For Osman the final straw came at 1 a.m. on a weekday night in late April when Kenyan police raided her apartment block in Eastleigh, a predominately Somali part of the capital.
“They kicked at my door in the middle of the night. I feared they might try to rape me. One of them broke a window but I wouldn’t let them in,” said the 28-year-old businesswoman and mother of two.
She listened as the officers went door to door seizing identity documents from her neighbors then demanding money for their return, or dragging away household items for which the owners could not produce receipts. Extortion marked every step.
“They used to harass us in the past but you pay $5 to $10 and they would go away,” said Osman.
In the name of fighting foreign Islamist terrorism, Kenya’s government launched a security crackdown in early April. Osman’s story of the effects of this “Operation Usalama [Security] Watch” is one of the more moderate ones. Human rights groups have criticized the rounding up of thousands of ethnic Somalis. Terrorist attacks have become a regular feature of Kenyan life since the army was sent into neighboring Somalia to fight Islamic insurgents such as Al Qaeda-affiliated group Al Shabaab in October 2011. The mostly low-tech attacks in Kenya — bullets fired into churches, grenades flung at bus stops — are rarely claimed either by Al Shabaab or any other group, but Islamic extremists are routinely suspected.
Allegations of mistreatment, though the government denies them, are numerous. Around 200 Somalis have been deported and hundreds returned to refugee camps in northern Kenya. Hundreds more languish in a football stadium that has been converted into a detention and screening center. Many others are choosing to leave a country they feel no longer wants them.
The harassment and the bribes increased under the new operation, Osman said. “Now it is $20 or $30 or more,” she said. The extortion has eaten into the money she saved to pay school fees and rent. “They are police but I call them thieves.”
So last Wednesday she took her 5-year-old daughter Ismahan and 6-month-old son Mohamed and joined the crowds of Somalis jostling for space on the regular flights back to Mogadishu. A friend in Eastleigh will sell all the stock in Osman’s cosmetics boutique and close up her apartment.
“I’m very angry about what the Kenyan government is doing to Somalis. They are targeting Somalis and also Muslims,” she said. “I won’t go back to Kenya.”
Sipping a glass of freshly pressed mango and papaya juice as shisha smoke drifted across a booth in a Mogadishu restaurant, Osman said she will first find a school for her daughter and then open a new shop.
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news ... rn-somalia
