by Ben Rawlence
The teachers were hosted at Garissa Teachers’ College. It was the first time Kheyro had slept in her own room made of concrete and on an elevated bed with a mattress, bedsheets and blankets. The staff of the college had prepared chicken, spaghetti and rice, mixed fruit and even tea. Kheyro ate a lot. ‘My whole life I have had two meals a day,’ she said. Although she had the means now to eat three times, the family often didn’t bother; their bodies were trained. In Garissa she ate all three meals, and at four in the afternoon there was tea and cake. ‘I was getting fat!’ she said. ‘Happy!’
Lacking documents, the student-teachers feared the police and so stayed in the college, not venturing into town. One boy with a Kenyan ID who went to the market, Kheyro gave money to bring back lotion for her. She was amazed at how clean Garissa was, no dust. She took one bath in the morning and by the evening she was still clean while in Ifo she sometimes had to bathe three times. She loved it. With an ID card she would have come often, she would have even seen Nairobi. In a way it made her sad, all those years of not seeing.
At the end of the three weeks, the trainees were expecting a cash handout, a stipend, but the supervisor told them they would get it when they returned to Ifo. Wise to such tricks by NGO workers, the teachers refused to board the bus home until their allowance was paid. The stand-off escalated until late in the day when eventually the District Officer from Garissa was called to referee. He ordered the supervisor to pay the teachers their due but by the time the money arrived, they had to sleep another night in the college and travel in the morning. The contract was expired, the staff said, and so the trainees went to bed hungry.
Back in Ifo, Rukia was delighted to see her daughter. The good food, rest and hot water had had an effect. ‘You have become beautiful!’ she said. ‘If you leave this refugee life, you will become a beauty, my daughter!’ The trip had whetted her appetite for exactly that. Kheyro dreamed now of university, diplomas, of Nairobi, Canada and even London. But the road to further education ran through Dadaab, not Somalia. ‘There’s nothing for me there,’ Kheyro said. After years of lobbying and planning, Kenyatta University in Nairobi, tired of the restrictions on refugee students who wanted to take its courses, had decided to come to them. In 2013 it opened a campus in Dadaab. A project with York University in Canada called Borderless Higher Education had also just started issuing online diplomas in the camp. When the new semester started next year, Kheyro was determined to enrol.
37
Welcome to Westgate
The Westgate shopping mall is in the leafy Westlands area of Nairobi, not far from the offices of UNHCR. It is an affluent district with expensive residential apartment blocks, gated villas, and smart nightclubs and restaurants, markedly different from the opposite, edgier side of town where the Somalis live, Eastleigh. The Israeli-owned mall epitomised the neighbourhood’s luxury identity. Inside the huge butter-coloured concrete rectangle, glass lifts gently rose and fell and Nairobi’s elite glided up escalators, browsed in boutiques, dined in restaurants and bought their artisanal bread from the expatriate meeting place of choice, the ground-floor ArtCaffe. Even before gunmen attacked it in the powder blue afternoon of 21 September 2013, the gleaming shopping mall announced itself as a target. The National Security and Intelligence Service had warned more than once of plans for attacks on shopping malls and, only a week before, Western agencies had issued an alert for Westgate including on the day in question.
Around noon that sunny Saturday, a Mitsubishi car pulled up outside the mall. Gunmen got out, tossed a grenade and opened fire on the diners in the open-air restaurants overlooking the road. Then four armed men walked into the mall, two up the vehicular ramp into the car park of the building and two through the pedestrian entrance, and began shooting everyone they saw. On the top floor of the multi-storey car park, a children’s cookery competition was under way. Five minutes later the tarmac was covered in upturned tables and chairs and amid the spilled food and blood, dead and dying children and their parents. All around, people walking to or from their cars had thrown themselves beneath parked vehicles.
