Crackdowns and coincidences: Tension high as East Africa confronts Muslim
groups
*
http://dailymaverick.co.za/resources/images/icon_journalist.pngSimon
Allison
* 24 October 2012 01:53 (South Africa)
A spiritual leader disappears in Zanzibar. Riots shut down central Dar es
Salaam. In Mombasa, a would-be rebel is badly beaten by police. All over
East Africa, tensions between governments and a number of Muslim groups are
running at an all-time high, and no one is in the mood for compromise. SIMON
ALLISON wonders if the latest crackdowns will have the opposite of the
intended effect.
As each day passes, the mystery around the disappearance of Sheikh Farid
Hadi grows deeper. The Zanzibari cleric went missing on Tuesday last week,
and even though he reappeared on Friday, no one's quite sure where he was or
what happened to him in the intervening four days.
His supporters have one story. They claim that the cleric, the spiritual
leader of Zanzibar's Uamsho ('awakening') movement was kidnapped by police
in apparent retaliation for Uamsho's demand that Zanzibar be given full
autonomy from mainland Tanzania. Venting their frustration with this
perceived persecution, the cleric's supporters caused havoc on the island
last week: blocking roads with chopped-down trees, burning tyres, throwing
stones at police. Police responded in kind, with batons and tear gas. The
unrest forced shops in Zanzibar's capital Stone Town to close, and one
policeman was killed - stabbed multiple times and left to die in a drainage
ditch.
When he emerged on Friday, Sheikh Farid supported this version of events.
"Four men who had their faces covered seized me on Tuesday. They were
interested in getting information on our activities, my trips to Oman and
Saudi Arabia.. They inquired about messages I received in my mobile phone
and as we speak they have not returned my handsets," Sheikh Farid told
reporters, adding that the men had introduced themselves as security
officers. "At one time they shot on the floor to scare me into telling them
what they wanted to hear."
Tanzania's security services vehemently deny this, saying they had
absolutely no idea where Sheikh Farid spent those four days - they couldn't
find him either, apparently, although not everyone bought this denial.
"Zanzibar is literally a village where everybody knows everyone else; it
beats the wits out of everyone that one Sheikh Farid Hadi Ahmed. could
disappear into oblivion just like that. The Zanzibar police owe the public
some explaining," wrote the Tanzanian Guardian.
On Saturday, just one day after his return, Sheikh Farid was formally
detained by police. After a lengthy interrogation, they claimed to have
solved the mystery of his whereabouts: "He was not kidnapped.he did it on
his own," said Zanzibar's Police Commissioner Mussa Ali Mussa. The good
sheikh, in other words, kidnapped himself - to what end, commissioner Mussa
did not explain.
If the police's version of events is true, than it is the most extraordinary
coincidence that on the same day - Tuesday - that Sheikh Farid faked his own
disappearance, another prominent Muslim cleric was detained by police.
There is no confusion over this one. Sheikh Ponda Issa Ponda was arrested on
the mainland in Dar es Salaam and charged on two counts, the most serious
being "inciting followers to commit violence". Sheikh Ponda is thought to
have encouraged those violent followers of his to attack five churches in
Dar es Salaam on 12 October, in retaliation for an incident in which a
Christian boy unequivocally
<
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-19950941> proved to his Muslim
friend that urinating on a Quran does not turn one into a snake.
Sheikh Ponda's followers weren't all that happy about his arrest, and
marched through the streets of Dar es Salaam voicing their displeasure:
rocks were thrown, teargas was sprayed and a heavy police presence shut down
the city centre.
The two incidents in Tanzania symbolize the growing friction in east Africa
between governments and conservative Islamist groups. This is most obvious
in Somalia, of course, where it has taken a five-member coalition of African
countries to put al-Qaeda-linked militant group Al-Shabaab on the back foot.
It is less obvious but no less present in Ethiopia, where huge protests from
the Muslim community - some estimates suggest in the hundreds of thousands
of people - have gone largely unreported. Here, many Muslims are upset at
what they see as undue government interference in religious affairs (and
they probably have a
<
http://dailymaverick.co.za/article/2012-07-17-ethiopia-rocked-by-massive-mu
slim-protests> point).
