at Nairobi’s upscale Westgate mall last month.

Readers may remember that we reported last December that Kenya told the UNHCR to get out and take their Somalis with them.  This article mentions that and reports that a Kenyan high court stopped the plan which initially only said that illegal Somalis in Kenya needed to get back to the camps (some are living freely throughout Kenya).

From AP at Kentucky.com (hat tip: Robin)

NAIROBI, Kenya — Some refugees fleeing insecurity from neighboring countries have abused Kenyan hospitality by planning terror attacks against the country, Kenya’s internal security minister said Friday, in an apparent reference to last month’s terrorist attack on an upscale mall which killed more than 67 people.

Joseph Ole Lenku said Kenya’s government started repatriating Somali refugees as part of remedial steps to prevent repeat attacks. Refugees from war-ravaged Somalia make up the most of the 600,000 refugees in Kenya, he said.

“We have welcomed with open arms refugees fleeing from insecurity from neighboring countries but as it turned out some of these refugees have abused our hospitality and kindness to plan and launch terror attacks from the safety of refugee camps. This cannot and shall not be allowed to continue anymore,” he said.

Westgate attack planned from refugee camp:

Last week, Asman Kamama, the chairman of parliament’s Administration and National Security committee, said that it was confirmed that the Westgate Mall attack was planned from a refugee camp in Kenya. He spoke after a meeting with Kenyan security chiefs.

This is edict from December after Somali crime and violence throughout Kenya was escalating (it was subsequently over-turned by a Kenyan court):

A government statement said that due to that “unbearable and uncontrollable threat to national security,” the government decided that all refugees and asylum seekers from Somalia must return to the large refugee camp complex known as Dadaab, a seemingly endless expanse of refugee housing on the sands of Kenya close to the Somali border. More than 400,000 refugees live in Dadaab, the largest refugee camp in the world.

We wrote about Dadaab earlier this month, here.

Just a reminder, the US resettled 7,608 Somalis to the US in FY2013.

Evidence is piling up that one of Westgate killers was Somali refugee from Norway

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

We’ve been patiently waiting to learn if any of America’s contributions to al-Shabaab (aka al-Shabab) have been identified as among those responsible for the Kenyan mall massacre nearly a month ago.

One of the Westgate Somali killers caught on surveillance camera looking for his next victim.

Here is the latest report on the Norwegian citizen/Somali refugee believed to have been involved.  From the BBC (hat tip: Ed). Emphasis is mine:

The man being investigated by Norwegian police over the attack on Kenya’s Westgate shopping centre is Hassan Abdi Dhuhulow, BBC Newsnight has learned.

The 23-year-old Norwegian citizen of Somali origin is suspected of helping to plan and carry out the attack.

BBC Newsnight has spoken to a relative of his in Norway who said he left the town of Larvik for Somalia in 2009.

At least 67 people died in the attack in Nairobi, which the al-Qaeda linked group al-Shabab says it carried out.

Last week Norway’s intelligence agency, the PST, said it had sent officers to Kenya to verify reports that a Norwegian citizen had been involved in the assault on the shopping centre, which began on Saturday 21 September and lasted four days.

He grew up in Norway!

Dhuhulow was born in Somalia, but he and his family moved to Norway as refugees in 1999.

There is a lot of mumbo-jumbo in the story along the lines of disenfranchised youths (dumb and naive), but nothing in the text about the Islamic Jihad imperative that is really driving crime of this horrific nature worldwide.  However, watch the BBC film and note that a neighbor says he was talking about the Koran all the time.

And, I’ve been wondering what the heck is taking so long to ID any bodies that might have been the attackers.  The BBC tells us this:

Forensic investigators are still combing through the rubble of Westgate – no bodies have yet been identified and it is not known whether the attackers are alive or dead.

Boxes of body parts sent to Kenyan morgue!

In a related story just this morning, foreign forensic teams have arrived at a Nairobi mortuary to attempt to identify the remains of what some believe are the killers.

From AP at Fox News:

NAIROBI, Kenya –  Officials in Kenya say two boxes of charred body parts have been delivered to the city morgue from Westgate Mall and that four AK-47 assault rifles were found alongside the remains. Gunmen stormed the mall on Sept. 21, killing more than 60 people.