Downstairs, the gunmen walked slowly through the mall taking aim and shooting methodically. CCTV footage showed them moving through the mall as if in a video game. Terrified shoppers and staff initially ran towards the oncoming attackers and then, realizing their mistake, fled in the opposite direction. People tumbled over the terrace of the ArtCaffe onto the road, rushed out of emergency exits and crawled around corners out of the building. The hundreds still trapped inside huddled in cupboards and toilets listening to shots ringing out through the building and the occasional explosion of grenades.
Outside, ambulances had started to arrive as well as crowds of onlookers, journalists and vigilantes from an Indian rifle club. Police tried to seal off the area, including firing tear gas to disperse curious crowds even as bloodied victims emerged from the entrance. Eyewitnesses spoke of ten attackers, shouts of ‘Allahu Akbar’ and ‘We are al-Shabaab’, of automatic gunfire, of dozens of bodies scattered over floors covered in glass and blood. At some point it seemed the gunmen stopped indiscriminately shooting and began differentiating Muslims among the hostages and sparing women and children. They asked victims to recite the shahada or name the prophet’s mother. Those who failed, they shot.
The people trapped inside were texting, tweeting and even videoing what was going on around them and the images had already circled the globe. In addition, there were around 150 security cameras in the building, most of them still working. This was the most videoed terrorist attack in history. Shoppers in Nakumat supermarket filmed themselves walking down aisles stocked with food as gunshots exploded ever closer. CCTV captured pictures of people running with children in their arms, of crowds pouring down the central aisle, of tear gas streaming out of air vents, of numbers of men in civilian dress holding handguns, of bodies slumped against glass displays. And there are the attackers, in hooded tops and trainers, rifles slung casually on their arms like cricket bats or fishing rods; walking down the aisle of a supermarket talking on the phone, taking orders perhaps. They have baby faces, they are young. The eldest was twenty-three, the youngest just nineteen.
At 1.45 p.m., ninety minutes after the shooting began, the first police tactical team arrived. Five minutes later, the Interior Ministry sent a tweet, saying ‘Keep off #WestgateMall @PoliceKE has taken charge,’ but arguments about jurisdiction with the army erupted and no one entered the building. Inside, many people cowering behind the meat counter in the supermarket or under tables in the restaurants were slowly bleeding to death.
Frustrated with the police delay, vigilantes armed with handguns – former special forces members and the son of the former Minister of Defence, Yusuf Haji – began a rescue mission to provide cover for people trapped inside to escape. No one seemed to be in control of the response. As one survivor told the Guardian newspaper: ‘We just went slowly, feeling our way along the walls … there were people with guns everywhere. You didn’t know who were the policemen and who weren’t.’
Eventually, at four p.m., the police ‘Recce’ unit entered the building without uniforms or badges and were soon engaged in a fierce gun battle with numerous heavily armed opponents. Only after their commander was killed did they retreat and realise the people they’d been firing at had been the Kenyan army advancing from the rear entrance. They didn’t go back in. By now, the attack was all but over. Sixty-one people lay dead in the mall. Many might have been saved if the response had been swifter. Footage from the security cameras later showed the terrorists, calmly chatting in the storerooms of the supermarket, taking their time, eating chocolate bars and praying.
Outside, tanks and armoured cars arrived. Inside, all was eerily quiet. On Somali radio, al-Shabaab claimed responsibility for the attack. ‘For long we have waged war against the Kenyans in our land, now it’s time to shift the battleground and take the war to their land,’ a Twitter account purporting to belong to al-Shabaab declared. ‘The atta
ck at #WestgateMall is just a very tiny fraction of what Muslims in Somalia experience at the hands of Kenyan invaders,’ said another post, before the account was suspended. As night fell, helicopters circled overhead and occasional gunfire continued.
The next morning, President Kenyatta made a statement that bore little resemblance to the facts on the ground. Ten to fifteen ‘armed terrorists’ were still inside the mall, he said, and they had hostages. ‘We have reports of women as well as male attackers. We cannot confirm details on this. Our multi-agency response unit has had to delicately balance the pressure to contain the criminals with the need to keep our people still held in the building safe … They shall not get away with their despicable and beastly acts … We will punish the masterminds swiftly and indeed very painfully.’
