NAIROBI, Kenya — Kenyan policemen have detained hundreds of Somali refugees, demanded bribes and even forcibly deported some who failed to pay, an international human rights group said Monday.
NAIROBI, Kenya — Kenyan policemen have detained hundreds of Somali refugees, demanded bribes and even forcibly deported some who failed to pay, an international human rights group said Monday. A new report by Human Rights Watch urged the Kenyan government to rein in police, reopen its border with Somalia to refugees and give more land to the U.N.’s refugee agency. "New arrivals face police extortion, violence and unlawful deportation when trying to cross Kenya’s officially closed border, and end up in appalling crowded conditions in under-serviced refugee camps," said refugee researcher Gerry Simpson. The organization released a 58-page report Monday on the assorted abuses that researchers found in three overcrowded refugee camps in Dadaab, about 60 miles (100 kilometers) from the Kenya-Somalia border. The report, titled "Horror to Hopelessness: Kenya’s Forgotten Somali Refugee Crisis," accuses Kenyan authorities of turning a blind eye to police corruption and abuses in the border areas and the camps. Kenyan police dismissed the report. "It is not worth the paper it is written on," police spokesman Eric Kiraithe said. "I challenge you to do one thing: Go to the areas mentioned, with a copy of that report, then you will come to realize that a lot of it is imagined." A 2007 survey by the Kenyan chapter of Berlin-based Transparency International ranked Kenyan police as the most corrupt institution in Kenya. "Kenya, for the last three years, has been in flagrant violation of its international legal obligations to ensure that asylum seekers get free access to Kenyan territories, and its obligation not to send back Somalis to a war-torn country from which they had fled," Simpson said. The three camps in Dadaab are overcrowded and unsanitary, with more than 250,000 refugees living in camps designed for one-third that number, the report said. Kenya closed its border in January 2007 to prevent Islamists fleeing Somalia from entering, but the closure has also blocked many refugees not affiliated with the Islamist movement, forcing tens of thousands of Somalis to use smuggling networks to cross into Kenya secretly. In 2008 alone, some 60,000 Somalis sought refuge in Dadaab, while possibly tens of thousands more traveled to Nairobi, the report said. Somalis have been fleeing their chaotic country in record numbers for the last three years. The exodus increased after Ethiopian forces entered Somalia in late 2006 at the request of Somalia’s fragile U.N.-backed government to oust an Islamic group. The operation sparked a bloody insurgency that killed thousands of civilians and forced more than a million others to flee the capital, Mogadishu. ______ Copyright 2009 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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