A city morgue official told The Associated Press that the two boxes arrived Thursday, and that a team of foreigners padlocked the boxes Friday.

Amazingly, several of these reports are now referring to only 4 men having pulled off this slaughter.  Surely these four were not the brains of the operation.

Just wondering if they let Anders Breivik in on this latest news?

In wake of mall slaughter, Kenya threatens to close Somali refugee camp

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Kenya is home to one of the largest refugee camps in the world!

But, the Somalis living there may not be so “welcome” in the wake of al-Shabaab’s attack on Nairobi’s Westgate Mall which resulted in scores of deaths of innocent shoppers and suggestions are being made to send the Somalis housed there back to Somalia.

Of course the human rights industrial complex is already screeching about any such suggestion.

From the Charleston Chronicle (hat tip: Joanne):

(GIN) Kenyan parliamentarians are threatening to close Dadaab, the world’s largest refugee camp, which is home to about half a million Somalis forced to flee to Kenya because of a war at home with insurgents under the Islamist Al-Shabab.

The closure threats follow the siege and massacre at a Nairobi shopping mall by the Somali Islamists who took their war against a western-backed government in the Somali capital of Mogadishu into Kenya. Foreign fighters including Kenyans and Ethiopians have been defending the Somali government since 2011 although the “government” controls only a very small part of the country.

Taking responsibility for the attack, Al-Shabab Islamists said it was in retaliation for Kenya’s military involvement in Somalia.

Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta responded: “If their desire is for Kenya to pull out from Somalia, my friends all they need to do is what they should have done 20 years ago, which is to put their house in order and Kenya will come back to Kenya.”

A “breeding ground for terrorists” (and a source of refugees for the US):

Over the weekend, a Kenyan official suggested that the Dadaab refugees were the obstacle to peace. The refugee camp, located in northern Kenya, was a “breeding ground for terrorists”, he alleged.

But the prospect of closing the camp has alarmed Human Rights Watch who warn it would inflame further instability in Somalia.

Speaking of the Kenyan killers, has anyone seen an OFFICIAL report yet on whether American Somalis were among the Islamic terrorists?

Mainstream media: Somalis just “found their way” to America

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

In the wake of the brutal slaughter in Kenya (don’t open this link if you have a weak stomach) by Somali Jihadists a little over a week ago, I’m struck by the fact  that the mainstream media is running one story after another about America’s growing Somali population, but the word “refugee” never makes it into the telling.   I can’t say never, but I just reviewed a bunch of recent stories in The New York Times, The Washington Post and Time magazine and searched for the “R” word. It was not there!

A seriously wounded girl is carried away from the Westgate mall in Nairobi as Al-Shabaab’s terror reign unfolded.

And, by the way, I still haven’t seen any further report on whether Americans have been officially identified among the killers.  Have you?

Do you think the average reader, someone not following immigration issues daily, wonders how a particular group of immigrants ‘found their way’ to America?  I think they do, so why does the media rarely mention the legal programs through which the US government is changing America’s demographic make-up?

Below is an example from a New York Times story entitled, ‘Somali Community in U.S. Fears New Wave of Stigma After Kenya Attack.’

Would this help you know anything about how the Somalis got here, how they in fact became a “community” (through the US State Department’s Refugee Resettlement Program going back three decades)?   The “R” word does not appear in the story:

More than 32,000 people of Somali ancestry live in Minnesota, census figures show, and local leaders say the true number is far higher. Some came in the 1990s after fleeing civil war, and others are their children, many of them born in this country.    [By the way, the number is way higher than 32,000 in Minnesota, in addition to the tens of thousands in other preferred resettlement states—ed]

They “came….after fleeing civil war.”   What!  they just got on a plane and said “here we are America,” “let us in,” and then picked Minnesota on a map?

Regular readers of RRW know how it happened (here and here), but do the reporters not know or do they deliberately cover-up the truth about LEGAL immigration programs gone wrong?

By the way, there is a good article (at Powerline, hat tip: Judy) about the problems the media is glossing-over with the Somali “community” in Minnesota, but it too doesn’t use the word refugee.  Why is that?