Kenya, The Next Shari'a State?

Kenya’s privileged tribe is on the run.

Christophe Calais for The New York Times - Kikuyus in Nakuru, Kenya, were part of a mass exodus trying to get to Kenya’s central highlands.

Over the past few days, tens of thousands of Kikuyus, the tribe of Kenya’s president, have packed into heavily guarded buses to flee the western part of the country because of ethnic violence. On Sunday, endless convoys of buses — some with their windshields smashed by rocks — crawled across a landscape of scorched homes and empty farms.

It is nothing short of a mass exodus. The tribe that has dominated business and politics in Kenya since independence in 1963 is now being chased off its land by machete-wielding mobs made up of members of other tribes furious about the Dec. 27 election, which Kenya’s president, Mwai Kibaki, won under dubious circumstances. In some places, Kikuyus have been hunted down with bows and arrows.

The hospital in Nakuru, a town in the Rift Valley, is full of Kikuyu men with deep ax wounds, fingers cut off and slash marks across their faces.

The New York Times is calling it Ethnic violence. But is it merely that?

Melanie Phillips, The Spectator Blog writes - While I was away, reading about the appalling atrocities in Kenya in which churches were torched and dozens of Christians burned to death, I wondered whether any mainstream media would get the point. They didn’t. As far as I could see, the violence was universally ascribed to ‘tribal conflict’. But this isn’t the first time churches in Kenya have been torched, as you can read here (date unknown):

On 13 June, Muslims rioting over the arrest of one of their clerics torched five churches in Bura, Tana River district, not far from Mombasa in Kenya… As impunity equals permission, this is a serious issue of national significance at a time when Muslim tensions are rising to boiling point. or here from 2001: Anglican Archbishop David Gitari and an interfaith team confronted rioting Muslim youths armed with swords and clubs on December 1 in Nairobi, Kenya. In response to this attempt to quell Kenya's worst outbreak of violence between Christians and Muslims, the rioters pelted the archbishop and his team with rocks. Moderate Muslim leaders plucked Gitari from the mob and rushed him to a nearby hospital, where he was treated for head injuries. ‘I survived only because Muslim leaders formed a human shield around me and in the process got more injured than myself,’ Gitari later said in local media reports. Or here from 2003: Muslim leaders in Kenya are threatening armed conflict if the new Kenyan constitution does not enshrine Islamic courts (known in Kenya as Kadhi courts).

For years, Kenya has been subjected to creeping Islamisation and jihadi violence by elements within the country’s ten per cent Muslims against the Christian majority. Yet unaccountably there was no mention of this key fact in the media coverage of the post-election violence. Well, fancy!

In the Christian Post, this article, (which was picked up by Stephen Pollard) written before the disputed election which led to the violence, put events in a rather more accurate context. Raila Odinga, it said, who was then the current presidential frontrunner, had promised to implement strict Islamic Sharia law if he received the Muslim vote and was elected president. Odinga had signed a secret memorandum of understanding with Sheikh Abdullahi Abdi, chairman of the National Leaders Forum, in which Odinga had allegedly stated his intention, if elected, to ‘within six months, rewrite the Constitution of Kenya to recognize Sharia as the only true law sanctioned by the Holy Quran for Muslim declared regions’.

The Evangelical Alliance of Kenya released a statement in which church leaders said Odinga ‘comes across as a presumptive Muslim president bent on forcing Islamic law, religion and culture down the throats of the Kenyan people in total disregard of the Constitutionally guaranteed rights of freedom of worship and equal protection of the law for all Kenyans.’

The Africa regional manager for International Christian Concern, Darara Gubo, said the agreement ‘undermines the secular nature of Kenya and opens a Pandora’s box of chaos and conflict similar to what happened in Nigeria and Sudan. This is not a stand-alone incident; rather, it is part of strategy to Islamize Eastern Africa and the Horn of Africa, through the introduction of Sharia law’.

Subsequently Joshua Hammer wrote a piece in the New York Times which, without going so far as to join up all the dots (please, this is the NYT!), nevertheless provided a hint of the same, ahem, context. Writing about sitting Kenyan MP Joseph Lekuton, he described his challenger, Godana Harugura, as… a convert to fundamentalist Islam who had reportedly raised money from Muslims along Kenya’s volatile border with Somalia by promising to ‘reclaim’ the region for Islam — and by attacking Lekuton for inviting Christian development groups into the area…Indeed, in the view of some of Lekuton’s supporters the election was shaping up to be a proxy confrontation between the West and Islam — a clash of civilizations in the Kenyan bush… A sizable, largely poor Muslim population concentrated along the coast — and proximity to the volatile states in the Horn of Africa, including Somalia and Sudan — have made Kenya especially vulnerable, in the views of counterterrorism experts, to the call for jihad. Since the early 1990s, the mosques of Mombasa and other towns have resonated with militant Islamic rhetoric. Radical imams have preached violence against Westerners, attacked the Kenyan government as the lackey of the United States and Israel and called for the implementation of Shariah. Members of the Qaeda cells that blew up the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, on Aug. 7, 1998, were recruited in mosques near the Indian Ocean beaches where hundreds of thousands of Western tourists flock each year.

Apart from that, I have found plenty of worthy hand-wringing in the mainstream media about tribal violence between equally bloodthirsty Kenyan sectarian groups, but diddly squat about the Kenyan jihad and the remorseless creation of Africastan.