Connect with us

BLOGS

OPINION:Closure of mosques not good for Muslim-State relations

Published

on

Your ads will be inserted here by

Easy Plugin for AdSense.

Please go to the plugin admin page to
Paste your ad code OR
Suppress this ad slot.

Muhammad Warsama

We have lost count of the number of police swoops that continue to be staged in this country from Mombasa to Kwale to Eastleigh to Lamu to Samburu, Turkana, Pokot and Baringo.
What has this unscientific and unprofessional approach to crime-busting operations achieved so far? Six thousand Somalis spent months including Ramadhan at Kasarani, Nairobi last April. We were told the operation was to get rid of Al Shabaab. Nothing of this kind happened.
On the contrary, a group of young Somalis returning from the diaspora and calling itself Super Power is ruling the Eastleigh underworld, robbing, maiming and killing at will. When they are caught, they bribe their way back to freedom. Some are even taken to the border, ostensibly for deportation by conniving police, only to retrace their way back to Eastleigh after being dumped at the frontier.
While the impact in dealing with the rampant insecurity through these heavy-handed operations by our corrupt is negligible, the political image of the Jubilee government has been dealt a very big blow. The social fabric of our society which for years since 1963 has remained cohesive is showing disturbing signs of a deteriorating relationship between the Christian majority and the Muslim minority. A look at the social media shows the rising feelings of animosity between the two communities.
The incompetence of the police bureaucracy which never changes tactics to adapt to the challenges of a fast evolving society is also making matters worse. Why have the authorities returned to the 1960s outmoded colonially-inherited collective punishment the Kenyatta Senior government invoked against secessionist Somalis?
That policy has no place or tolerance in the new constitutional dispensation we are enjoying in our country today. Even in Nigeria with its much bigger Boko Haraam problem, collective punishment is not an option. But it appears that the Jubilee government does not care, for if it did, it would not allow the Inspector General of Police David Kimaiyo to take draconian measures against settled communities that would grievously impact on Jubilee’s political fortunes in 2017.
I am also disappointed to see that the Muslim leadership is being ignored and not consulted when these things are happening around them.
It is now more than a week since four mosques were closed in Mombasa since and more might follow suit. You can never persuade Muslims that the closure of these mosques is because they are crime scenes. The police displayed weapons they claimed to have seized in the mosques but many Muslims believe the weapons were planted inside the mosques.
We cannot accept the closure of our mosques as scenes of crime. The police should simply modernise their archaic and useless methods of dealing with insecurity and find better ways of dealing with radical Muslim youth. Each day the mosques remain closed drives a dagger of bitterness in the hearts of all Muslims.
Our community has since last February told the police to set up sentry posts at the affected mosques to vet those going in and out. That offer has not been acted upon.
As matters stand now, hundreds of Muslims will be without their places of worship because of police incompetence, not because of radical youth. If they had the capacity to arrest 291 people, why could they not do it before without disrupting our places of worship? Why did they not compile lists of youth they wanted to arrest and swooped on them individually in their homes rather than storming mosques?
Where are we heading to?
The writer is veteran journalist based in Mombasa

Comments

Your comments here:

Continue Reading
Click to comment

Leave a Reply

error

Share it with your friends