Kenyan Muslims protest harassment over Somalia

NAIROBI, Jan 19 (Reuters) Carrying anti-Bush and anti-Ethiopia placards, hundreds of Kenyan Muslims rallied today to accuse authorities of unfair arrests and increased harassment due to the crisis in neighbouring Somalia.

At a peaceful meeting after Friday prayers outside Nairobi's main mosque, the protesters said Kenya was currying favour with Washington by cracking down on Muslims suspected of sympathy towards or links with Somalia's ousted Islamists.

''Every Kenyan Muslim is an Islamist. We are not apologetic about it, we are not begging, we were born Muslims, Islam is our religion,'' said Abdullahi Abdi, the chairman of National Muslim Leaders Forum. ''The message is clear, we are being pushed to the wall, we are under siege and we must stand up for our rights.'' Leaders of Kenya's Muslim community -- estimated at between 7 and 15 per cent of the mainly Christian country's 35 million population -- said dozens of youths had been held and denied access to lawyers in north Kenya, near the Somali border.

Nairobi closed its border after Ethiopian and Somali government troops swept aside Islamists who ran most of south Somalia for six months. After their defeat, Islamist fighters fled to remote areas near the Kenyan border.

Thousands of would-be Somali refugees are stranded.

At the rally, young Muslim men shouted ''God is Greatest'', denounced US President George W Bush and vowed to vote out Kenya's President Mwai Kibaki in an election later this year.

Placards read: ''Satan is embodied in Bush!'', ''Due process, not bombs'', ''Kenya stop aiding US/Ethiopia terrorism.'' One of the organisers, Alamin Kimathi, said: ''Today we are sad and very angry ... We have turned into a country which is given orders by the US on what to do.'' Muslim leaders said Kenya had shown a lack of consistency because it had regularly invited the Somali Islamists to Nairobi for dialogue and then treated them as terrorists.

''Without any reason, it has changed its policy on Somalia ... instead of pursuing dialogue it has now decided to attack Somalia,'' said Billow Kerrow, a Muslim member of parliament, referring to Kenya's deployment of troops around its border.

Kenyan Christian groups also weighed in to warn the Somali crisis could divide communities in the east African nation.

''The crisis will engender divisions where there were none before. There has been no division between Christians and Muslims in Kenya -- we work happily together,'' said Sister Nuala Brangan, of the Association of Sisterhoods of Kenya.

''We support Muslims and want to tell them that we feel for them at this moment when there are thousands of them at the border suffering,'' she said.

Aid groups say 4,000 Somali civilians are stuck on their side of the border, with little food and shelter, unable to cross over to Kenya's Dadaab refugee camps which already house 160,000 Somalis who have fled there.

Rights groups called a news conference to also express their concern at harassment against Muslims. ''The Kenyan government will continue to use the Somali crisis to arrest whomever they want,'' said Ndung'u Wainaina, of the Somalia Crisis Caucus.

REUTERS LL RAI2146