Trouble in paradise: Kenya’s lawless neighbours

Somalia’s deadly chaos is spreading across the border into Kenya, where dry land is no longer a refuge from the hostage takers who infest the failed state to the north, explains Margot Kiser.

DAVID and Judith Tebbutt planned to wrap up their Kenya holiday in style.

After a week in the vast Maasai Mara wildlife reserve, the British couple headed to the powdery white beaches of Kiwayu Safari Village, an exclusive resort on Kenya’s northern coast.

Previous guests at its 18 thatched huts have included Mick Jagger and British princes William and Harry, but on this particular night, the Tebbutts had the place to themselves. After dinner, the 58-year-old publishing executive and his 56-year-old wife, a social worker, walked in the moonlight along the edge of the sea to their secluded €1,200-a-night lodgings.

Shortly after midnight, one of the resort’s watchmen heard a single gunshot. David Tebbutt was found face down across the bed, its mosquito net cradling his head, dead from a bullet through his chest. His wife was gone. Footprints in the sand showed how she had been marched over a kilometre up the shore to a cove where a skiff had apparently been moored.

A search started immediately, but there was little hope of finding her. The resort is only a short distance south of a land that for the past generation, has had no law but the gun: Somalia.

The September 11 incident proved to be only the first in a series of unprecedented attacks. Twenty nights later and about 110km further down the coast, a gang of Somali gunmen kidnapped Marie Dedieu, 66, a retired French journalist. And last week, even as Kenya’s armed forces strengthened their presence against attacks from the sea, suspected members of Somalia’s militant Islamist group, al Shabaab, grabbed two Spanish women who were working for Médecins sans Frontières in Kenya’s Dadaab refugee camp, some 240km inland.

The sprawling city of makeshift tents and huts has become home to roughly 450,000 Somalis who have been driven from their own country by war and famine. (A senior Shabaab official denied that his group had anything to do with the abduction.)

Somalia’s problems have boiled over and are threatening Kenya, one of the few dependably stable countries in the region. In the past the failed state’s pirates confined their attacks to ships on the open sea, and the Islamists focused their ransom kidnappings on aid workers inside Somalia. Now both groups are making hostage-taking raids on dry land, and the Kenyan nation itself is a victim.

Tourism, a mainstay of the economy, was already hit hard by the global recession. But since the attacks began, holiday-makers have cancelled their reservations en masse. Foreign investors have halted funding for major projects until the government sorts out its security problems. And the people whose livelihoods depend on tourism — not only hoteliers, restaurateurs, shopkeepers, and employees, but entire communities — have no idea when or if the affluent visitors will ever come back.

The loss of jobs is being felt as far away as the capital Nairobi, where tourists routinely stop over before heading on safari and then going east to the beaches on the Indian Ocean. Many longtime residents of the northern coast have left, looking for safer places to wait until they feel comfortable about going back.

Although Somali bandits have been making forays into Kenya for more than 30 years, the attack on the Tebbutts was another matter entirely. Dedieu’s kidnapping showed that the first raid was not an isolated case. And the seizing of the Spanish women suggests that Westerners may be at risk anywhere in Kenya.

The Frenchwoman’s abductors clearly knew what they were doing. They landed their 8m fiberglass skiff on the beach directly outside her winter residence, a spacious thatched hut on Manda island in the Lamu archipelago, in the early hours of October 1.

Dedieu had returned from her summer in France only a day before. Dressed in camouflage fatigues and carrying assault rifles, the intruders first made their way to the rear of the property, where most members of Dedieu’s household staff lived, and awakened them at gunpoint, demanding in broken Swahili to be led to the “mzungu” — the foreigner.

When one servant tried to argue, a gunman struck her with his rifle butt. As the Somalis forced their way into the main hut, Dedieu’s companion, a 39-year-old Kenyan named John Lepapa, leaped from his bed to protect her. One of the men fired at him, and Lepapa managed to escape through a window.

At the beach hut next door, an elderly caretaker heard the commotion and ran to intervene. A gunman fired three shots at him, and the old man dived for cover in the remains of a fallen tree at the property’s edge. Dedieu had no way to save herself; she’d been confined to a wheelchair for years because of an accident.

The Somalis tried to force her to stand up and walk before dragging her out of the hut, nearly naked, while the housemaids begged them at least to carry her. Tossing their prisoner into the boat, the men put out to sea, leaving behind both Dedieu’s wheelchair and the cancer medication she’s supposed to take every four hours. The raid took less than 20 minutes.

Dedieu’s friends and neighbours are furious with the government — and particularly with their local law enforcers. People on Manda immediately began ringing the emergency number for the police station, on nearby Lamu island, but the calls went unanswered until 6am, more than three hours after the attack.

The police sent a boat to Manda to investigate, but soon returned to Lamu to gather reinforcements — which was not a simple task. Although Lamu’s police have three boats, each equipped with twin 115-horsepower outboard engines, two of the boats were out of commission that morning.

Instead officers had to hire one 140-horsepower craft from a local captain and requisition another from the Kenya Wildlife Service. By the time the necessary paperwork was filled out and the boats were fuelled up, it was eight o’clock. They headed north at full speed.

People on Manda knew better than to wait for the police and about 4am that day, someone phoned three local pilots — charter air-service owner, Roland Purcell, and luxury-hotel proprietors, Andy Roberts and Fuzz Dyer — who, as quickly as they could, headed for their planes.

