Charcoal claims hurt bid to list Shabaab as terror group

Accusations against Kenya’s alleged participation in illegal charcoal trade in Somalia have returned to haunt Nairobi’s bid to have militant group Al-Shabaab listed as a terrorist group.

day, the UN Security Council rejected Kenya’s argument to place Shabaab in the same league as Al-Qaeda and Isis, with Somalia specifically lobbying against tighter sanctions on the group.

“We are disappointed because it seems unconscionable that any country, least of all a country that is in the UN Security Council and that has lost its citizens in the terror attacks of the Al- Shabaab, would not wish to see all necessary measures brought to bear on this hideous organisation,” Foreign Affairs Principal Secretary Macharia Kamau said.

Admitting “surprise” at the decision, Mr Kamau said Kenya will continue to fight Al-Shabaab “using all the means necessary and available to it, including the currently existing sanction regimes that we have fought for previously and that are in force within the UNSCV counter-terrorism regime.”

The decision means Kenya and the region will continue to deal with Shabaab using sanctions that were aimed at controlling civil conflict in Somalia, and not those meant to tackle terrorism, despite loopholes that could allow militants to prosper.

Mr Abukar Dahir Osman, Somalia’s Permanent Representative to the UN in New York claimed Al-Shabaab can be tamed through existing UN Security Council resolutions, as long as there is regional cooperation on it.

“We urge the Kenyan government to implement existing Security Council resolution 751 targeting AS (Al-Shabaab), including the ban on illegal charcoal trade in Somalia, which is the lifeline of the AS to finance its operations in the region,” he wrote on his Twitter page on Wednesday night.

The bid to list Al-Shabaab as a terrorist group had initially met opposition from the UK (when Kenya first fronted the proposal in 2014), and the US year. But the emergence of Somalia, which had supported Kenya in the 2014 failed bid, as one of the opponents could baffle the region.

The Somali envoy called Kenya’s suggestion this time as “unjustified” and suggested Kenya had failed to stop the illegal charcoal trade that had been Shabaab’s mainstay, alongside piracy.

He was referring to various UN Monitoring Group on Eritrea and Somalia reports which charged that the Kenya Defence Forces, who are part of the African Union Mission in Somalia, had collaborated with militants to continue exporting charcoal using the Port of Kismayu.

On all occasions, the Kenyan government had rejected the claims in the reports.