JEDDAH, 26 May 2003 — Kenya’s National Security Minister Chris Murungaru has disclosed that two Kenyan Army battalions were deployed on the border between Somalia and his country in a fresh attempt to counter terrorism.
According to a report in the Daily Nation newspaper last week, the minister said that the government was determined to crack down on terrorism. He said troops would patrol the border, which is a possible entry point for terrorists.
It was also reported that Kenyan security forces were put on high alert after the recent bomb attacks in Saudi Arabia and Morocco.
The minister warned that a terror attack was imminent in the country. “Burying our heads in the sand and wishing the problem away will not help,” said Murungaru after he received a group of visiting US Army officers, led by Maj. Gen. John F. Sattler, the commander of the combined Joint Task Force in the Horn of Africa.
The joint task force was formed to oversee US Central Command operations in Kenya, Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti and Yemen, in support of the global war on terrorism. Since the deadly terrorist bombings of the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania in 1998, more than 2,000 US forces have been stationed in the Horn of Africa to battle terrorists.
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Civil society groups including schoolteachers and medical personnel in Mogadishu went on a one-day strike to protest growing violence in the capital city, press reports said. Organizers said the strike was aimed at protesting the instability, which leads to killings, rape, torture and abduction by clan militias. “The gunmen are making Mogadishu an almost uninhabitable place,” one organizer was quoted as saying.
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Flooding in the Juba and Shabelle river basins of southern Somalia is endangering the food security of the local population, a report has warned. The Food Assessment Unit (FAU) of the EU and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said in its May report that the worst-affected areas were in the Jowhar district of Middle Shabelle Region, the districts of Qoryoley, Merka and Kurtunwaarey in Lower Shabelle.
The flooding follows heavy rains in the Ethiopian highlands and Somalia in the last few weeks. The situation has been exacerbated by the fact that local farmers are cutting into river embankments in order to irrigate their land, but instead they increase the flood risk, the report said.
The FAU report said that comprehensive maintenance of river banks and the de-silting of riverbeds would go some way toward reducing the impact of small-scale localized and destructive floods.
A Somali agronomist told a UN humanitarian website that since the collapse of the Somali government in 1991, no one has been able to de-silt the riverbeds or manage the sluice gates on the rivers or adjoining canals, which contribute to the seasonal flooding.