All three had done what they could in the search for Judith Tebbutt three weeks earlier, but her kidnappers had too much of a head start. This time the pilots had no intention of letting another gang of kidnappers slip away. By first light they were on the runway at the controls of two Cessna 206 planes, and at 6am they were in the air. Purcell flew solo.

They traced the coast north, with one plane staying 5km offshore and the other flying 10km out. About 45 minutes later they spotted a skiff heading north, just south of Kiwayu Safari Village. The pilots had no doubt that they had found the kidnappers.

“We knew we had the right boat when we realised we were being shot at,” says Dyer. They couldn’t see Dedieu, but they figured she had to be under a tarpaulin that had been thrown across the bottom of the skiff. The pilots reported the kidnappers’ location to the Kenyan navy and circled overhead. The boat sped up, and the pilots continued to send regular updates on its position.

The navy had sent out a small skiff to intercept the kidnappers, but it struck a coral reef and capsized. The pilots saw the sailors in the water as the Cessnas flew on after the kidnappers. At least two of the 10 sailors aboard were killed, according to the Lamu police. One of the dead later washed ashore, and another died after being transported to a hospital in Mombasa. A third reportedly remains missing.

A little farther north, the pilots spotted a pair of navy attack boats that apparently had been on patrol along the border. Roberts and Dyer managed to get the phone number for the captain of one of the boats, and the pilots guided the vessels toward the kidnappers’ skiff.

When the Kenyans closed in on their quarry, Dyer says, there was “a serious exchange of gunfire”, although he can’t say whether anyone was hit. The kidnappers managed to slip past their pursuers, but the attack boats gave chase and again caught up to the kidnappers, who answered with a storm of gunfire. The spatter of bullets on the water was visible near the two attack boats — and then a cloud of smoke appeared above the skiff, followed by a big splash not far from one attack boat’s bow. It was a rocket-propelled grenade, says Dyer.

The pilots watched helplessly as the skiff reached Somalia’s territorial waters at about 9.15am. The Kenyans broke off their pursuit, apparently unwilling to violate Somalia’s sovereignty.

“They were probably scared,” says a Lamu police officer. “None of them even know how to swim.”

But Purcell followed the skiff north, while Roberts and Dyer flew back to the Kenyan naval air base at Kiunga to refuel. About 6.5km north of the Islamist stronghold of Ras Kamboni, the kidnappers beached their skiff at a deserted spit of land.

Carrying Dedieu, they walked a short distance inland and settled down in the shade of an acacia tree. Purcell and his partners stayed there until dark, circling the area in relays, one plane keeping watch while the other flew south to refuel. The gunmen never moved.

The pilots say they spent the whole day in communication with foreign forces, which kept promising help. The three men wanted to be there to point out the spot where the gunmen were hiding. “There was talk of French, US, and UK military being activated,” says Dyer. “That’s why we hung in until last light.”

At about 4pm, a Kenyan Navy helicopter flew in briefly to disable the skiff, in case the kidnappers decided to sail on, but nobody else showed up. The last image the pilots had before they gave up and flew home was of Dedieu and her kidnappers sheltering under that acacia as darkness descended. At dawn the next morning, Purcell returned to look for her, having memorised the acacia’s precise location, but she and the gunmen were gone.

Yesterday, French Foreign Ministry spokesman Bernard Valero confirmed that Dedieu had died, although could not confirm the date or cause of death. He demanded her body be handed to authorities.

“France is shocked at the total absence of humanity and the cruelty that the kidnappers have shown with regard to our compatriot, and we want them to be identified and face justice,” he said.

Paris updated its travel advisory, warning anyone who goes to the northern frontier and east of Kenya, Somalia and its periphery or near there “is risking their life and freedom”.

To date, there have been no public ransom demands for any of the kidnapped Europeans. The Spanish aid workers were last seen in a vehicle that was speeding toward Somalia, with Kenyan security forces in pursuit. The vehicle was found abandoned a day later, 20km from the border. The aid workers remained missing.

And the kidnapped Englishwoman, Judith Tebbutt? She’s thought to be in the village of Amara, inland from the coastal town of Xarardheere, a notorious nest of pirates roughly 400km up the coast from Mogadishu. Amara is where a pirate known as Buggas held Paul and Rachel Chandler prisoner for more than a year after capturing the British couple’s yacht off the Seychelles in October 2009.

To Robert Young Pelton, author of The World’s Most Dangerous Places and editor of the blog Somalia Report, there’s only one way to be sure.

“Let’s hope people drop from the sky and put some bullets in surprised foreheads,” he says. “That should dampen their ardor. Pirates are in it for the money, and because there are no penalties for audacity.”

How desperate would they have to become before northern Kenya turns into another Somalia? Nobody wants to find out. But the fact is that until Kenya finds the political will to sort out its glaring lack of security, the country will continue to be more like Somalia than anyone cares or dares to admit. And for now, the waters around Lamu’s islands, ordinarily a cacophony of boat engines and tourists’ laughter, are eerily quiet.

Margot Kiser is a Kenya-based American correspondent covering piracy, geopolitics, and wildlife conservation in East Africa. She is currently at work on a memoir of her life as a safari wife in post-socialist Tanzania and is establishing a wildlife-conservation area at the foot of Mount Kilimanjaro.