Street vendor Makasi Mamso was touting cheap watches in the winding streets of Mombasa’s Old City last Friday when he saw Kenyan police march a group of arrested Pakistanis and Somalis out through the iron gates of the old port and load them onto a pickup truck.
The men, most of whom arrived in Kenya on a fishing boat and carried Somali passports issued the same day, entered Kenya illegally and now face questioning in a suicide bombing that killed 16 and destroyed an Israeli-owned resort hotel just up the Indian Ocean coast.
The problem, Mamso said, is that each year thousands of such mysterious foreigners pass through steamy Mombasa, a coastal port with ancient ties to the Arab world. Some come legally. Others, secreted in the bellies of the wooden dhows that sail East Africa’s coast, wait until dark to make their way to shore and disappear into the maze of the Old City.
`The problem is money’
“Our security is poor,” said Mamso, 39, who has lived two decades in Mombasa. Corrupt officials ignore the movements of those who can pay, he said, and passports are easily bought and sold. Contraband moves nearly as freely through the ports as the fragrant burlap sacks of Kenyan tea making their way to Tanzania and Somalia.
“The problem is money,” he said. “People like money, and our security is going down because of it.”
Persistent corruption, poverty, a history of openness to foreigners and tourists, and porous borders with lawless nations such as Somalia have helped turn Kenya — and much of East Africa — into a target for international terror, analysts say.
Terrorists believed linked to Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda organization bombed the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, killing 224 people, mainly Kenyans. And last week, attackers who witnesses said appeared to be Arabs blew up the resort hotel near Mombasa and narrowly missed shooting down with shoulder-fired missiles an Israeli charter jet carrying 271 passengers and crew, police say. Kenyan, Israeli and U.S. authorities suspect Al Qaeda may be involved.
On Thursday, Kenyan President Daniel arap Moi and Ethiopian Premier Meles Zenawi will sit down with President Bush in Washington to discuss security in the region, including fears that Al Qaeda or other terrorist groups may be putting down roots in the area.
U.S. officials have warned in recent days that terrorists may be planning other attacks against American interests in the region, particularly in tiny Djibouti, where U.S. forces are setting up a Horn of Africa military command center.
The Pentagon has said that 1,200 Marines in Djibouti would form the new task force, which military analysts say could support anti-terrorism operations and a possible war on Iraq. Last month, a U.S. missile attack killed six suspected Al Qaeda terrorist operatives in Yemen, just across the Gulf of Aden.
U.S. officials also have banned Americans from traveling to Yemen and say they believe a Somali-based fundamentalist group, al-Itahad al-Islamiya, also known as the Islamic Union, may have played a role in the Mombasa attacks.
10 remain in custody
William Langat, a deputy police commissioner in Mombasa, said Monday that investigators are continuing to hold the six Pakistanis and four Somalis arrested last week at the port, although they have not begun to thoroughly question the Pakistanis because of problems translating Urdu.
While the arrested men so far have not been linked to the recent attacks, police find their story odd. The men say they left Somalia to fish for sharks and landed in Mombasa to repair a leaking boat, but police found no fish on the vessel.
“How did they leave Mogadishu and arrive in Kenya empty-handed?” Langat said.
Despite its Arab-influenced Swahili culture and long history as a predominantly Muslim city, Mombasa is known better for its religious tolerance than for fundamentalist extremism. Intermarriage between Christians and Muslims is common, and tolerance is the norm in this city where the call to prayer floats down from the minarets of tall, white mosques.
That has begun to change somewhat in recent years, as wealthy Middle Eastern benefactors have brought cash for new mosques and religious schools. Today the city has one fundamentalist mosque where concerned Muslims say the imams preach fiery anti-Western rhetoric. The mosque’s followers pay back their Middle Eastern benefactors “by letting them do what they want,” said one Muslim man who asked not to be named.
That includes helping Middle Eastern visitors move in and out of Kenya without leaving behind records of their visit, the man said, and providing passports and identification cards.
“Anything can be done here,” confirmed Feisal Faiz, 31, a tour guide in the Old City. “Foreigners can break any kind of rules.”
One problem, Mombasa residents say, is that cracking down on terrorists while remaining open to tourism — a big source of the region’s jobs — is a difficult task. Kenya “is a country frequented by people of so many backgrounds and nationalities coming in and out,” Interior Minister Julius Sunkuli noted recently.
“We welcome everyone who comes in,” said Mohammed Shirazy, 24, who is opening an antique shop just down the street from the Old City’s faded port building. The difficulty, he said, is that “you can’t check the passport and see who’s a terrorist.”
Since March, German military pilots have been taking off from Mombasa five times a week on observation missions along sections of East Africa’s 2,500-mile-long coast from Djibouti to the Kenyan border. Scouts try to identify the ships below and feed the information into U.S. computers used to help track terrorist threats, particularly off the coast of war-torn Somalia, where terrorists are believed to be trying to set up training camps.
`A general overlook’
“We’re not searching for a specific target. We’re just trying to get a general overlook,” said Cmdr. Hanno Fischer, who heads the naval aviation team.
But tracking things such as the missiles used in the effort to shoot down the Israeli charter jet last week, he said, is nearly impossible.
“These hand-held missiles can’t be controlled,” he said. They are easy to hide and “the time it takes to aim and shoot one is very short,” he said.
In Mombasa’s old port, a blue wooden boat called the Mogadishu, a fishing vessel that carried the Pakistanis and Somalis now in custody, remained tied up Monday behind an Abu Dhabi freighter being loaded with bags of tea.
Shirazy, who works nearby, said he hopes that whoever carried out the recent attacks can quickly be brought to justice. Kenya, he said, wants no part of fights between terrorists and their American or Israeli targets.
“We have a saying,” he said, “that when two big animals fight, it’s the grass that gets trampled.”
