The eastern coast of Kenya, home to millions of people and the pearl of the country’s once-booming tourist industry, is now slowly draining itself of foreign visitors. Growing unemployment lands fertile ground for drug trafficking and extremist recruitment. Will winds of change blow Mombassa’s way again?
A security officer helping an injured woman to safety during the Westgate Mall attack. Image Source: http://bit.ly/1AgjaBb
In the perspective of the United States – no place is safe place on the Kenyan soil. At least that is what travel warnings issued by US State Department translate into. After several terrorist attacks hit targets across the country, including the deadly siege of Nairobi’s Westgate Mall in 2013, which saw 67 fatalities, a large number of Western countries issued strict policies discouraging, or at places even prohibiting its citizens from travelling to Kenya. Needless to say, its tourism industry, the country’s second-largest source of income with over USD 1 billion cashed in foreign currencies in 2014, started to plummet. According to the Kenya Association of Hotelkeepers and Caterers, last season brought significant lay-offs in the hospitality sector, resulting in over 20 hotels closed down on the coastline between May 2014 and last January. A brief overview of travel figures says it all – the number of visitors landing at the airports in Nairobi and Mombassa went down 27% in the second quarter of 2014 year-on-year. As a result, over 20,000 workers joined the already hefty cohort of unemployed. The trend is, by the same token, unlikely to reverse. The upcoming year might well turn out to be a nail to the coffin for Kenyan tourism. Country’s authorities report that at the moment – when traditionally Europeans fill up the spots in Mombassa and the likes, escaping from the nippy northern winters, hotels go on with a bed occupancy of 30 per cent with some having as low as 15 per cent of places occupied.
The lethal inference between terrorism and tourism is by no means a new discovery. Countries far more developed than Kenya suffered from similar phenomena, when fear of terror hampered the leisure industry – to name only Greece, Austria and Spain. But the numbers coming from Nairobi prove that the attacks have ceased to be episodic acts of violence, evolving into a prolonged threat to the country’s stability. Between 2012 and 2014, 312 people died in terror-related attacks, with further 779 injured in 2014. Most of them have been claimed to be conducted by a Somali islamist group al-Shabab, a remnant of Al-Qaeda. Kenya has been under threat ever since the African Union’s stabilising mission in Somalia in 2007. Al Shabab has since mostly targeted Kenya’s interiors. The gust of terror is now moving eastwards, making inroads and winning ground on the coastline, where most Kenyan resorts are based and where the majority of visitors spend their holidays.
African Union’s stabilising mission in Somalia. Image Source: http://bit.ly/18clAJV
The eastward migration of terrorism gives room to an obvious spiral of inimical processes. As the hotbeds for western tourists are less and less safe, more and more countries issue travel warnings, successfully persuading their citizens to stay off the beaches of Mombassa. Consequently, resorts up and down the coastline shut down, laying off their workers, who now become easy targets for various sorts of criminal activity. It would be a bold, even a far-fetched claim though, to say that those people jump directly from their lobby boy suits into terrorist camouflage. On the contrary, they oftentimes go through various different middle stages of criminalisation. Drug trafficking and drug addiction – especially with heroine growing big on the Kenyan scene – is frequently the first step. Considering the significant interconnectedness between drug smuggling and terrorist groups, the transition is often smooth and easy. Recruiters from terrorist groups first targets the addicts, then offer them money for drugs in exchange for them joining secret training camps, where they undertake physical training as well as mental instruction. Even if they fail to complete the training and eventually do not join the extremists, they still remain on the margins of society – unemployed, and with little possibilities to seek help from state institutions. Much without them conducting terrorist attacks, they join other criminal groups, often just to make ends meet. No need for another Westgate to have a country’s stability shaken up, one can say. And be certainly right.
Evidence about a direct connection between poverty, unemployment and growth of terrorism is murky for some. In fact, a 2004 research report issued by the National Bureau of Economic Research determined that — contrary to popular belief — a country’s internal financial and political stability of is more preventive to terrorism than its overall wealth. The former factors, however, cannot be achieved in Kenya without a tourism industry alive and kicking. Indirect causal relation is certainly in place here – plummeting tourism fuels various types of crime, not all of which, of course, lead to terrorism. But it is definitely much easier for extremist recruiters to target poor and drug-dependent individuals than those regularly employed.
Lifting up all of the travel restrictions would be perhaps too much to ask for, given the Western countries’ hypochondriac approach to any piece of this planet where words such as “terror” and “Islam” are often mentioned on the same page. But more detailed, target-specific warnings, such as those issued by Italy, France, or Sweden, could become the first step to break the vicious circle taking place on the Kenyan coast. Otherwise the country runs the risk of becoming a living example of a Catch-22 victim, requiring foreign assistance to solve its problems yet being constantly deprived of international presence.
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