NAIROBI — The Kenyan government has accused two local human rights organizations of alleged links to terrorism networks as part of a security sweep following a terrorist attack at a Kenyan university two weeks ago.
The government officially listed five terrorist organizations: al-Shabaab, ISIS, al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, and the Mombasa Republican Council, a separatist group in Kenya's coastal region that has long been held in suspicion by the government. It also listed 85 other individuals, companies, and organizations suspected of being associated with al-Shabaab, the Somali terror group that took responsibility for the attack on Garissa University.
Among the 85 groups are Muslims for Human Rights (Muhuri) and Haki Africa, two Kenyan organizations based in the coastal town of Mombasa. (Muhuri serves communities of multiple faiths and its board membership is equally split between Muslims and Christians.)
Hussein Khalid, executive director of Haki Africa, attended the White House Summit to Counter Violent Extremism in Washington, DC, in February.
The groups have a record of investigating alleged abuses by Kenya's security forces, including extrajudicial killings by the Anti-Terrorism Police Unit (ATPU), leading Muhuri's leadership as well as other Kenyan human rights groups to question whether the listing is retributive.
"It has everything to do with [our documentation]," Khelef Khalifa, the chair of the board of Muhuri, told BuzzFeed News.
Manoah Esipisu, a spokesperson for President Uhuru Kenyatta, denied the connection.
"I'm quite sure it has nothing to do with their documentation on the ATPU," Esipisu told BuzzFeed News.
Esipisu said he could not elaborate on why the groups were included on the list or the process by which the 85 were evaluated for the listing. He said the list was complied by Kenya's "security agencies," including national police, intelligence, and defense departments.
The list is part of a larger push by Kenyatta to monitor terror suspects and disrupt financial networks in the wake of the attack on Garissa, in the north near Kenya's border with Somalia, where 148 people, mostly students, were killed on April 2.
Last week, Kenyatta asked governors and county representatives to send him the names of young people who've left home and are suspected of having joined al-Shabaab. The president also shut down 13 Somali money transfer companies and froze dozens of other accounts, disrupting the flow of remittances not only to Somalia but to South Sudan and Ethiopia as well, a move that earned criticism from Kenyan rights groups, 16 international aid organizations, and the Intergovernmental Authority on Development, an influential regional body.
Kenya's human rights community suggested that the designations were designed to deflect attention from the government's failures at preventing and responding to the massacre at Garissa.
The day before the attack, Kenyatta criticized the British government for issuing new travel warnings, which in the past have adversely affected Kenya's tourism sector. Kenyatta told a group in Nairobi that his government "would not be intimidated by these threats" from foreign governments and that "we are also tired of kneeling before them all the time," according to the East African newspaper.
The attack on April 2 was ended when members of an elite police squad, known as the RECCE, arrived in Garissa and shot and killed the four alleged al-Shabaab members who had taken over the campus. But according to the Daily Nation, the RECCE squad didn't arrive until around 2 p.m., on a government aircraft that had spent the morning ferrying the relatives of a pilot from Kenya's coast back to Nairobi.
"The government dealing with this whole crisis does not lend too much confidence to the people that there is a government in charge that at all knows what it's doing," George Kegoro, the executive director of Kenya's International Commission of Jurists, told journalists at a press conference in Nairobi on Tuesday.
Khelifa, who was not present at the press conference, agreed. Garissa "is their [the government's] failure," he said. "Now they're pouncing on Muslims for nothing."
The Kenyan government has frozen the groups' bank accounts, Khelifa said.
The groups are presenting documents to the government this week, seeking to explain their activities and demonstrate that they are not connected to al-Shaabab, he said. Among the areas of interest Khelifa expects to discuss is funding. Khelifa said Muhuri's funding comes entirely from legitimate foreign donors, including several Western governments.
Neither Muhuri nor Haki Africa had been given advance notice of their inclusion on the list of organizations suspected of terrorist affiliations, according to a court petition filed by the groups Monday. The petition seeks a declaration by Mombasa's High Court that the list inclusions are unconstitutional, the removal of the organizations from the list, and the release of their accounts.
"The whole thing had caught us by surprise," Khalifa said.
Khalifa said Muhuri often collaborates with police and the judiciary, including in matters of suspected terrorism cases, and with the Independent Policing Oversight Authority, a civilian body established in 2011 to help check corruption and other abuses inside the force.
Despite those relationships, Khalifa said Muhuri's efforts to investigate extrajudicial killings and other abuses of power by Kenya's security forces has created "a lot of antagonism" between Muhuri and the government.
In late 2013, Muhuri released a report, in collaboration with the Open Society Justice Initiative, documenting disappearances, extra-judicial killings, beatings, and other human rights violations by the ATPU.
Haki Africa was also in the "final stages" of a report documenting 51 disappearances or killings of suspects in the custody of Kenya's security forces, according to Njonjo Mue, vice chair of Kenya's branch of the International Commission of Jurists, who spoke at the Tuesday press conference.
"Connecting some dots [requires] at the very least asking the question whether the two organizations are not being targeted because of the work that they're doing in exposing human rights violations, especially by the ant-terror police unit, the ATPU," said Mue, who is also an adviser with Kenyans for Peace, Truth and Justice.
Mue's group is one of 15 human rights groups that issued a statement Tuesday decrying the inclusion of Muhuri and Haki Africa on the suspect terrorist affiliates list.
The groups were also critical of the ultimatum issued last week by Kenyan Deputy President William Ruto, demanding that the 600,000 refugees in Dadaab Refugee Camp, near the Somali border, be repatriated to Somalia and the camp closed.
"Basically, we'll be handing over to al-Shabaab a ready-made army of, say, 200,000 young men who will be desperate, who will have nothing to do, and who will be angry by being victimized twice over," Mue said, "by the war and the famine in their country and by their country of refuge in Kenya."