Security

Armed Forces Overview

In mid-2006, regular armed forces totaled 24,120 active personnel, including headquarters staff. The army numbered 20,000; the navy, 1,620 (including 120 marines); and the air force, 2,500. Kenya’s military participates regularly in international operations and exercises. Kenya also has a paramilitary internal security force, the 5,000-strong General Service Unit (GSU), which is part of the police. Among police units, the GSU is the most notorious for human rights abuses. The rest of the police has a reputation for graft.

Foreign Military Relations

Kenya long has had informal military alliances with the United States and the United Kingdom (UK). Since 1980 Kenya has supported U.S. military commitments in the Indian Ocean by permitting the use of Mombasa port and air base facilities in exchange for U.S. military assistance. The U.S. Central Command⎯which covers the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Horn of Africa⎯has not sought permanent basing rights in Kenya because of the availability of Djibouti. However, Kenya is a valuable point of entry and staging platform, for example, for U.S., British, and German aerial and naval search operations targeting al-Qaeda–linked Somalia-based groups. U.S. and British forces also use Kenyan territory for training, the UK since before Kenyan independence. The UK conducts three to four military exercises per year in remote areas, often with Kenyan participation. In recent years, the United States has provided joint peace support training through its Africa Crisis Response Initiative (ACRI) program, as well as conventional military training under the Africa Contingency Operations Training Assistance (ACOTA) program. A major amphibious joint exercise, “Edged Mallet,” is held regularly along the northern Kenyan coast and has involved up to 3,000 U.S. Marines. In 2004 the joint exercise had regional terrorism as the primary focus.

Currently, Kenyan and U.S. officials are discussing a new U.S. military command, Africa Command (AFRICOM), which will oversee U.S. military operations in Africa. Announced in 2007, AFRICOM will be carved out of the three combatant commands responsible for the continent: European Command, Central Command, and Pacific Command. AFRICOM will stand up initially in Germany at European Command headquarters and become fully established in late 2008 somewhere in Africa. Kenya is among the 10 countries being considered for AFRICOM’s main base.

External Threat

Kenya has security concerns regarding several near neighbors, chiefly, Somalia, Sudan, and Uganda. Somalia poses a threat in the disputed and lawless semi-desert northeastern region of Kenya, where there is a large Somali ethnic population. In the early 1990s, this population was augmented by a large Somali refugee influx fleeing political breakdown in Somalia. The Somali frontier is porous to illegal weapons traffic and other contraband and to livestock raiders and bandits, as well as to potential terrorists. In response to the crisis in Somalia in 2006, Kenya deployed its forces along its border with Somalia and at sea to apprehend extremist Somali fighters fleeing the Ethiopian advance and to prevent them from establishing safe haven in Kenya.

Sudan and Kenya have had a strained security relationship since the late 1980s. The Sudanese government accused Kenya of aiding the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA). Sudan also worries that Kenya could allow the United States to use it as a platform for actions against terrorists in Sudan. Further strains stem from Khartoum’s claim to the “Elemi Triangle”⎯a potentially oil-rich arid area on the Kenyan side of the border. Despite the tensions, Kenya has played a leading role as a mediator in Sudan’s civil war. Bilateral relations between Uganda and Kenya periodically also have been strained, with mutual concerns about cross-border incursions and arms provision to dissidents, as well as fears about Kenyan interference with transport and Ugandan cutoff of electricity supplies.

Defense Budget

Kenya’s military expenditures for 2005 totaled US$280.5 million, which represented 3 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), an increase from 1999, when expenditures constituted 1.9 percent of GDP.

Major Military Units

As of 2006, Kenya’s military had five brigades: two infantry, one with three battalions and one with two battalions; one armored, with three battalions; one artillery, with two battalions; and one engineer, with two battalions. In addition, the army includes the following four battalions: air defense artillery, airborne, independent infantry, and independent air cavalry.

Major Military Equipment

As of 2006, the army had 78 main battle tanks, 92 reconnaissance vehicles, 62 armored personnel carriers, 48 pieces of towed artillery, 62 mortars, 54 antitank guided weapons, 80 recoilless launchers, and 94 air defense guns. The navy had four offshore patrol craft, two amphibious craft, and one support craft. The air force had 9 combat aircraft, 34 attack helicopters (of doubtful serviceability), 30 transport aircraft, 17 transport helicopters, 25 training aircraft, and various missiles.

Military Service

Recruitment into the armed forces is on a voluntary basis. The minimum recruitment age is 18. The recruit must be a Kenyan citizen and have a national identity card, which may be issued only when the applicant is 18 and is able to produce a birth certificate. In 2005 persons in the eligible age-group of 18 to 49 numbered 7,303,000 males and 7,084,000 females.

Paramilitary Forces

In addition to the regular armed forces and the regular national police, the government can call on a special security force, the 5,000-strong General Service Unit (GSU). Part of the police but semi-autonomous, the GSU acts as the uniformed paramilitary cousin of the security and intelligence units. The GSU handles violent crime, outbreaks of communal violence, and demonstrations. Since 2003, the GSU also has had certain counterterrorism functions, including patrolling around Kenya’s international airports. The GSU has 12 boats, an air wing of seven light, fixed-wing aircraft and three helicopters, and eight armored cars. In carrying out its functions, the GSU is especially notorious among police units for human rights violations, including extrajudicial killings and torture.

Military Forces Abroad

Since 1989, Kenya has participated in more than 20 United Nations peacekeeping operations worldwide, contributing military observers, staff officers, police monitors, and infantry troops. Kenya is the third largest African contributor of troops to such operations, after Nigeria and Ghana. Kenyan forces have deployed for missions in numerous African countries, in the Balkans, and in East Timor. Currently, Kenya contributes forces to the African Union’s peacekeeping operations in Darfur, Sudan. Kenya also contributed personnel to the U.S.-led coalition forces operating in Afghanistan after October 7, 2001.

