Kenya was again this week the victim of an Al Shabab terrorist attack that took the whole day to quell. In the meantime, close to a hundred innocent university students lay dead. As the events were unfolding, here in Kigali, Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda were putting the final touches to guidelines of cooperation for Peace Support Operations as part of the Northern Corridor Integration Projects. This was a result of the peace and security pact signed last year by the three countries as part of the East African Standby Force. What the Kenyan students experienced can happen to any other country in the region, therefore the need for closer cooperation in peace and security matters is now more urgent than ever. This region is rife with distabilising forces capable of creating harm – and have no qualms about it afterwards – so, intelligence sharing is not an end to itself; rapid response to a given situation is. Regional countries should come up with strategies to deal with security affairs, share expertise where necessary, but above all, security cooperation should translate into action and not buried in numerous memorandums of understanding (MoUs). In order to combat terror, one needs to keep a step ahead of the perpetrators, and where necessary, conduct dissuasive operations, even if it means finding potential terrorists in their home turf. FDLR is no different from Al Shabab, their tactics are similar as well as their ideological bankruptcy, but as long as there is no genuine attempt and willingness to deal with them, the region will see no end to terror attacks.