And so the endless circle of violent retribution was reinforced. The pictures of a multinational crowd bloodied and terrified in a place as seemingly safe and familiar as a shopping mall jarred in the world’s media. For the journalists covering the siege, it was frighteningly close to home. They were lucky they weren’t inside; they could have been.
The scene struck a chord around the world in the way that news of carnage on a dusty street in Hosingow in southern Somalia had not. A few months earlier, a Kenyan airstrike had destroyed several shops and at least twelve civilians, including women and children, and it barely made a headline. Although for the victims, the experience of dying abruptly among your weekly groceries was the same, killed by forces you neither knew nor understood, the world had different words for each event. One was collateral damage, the other was a terrorist attack. One could be explained away; the other provoked governments to demand brutal justice.
The second day at the Mall ended in darkness, rain and gunshots. The third began with heavy gunfire, condemnations from world leaders and a massive explosion followed by black smoke billowing into a grey, baffled morning sky. Still, piped music blared from loudspeakers echoing through the empty shops and still the automatic welcome jingle repeated itself inanely, ‘Welcome to Westgate!’
At the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Kenya’s Vice President William Ruto successfully petitioned to have his trial adjourned so he could return home. For the conspiracy theorists, that was the purpose behind the attack. Since taking office, the government machine had engaged every nerve in trying to get the crimes against humanity charges against the President and his deputy dropped. Ambassadors had twisted arms, petitioned the United Nations Security Council, rallied motions at the African Union – all without success. Here, now, was the perfect ruse, so the cynics said. But such deft calculation appeared well beyond the capacities of the Kenyan government. By the end of the third day, spokesmen for the military, the interior ministry, the President and the police had all variously claimed that the siege was over, that all hostages had been released, that Kenyan forces were in control of the building, while at the mall the gunfire that continued into Monday night and Tuesday morning contradicted them. The world was watching and Kenya was faltering.
Finally, on Tuesday afternoon, President Kenyatta addressed the nation. He said the siege was over and declared three days of national mourning. ‘Kenya has stared down great evil and triumphed,’ he said. ‘We have shamed and defeated our attackers.’ But in the following days, as the truth emerged about the fiasco of the response by his government; the incompetence and criminal looting of the mall by the army and the frustrating of any investigations by the police, the shame was most squarely on him. The number of terrorists would be written down, from fifteen to eight and then, finally, to four. Wild claims from the foreign minister of attackers from the US, UK and several other European countries would be proved false; only one of them would later be revealed to hold a Norwegian passport, the others hailing from Somalia. Pictures would emerge of mountains of empty beer bottles and banks and shops stripped clean by soldiers. The collapse of the parking lot claimed to have been caused by a fire started by the terrorists would turn out to be the result of a tank shell fired, allegedly, to obscure the fact that the vehicles inside had been stolen by the army. The FBI and UK Metropolitan Police would leave Nairobi in disgust having offered to help investigate only to find their efforts unwanted. The New York Police Department would release a report in which it claimed the most likely scenario was that the four terrorists escaped at the end of the first day of the siege. And, most damaging of all, having acknowledged all the errors, and promised a comprehensive investigation, the President’s appointed committee would never report. For now, though, the nation was in mourning and they were giving their President the benefit of the doubt.
During the final days of the siege the President’s spokespeople had been manically repeating the slogan ‘WeAreOne’ on Twitter and Facebook and the idea had taken off. But the ‘One’ nation that people rallied around did not include Somalis.
