Success at Pacification

We undertake a vow to skin some people, make paper out of their skins, take their blood and use it as ink, use their bones as our pens and make their flesh our rations.

Instructions for cannibals who have literary ambitions? Hardly. That grim promise is simply one dose of the tough talk that is familiar fare on Radio Mogadishu, the official voice of the Republic of Somalia. For the past four years, Somalia has been working over time to keep Somali guerrillas, who are called shifta (bandits), in revolt against the government of Kenya.

The Somalis argue that much of Kenya's eastern and northeastern prov inces, where the Ogaden and other Somali tribes have traditionally grazed their cattle, is really part of Somalia.

They were furious when Kenya got the territory from Britain as part of its in dependence package in 1963, and ever since, the Somalis have trained and equipped the terrorists. Like a small-scale Viet Cong, the shifta have am bushed army patrols, sown vast networks of road mines, and abducted and tortured village headmen. Their raiders have killed at least 645 civilians for not cooperating with them. But lately the Kenyan government has been successfully striking back--largely by forcing the nomadic tribes to settle down where they can be kept under scrutiny.

Barbed Wire & Bren Guns. Before the new pacification program began, many a shifta tended his herd by day and turned terrorist at night. He was hard to catch because he kept constantly on the move. Now thousands of Somalis have been shunted into manyat-ta (protected villages), a safe distance from the Somalia border. Such tribes as the Turkanas and the Boran, which have been nomadic for centuries, have been settled along with them in rows of dome-shaped huts that are protected from terrorists by barbed wire and Kenyan troops armed with Bren guns. At the same time, with the -L-3,000,000 a year allotted for the security and pacification effort, Jomo Kenyatta's government has done much to upgrade the nomads' lives. It has dug wells, built schools and hospital wards and provided veterinarians for sickly cattle.

The tactics are paying off. Taking advantage of an amnesty offer from Kenyatta, 340 shifta recently surrendered. Many of them have been entrusted with jobs in the army and police department. By last week, despite the provocative broadcasts from Somalia, terrorism seemed to be under control.

But the government, which has killed more than 2,000 shifta during the revolt, warned that it intends to keep the pressure on. "We are willing to meet with Somalia anywhere, any time, to discuss this problem," said Defense Minister Njoroge Mungai. "We have extended the hand of friendship, but in the meantime we are going to hit the shifta very, very hard."

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