Law Enforcement Vs Communities who is responsible to Prevent and Counter Violent Extremism?
Reflection by Mujuni Baitani
P/CVE (preventing and countering violent extremism) is the new phenomena in Africa. Over a decade most of the African countries are finding the best practices and initiatives to tackle conditions to radicalization and violent extremism with the ultimate aim of denying terrorist groups new supporters and recruits. Many of the organizations in collaboration with international organizations have been pushing the agenda to ensure that Africa is the safe from Radicalization, Violent Extremism and Terrorism. IGAD been one of the institution, has geared towards building national and regional capacity of the Horn of Africa countries in the fight against terrorism, radicalization and extremists violence. Recently IGAD have established the Center of Excellence for Prevention and Countering Violent Extremism (ICEPCVE) focusing on capacitating the region members on peace, security and humanitarian affairs. From 5th September to 7th September, IGAD through its center ICEPCVE conducted a workshop on how “Law Enforcement and Local Communities can engage in Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism”. It was compelling, personally I acknowledge that as I attended and participated representing Tanzania. Attendees from different countries, organizations shared different perspective of peace building accordingly to the context and capability of the actors in their countries.
Sharing my opinion, the issue of Peace building is much more efficient on the context of Local Ownership. This is a great concept that must be taken into necessity. Local ownership is refered to the degree of control that actors convey common sense of wisdom that any peace builder can embrace and still promote sustainable peace within their community. Local actors contributing to the local ownership are; normal people, police, military, local leaders, CSO’s, FBO’s and other more. During the discussion it was illustrated clearly that key concepts that informs on Violent Extremism, Law Enforcement and Community Policing does not have universal definition but differ according to the local context. I agree,thinking out loud! When comparing these narratives just the case of East Africa Countries it obvious we find different experience regrading local ownership. Imagine a country like Tanzania where particularly the indicators of VE,are not addressed at their embryonic stage. Tanzania has been facing tensions that are significant drivers in the rise of groups condoning violence and radicalization, like the Islamist organization Uamsho in Zanzibar and anonymous groups in Kibiti, Pwani. If we had already begun to see the importance of local ownership this would have helped to deal with such threats on early stages from individual level, then family level to Community level.
On other hand, Non-Governmental Organizations and Faith Based Organizations have been doing every move to ensure that all issues that threaten peace are discussed and resolved. Tanzania has less than 30 NGOs working on Peace Agenda, possibly many other organizations except they are identifiable. However, these movements have been confronting with the various challenges such as collaboration and partnership with the governing bodies. In the presentation we were able to address issues such as trust, ethics and accountability as challenges to the practices of peace building in Tanzania which practically involves Police brutality, Corruption, injustices and public interests with political affiliation.
Speaking of Law enforcement Vs Communities these two are major integral parts that depend to each other especially in the issue of peace. Its Key that through the discussions we were able to share and listen to the experiences that bind good practices between the parts. Community engagement is still seen at peak in peace building especially on building trust between law enforcement officials and community members. Listening to other countries experience it proves that such relationships cannot be built overnight and should be cultivated and maintained over time in order to have effect. It is critical to have at least the beginnings of such relationships in place before engaging the community on the issue of radicalization to violence and empowering them to become part of the solution.
Furthermore officials should approach communities with basic knowledge of their local dynamics and the issues they face in order to demonstrate to the community that they are not engaging the community solely because of potential security threats arising within the community. Both officials and community leaders can emphasize a secularized relationship in which the security concerns of officials crowd out community concerns in other areas of government responsibility is counterproductive to genuine community engagement and ultimately leads to distrust and bad relations. Also in community engagement, initiatives should focus on proactively engaging the local community to share information and better serve their needs not just employing traditional law enforcement methods or gathering security related information.
When sharing on legal procedure and practical measures supporting Law Enforcement and community engagement in P/CVE. I had to be thoughtful that many communities have formal leaders who ably represent their peers, understand their communities and should continue to be at the forefront of community engagement initiatives, community engagement and community- oriented policing efforts tend to work best when multiple sectors within a community are involved in the initiatives. These will bring much sense on the agenda of peace building with “Local Ownership”. It is important to incorporate community influencers who are not formal leaders into any engagement plan. This will ensure that engagement has the best chance of reaching a broad cross-section of individuals within the community and it also has the potential to aid in developing trust with different levels in the community. Providing local-level engagement officials with a broad range of potential partners, such as private sector businesses, national and local government agencies, NGOs, academia, local health care providers, teachers and the media, could give them more tools to respond to community needs. By the same token, practitioners of community-oriented policing should have access to the breadth of local law enforcement and should not be isolated from senior law enforcement leadership by excessive levels of hierarchy.
In a nut shell, I believe that training methods should be continually especially in local context helping building up collaboration and good practices of preventing and countering Violent Extremism. The differences between Law enforcement and Communities should be discourages as key to updated and revise the evolution of threats associated with Violent Extremism. Most like by ways in which measures community perceptions before, during, and after a given community engagement or community-oriented policing initiative. Such measures can take the form of polls, surveys, focus groups, or community round-tables.