Police

Kenya Police, a national civilian force about 30,000 strong, is divided into a number of separate operational units, including an air wing, port police for the Indian Ocean and Lake Victoria, and a Criminal Investigation Department (CID) intelligence division, which investigates criminal activity. An Anti-Corruption Unit, created in August 2001, reports to the CID director. Another element of Kenya’s large internal security apparatus is the National Security Intelligence Service (NSIS), the primary civilian intelligence organization. The NSIS was established in 1998 from the Police Special Branch (Security Intelligence Service) to monitor people considered subversive. The NSIS’s formation was spurred by the August 1998 U.S. embassy bombing. In the aftermath of the bombing investigation, U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents and other consultants stayed on to help train the NSIS in urban counterinsurgency and counterterrorism strategy. With the victory of Mwai Kibaki in the presidential election in December 2002, further steps were taken to professionalize the NSIS, including the initiation in 2003 of a graduate training program. A Tourism Police Unit, with an initial contingent of 450 officers, also was established in mid-2003, with the charge of reducing concerns about the threat to foreign tourists from terrorism, especially in Coast Province. The various new police units augment the internal security capabilities that were long the province of the paramilitary General Service Unit.

Internal Threat

A relatively stable country, Kenya’s political status quo is not under significant threat either from its own security forces or from rebel political movements. Kenya’s nearest brush with a military coup occurred in 1982 in a brief failed action by air force officers. No local insurgencies of consequence currently exist. Kenya’s chief sources of internal unrest are ethnic tensions. Such tensions and flare-ups of interethnic violence frequently arise from competition for productive areas. Serious interethnic disturbances erupted in the Rift Valley after the elections of 1992 and 1998. The 1998 clashes may have displaced 300,000 people.

Another key security concern in Kenya is the escalating level of crime, both urban and rural. Urban areas, especially the capital, nicknamed “Nairobbery,” are plagued by burglary, armed robbery, and vehicle hijackings. Police complicity in illegal activity is much in evidence. The most prevalent form of serious rural crime is armed livestock rustling. Rustling and brigand activity, often linked to ethnic feuds, have rendered much of the North-Eastern Province and parts of the Coast and Eastern Provinces virtually ungovernable. Other prevalent forms of rural crime, attacks on tourists and poaching, have intermittently been better controlled, in particular, by the British Special Air Service (SAS)-trained Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS).

Terrorism

Kenya’s vulnerability to Islamic terrorists operating under the al-Qaeda banner has been demonstrated by several attacks. Kenya was attacked first in 1998 when a car bomb blew up the U.S. embassy in Nairobi, killing well over 200 people, mostly Kenyans, and again in 2002, when suicide bombers killed 15 people in the Israeli-owned Paradise Hotel in Kikambala near Mombasa, and when terrorists reportedly shot a missile at an Israeli airliner at Mombasa airport. The embassy bombing was one of the most serious attacks on American interests outside the United States. Warnings of further possible terrorist activity in Kenya in May 2003 led to a six-week suspension of commercial flights from the United Kingdom to Kenya and negative travel advisories by several Western countries. The advisories have since been withdrawn or, in the U.S. case, softened. The United States renewed travel warnings about Kenya on December 28, 2004.

Located in the Horn region, Kenya faces an ongoing threat of terrorist attacks. The 1998 and 2002 attacks, according to a recent United Nations report, were prepared by a Somalia-based al-Qaeda–linked group in neighboring Somalia, which is beset by a strong fundamentalist presence, weak rule of law, and arms smuggling from Yemen. Kenya’s Somalia border area, with its ethnic Somali communities, and the long, poorly guarded Indian Ocean coastline remain potential entry points for outside extremists. Kenya’s own Muslim community on the coast, while largely moderate, offers a potential foothold for terrorist infiltrators.

Under pressure from the West and anxious to revive tourism, Kenya has taken action against suspected Islamic extremists, detaining and interrogating dozens of people in several drives in 2003. In 2004 four Kenyans were charged with involvement in the Paradise Hotel attacks. The four were acquitted on murder charges, but one was rearrested and sentenced in 2007 to eight years’ imprisonment on firearms charges. Several other terrorism-related cases have ended in acquittals or dropped charges. In 2007 Kenya transferred a suspected al-Qaeda operative to Guantanamo Bay and, possibly, other suspects into custody elsewhere, e.g., in Somalia.

Kenya has sought to improve its security apparatus and legal framework to fight terrorism. In January 2004, Kenya opened the new National Counter-Terrorism Center, the first of its kind in Africa. The center aims to improve security throughout the Horn of Africa by coordinating information. Kenya also formed an interagency Coastal Security Steering Committee. Generally cooperative with the United States, Kenya has been a beneficiary of the U.S. aid to, for example, train its Anti-Terror Police Unit and upgrade air and seaport security. The Kenyan military also has participated in training and operations with the 1,800-member, U.S.-sponsored Combined Joint Task Force–Horn of Africa (JTF–HOA), a task force created to disrupt transnational terrorist groups in the Horn of Africa region. Kenya’s government has taken steps to combat money laundering and terrorist financing, with a pending money-laundering bill, guidelines issued by the Central Bank, and the closure of Charterhouse Bank. The government has made some progress on improving aviation security. However, efforts to enact counterterrorism legislation, underway since 2003, have as yet been unsuccessful. In 2006 the National Assembly shelved a long-pending antiterrorism bill in the face of criticism from human rights groups and Kenyan Muslim communities.

Source: Library of Congress – Federal Research Division Country Profile: Kenya, June 2007