Kenya Welcome Mat for Somalis Fraying : Africa: The refugees from famine and warfare were embraced at first. But now they’re blamed for an upsurge in crime.

In 1991, when famine and civil war raged in Somalia, boatloads of refugees sailed down the Somali coast to neighboring Kenya seeking political asylum. Others--an average of 900 a day--trooped across the border on foot, many of them after trekking through the bush for months.

At first, Kenyans embraced their uprooted neighbors.

In partnership with the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, the government allotted land for more than a dozen camps. Doctors and nurses were sent to provide free medical services ranging from vaccinations to maternity care. Authorities set up security patrols at each site.

At the time, many Kenyans believed that the need would be temporary--a few months, perhaps, according to initial predictions; once the political situation in Somalia stabilized, the Somalis would pack up and go home.

But now, more than two years and 334,000 refugees later, Kenya’s patience and goodwill have run out. Throughout the country, anti-Somali sentiment is on the upswing, fueled by government claims that Somali gangs are behind a surge in both urban crime and banditry in the rural northeast.

According to police, scores of heavily armed Somalis have crossed over into Kenya to elude U.N. security forces in Mogadishu. The result, they say, has been an unprecedented flow of guns into the country and almost weekly shootouts between Somali bandits and local villagers in the vast stretches of no-man’s-land near Kenya’s eastern border.

Many Somali gunmen have reportedly taken up residence at the border camps, using them as a convenient base for their operations. According to Kenyan authorities, gangs have raped Somali refugee women while they gathered firewood, killed more than a dozen policemen and hijacked U.N. vehicles into Somalia--all within the confines of the refugee camps.

In a report released in September, the London-based group African Rights charged that Somali refugees in Kenya had been subjected to “an appalling range of human rights violations” at the hands of bandits as well as of the police who are supposed to protect them.

The report, “The Nightmare Continues . . . Abuses Against Somali Refugees in Kenya,” further alleged that hundreds of Somali women have been raped in the border camps, and it accused Kenyan authorities of doing nothing to improve security.

“The situation is so bad that many refugees have voluntarily returned to war-torn Somalia,” the report stated. “There are also indications that the Kenyan government is content to let the security situation deteriorate to encourage the refugees to return to Somalia.”

However, Kenyan law enforcement authorities counter that they are outgunned and powerless to stop the violence.

“A lot of the refugees came over with AK-47s, M-16s and all kinds of crazy weapons,” said Nyagah Mucunku, a provincial officer in charge of refugees for Kenya’s northeastern district. “We’re not just talking about small-time thugs. We’ve got some very well-trained commandos here--the same ones the U.N. is fighting in Mogadishu.”

But aside from the security concerns, many Kenyans view Somalis as ungrateful and undeserving of the massive infusion of foreign aid.

This unflattering image of the Somalis reflects the growing frustration among not only Kenyans but also international relief workers, diplomats and others, who are beginning to question the huge sums of money being spent on a country that seems bent on self-destruction. The almost daily reports of U.N. peacekeepers killed or injured in Mogadishu have done nothing to help the Somali cause.

“There is definitely an overall feeling of, ‘Why are we doing all of this?’ ” said Dario Baroni, an International Red Cross relief worker in Mombasa, a coastal city of 500,000 that has absorbed more than 60,000 Somali refugees. “The Kenyans seem to have reached the point where they’re just tired of the whole situation.”

In August, months of festering tensions between Kenyans and refugees at the Utange camp finally reached the boiling point. According to Red Cross officials, one Somali teen-ager was killed and 14 other people injured during clashes between opposing groups armed with bows and arrows. The fighting apparently broke out after an argument between a Kenyan bus driver and his Somali passengers.

A month earlier, government security forces escorted 1,400 refugees back into Somalia at gunpoint. The group, which U.N. refugee officials say included 600 children, had been accused of offenses ranging from gun-smuggling to armed robbery.

Kenya’s President Daniel Arap Moi has asked U.N. refugee officials to send all the refugees back, charging that they are a threat to national security. But the agency, which protested the July expulsions, has stated that all repatriations must be on a voluntary basis. So far, 3,000 refugees have returned of their own accord.

“I want to go back home, but for the time being it is not possible,” said Omar Mohammed, a 26-year-old university student from Mogadishu who lives at Utange refugee camp. “If I went back, I probably wouldn’t last one day.”

Mohammed and other Somali refugees accuse the Kenyan government of fanning xenophobia to divert attention from domestic problems. The devaluation of the Kenyan shilling by more than 50% over the last year, coupled with a steady rise in consumer prices, has precipitated an economic crisis.

Tribal violence has claimed dozens of lives in recent weeks, forcing the government to impose a state of emergency. Meanwhile, several international donors have suspended development funds amid allegations of widespread government corruption.

“We’ve become the convenient scapegoat for all of Kenya’s political and economic problems,” said Isse Yusef, 45, another Somali refugee from Mogadishu who has lived at Utange camp since February, 1991. “It’s easy to blame everything on the refugees because we have no voice.”

International observers agree that there is no hard evidence that the refugees themselves have played a significant role in Kenya’s escalating crime rate. Kenyan bandits were terrorizing border communities long before the influx of refugees and are still active. Some apparently are posing as Somalis. And Kenya’s major cities, Nairobi and Mombasa, are hardly unfamiliar with crime.

Regardless of the reality, the perception that Somalis are to blame has become ingrained in the Kenyan national consciousness.

“It’s like you offer someone a room in your house one day, then they come back the next day and set your place on fire,” said Charles Njau, a Mombasa tailor. “They have brought us nothing but problems.”