Across the city, police were already kicking down doors and rounding up anyone they thought looked suspicious, and to them that meant anyone of Somali ethnicity. As of Tuesday evening, eleven were in custody, the President said. But that was just the beginning. The attack put the Kenyan Somalis in a difficult position. For some who felt they had to choose between their passport and their blood, it was an easy step to join the rest of the nation and shift the blame onto the refugees. A Kenyan Somali woman from Garissa who escaped from the mall summed up the national feeling to a US journalist: ‘Right now, I feel like they should all be sent back. Let them go and burn each other in their homes.’
The visceral urge for vengeance exploded in several directions. In Eastleigh, the crackdown continued. The following month in Mombasa, the radical cleric and successor to the slain Aboud Rogo, Sheikh Ibrahim Amor, was gunned down with three others as they left a mosque. The government distanced itself from the assassination in a mealy-mouthed denial that fooled no one: it had a persistent habit of extrajudicial executions. The next day, after Friday prayers, riots broke out in Mombasa. And further up the coast, across the border, at two a.m. on Saturday, two speedboats carrying US commandos from Navy Seal Team Six aimed for a house near the beach in the historic Somali port of Baraawe. An hour later, after heavy gunfire, they were forced to retreat with their target – the al-Shabaab leader Mukhtar Abu Zubeyr ‘Godane’ – still alive. Other, less publicized operations were under way inside Somalia: more Kenyan airstrikes with their heavy, indiscriminate toll.
The head of the Kenyan parliamentary defence committee, Ndung’u Gethenji, told the media that Dadaab was being used as a ‘training ground’ for terrorists, and should be shut down forthwith. While the road to Somalia does indeed pass through Dadaab, there was no evidence that the attackers stayed there. Indeed, it emerged almost immediately that the attack was planned from a nearby apartment in Westlands itself. Nonetheless, other MPs soon took up the cry. And, for the refugees, that became the meaning of Westgate: the final stage in their journey in the Kenyan imagination from neighbour, to other, to suspect and, finally, to enemy. In Nairobi, the stalled negotiations between the UN, Kenya and Somalia setting the terms for the return of refugees to Somalia burst into sudden life. And the camp waited nervously for the inevitable assault, for the revenge that would surely come.
38
Westgate Two
In the days since Maryam had gone, Guled spent a lot of time watching television in the cinema in his block and that’s where he was when news of the Westgate attack flashed across the screen. The boys in the MAN UNITED makeshift hall were passing the time before the game. They watched with a macabre fascination the images of explosions, people running and police aiming weapons in the unfamiliar surroundings of the shiny urban scene. When the time for the game arrived, the cinema erupted into argument. One group wanted to keep the news, the other, the football. ‘Football, in this place, is supreme,’ said one, as though it were a kind of temple. Most had no interest in bombs and explosions. The news from Mogadishu, Libya, Syria and Afghanistan had normalized images of violence; the attack in Nair
obi held little meaning for the young inmates of the camp beyond a certain schadenfreude.
‘We are used to bomb blasts and these kinds of attacks,’ someone said. ‘Let them also taste what it’s like.’
‘Yes, let Nairobi feel it too!’
Only the arrival of another television resolved the quarrel and the news hounds moved to a corner. Guled was upset at the innocent people killed. But he just wanted to watch his game. Football was his only solace these days.
Things with Maryam were bad. It was weeks since he’d sent any money. Auntie’s customers owed her a lot; she was carrying bad debt and there was no profit from the khat. Maryam had called and told him to come and divorce her. But he didn’t even have the money to try and reason with her on the phone. By the time Westgate happened, he had made a decision. Life in the camp was becoming too difficult; he was ready to take his chances back home. He resolved to tell Maryam, the next time she called, that he would come at the end of the year, when he had saved the money for the fare, regardless of the threat to his life. If that didn’t satisfy her then he planned to switch off his phone until she changed her mind, or until he could get there in person. Then, suddenly, everything had changed. While the Westgate attack was under way, she called. She was in Jilib, on the way to the camp. He kept quiet about his concession and accepted the news warily; he didn’t know what she was up to, he would have to wait and see.