And in Kenya, still the most influential country in the region, news in
recent months has been dominated by tensions between the government and
various groups in Muslim-dominated Mombasa and surrounds. In another
suspicious coincidence, just one day before Sheikh Farid went missing in
Zanzibar and Sheikh Ponda was arrested in Dar es Salaam, the leader of the
secessionist Mombasa Republican Council (MRC) was arrested during a police
raid. Omar Mwamnuadzi claims to have been badly beaten during his arrest,
and said he would be dead if his bodyguards had not intervened. Several
other prominent MRC members were arrested, while others are on the run. A
Kenyan MP, Sheikh Mohammed Dor, was also caught up in the crackdown after
commenting that he would be ready to fund MRC activities.
These arrests were all the more unexpected since it was only this July that
the MRC was declared by a court to be a legal political grouping, after
years of featuring high on the government's banned list. Just three months
later, the MRC finds itself back on the list, much to the delight of many
Kenyans worried about the potentially destabilizing effect they will have on
the upcoming presidential elections (the MRC was calling for an electoral
boycott).
"So the MRC, in my personal opinion, are just petty criminals who should be
dealt with mercilessly and ruthlessly by the security organs in this
country," said Dr Douglas Kivoi, a Kenyan governance analyst and researcher.
"Remember the Taliban in Pakistan started the way MRC is behaving, and we
all know the effects and atrocities the Taliban are committing in Pakistan
and Afghanistan."
This analogy should give some pause for thought. Even if we accept that the
MRC and the Taliban employ similar methods and ideologies, with similar
goals (which is debatable), it is also true that the military might of the
United States of America has not been able to comprehensively defeat the
Taliban in more than 10 years of fighting. And Kenya's security forces, even
emboldened by their supposed
<
http://dailymaverick.co.za/article/2012-10-01-the-war-against-al-shabaab-ro
und-two-begins-now> victory against Al-Shabaab in Somalia, are unlikely to
fare any better. The same goes for Tanzania's crackdown against Islamist
groups.
A more cautious approach might yield greater rewards. "Sometimes, because of
the sensitivity of the issues, it calls for circumspection," said Andrews
Atta-Asamoah, a senior researcher at the Institute for Security Studies. "It
might not be the best idea to treat the leaders of these groups as
criminals. Kenya and Tanzania will have to learn a lot from what happened to
Boko Haram and how it evolved after their leader was arrested." Boko Haram,
in its current form - the form that has killed more than 1,000 people in
Nigeria since 2009 - evolved after the death in police custody of its
original leader, who was arguably more moderate than the leaders which
followed him. "You confuse the group and they kick into a survival mood,
which invariably involves more violence," added Atta-Asamoah.
Kenya and Tanzania would do well to remember this advice as they consolidate
their crackdown on various Islamist groups. The same goes for Ethiopia,
should it be contemplating a similar move. Somalia, like Nigeria, has
already learned this lesson the hard way; the genesis of Al-Shabaab was the
Ethiopian invasion of 2006-2007 that unseated the significantly less
fundamentalist Islamic Courts Union.
Undeniably, East Africa is going through a tricky period, with a number of
different Muslim groups at the forefront of anti-government protests. There
are some concerns that, as Kivoi described it, "a brand of radical Islam is
trying to gain a foot hold in East Africa". It is more true, however, that
each group in question is largely motivated by very specific domestic
issues: the secession of Mombasa for the MRC; the autonomy of Zanzibar for
Uamsho; religious independence and a greater say in government for
Ethiopia's Muslim demonstrators.
These are all ultimately political problems requiring political solutions.
East Africa's challenge will be to find capable politicians able to
recognize this and act accordingly. So far, if the recent spate of arrests
and riots are anything to go by, these are in short supply. DM
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Received on Wed Oct 24 2012 - 08:14:32 EDT
