ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the nature and extent of refugee militarisation in Kenya and Tanzania and the factors that underpin it. Criminal, rather than political, motives also tended to characterise the militarisation of Somali refugees. Refugee militarisation describes non-civilian attributes of refugee populations and refugee camps, including such things as refugee participation in and support of armed rebellion, the use of refugee camps for arms storage and trafficking, military training of refugees and in refugee camps. The phenomenon of refugee militarisation came to prominence in the mid 1990s, especially as a result of the events occurring in the Great Lakes region of Africa, East Timor and the Balkans. The strategic and political interests of the West and its allies to maintain pressure against and to destabilize revolutionary states in the Third World, and through them, to raise the costs to their patron, the Soviet Union, were served by the continued military use of refugees.
