Ban Ki-moon dismissed Lt Gen Johnson Ondieki after a report said it had failed to protect civilians in July.

Kenya condemned the decision as unfair, and said it would withdraw its troops from the UN mission in South Sudan.

The report said peacekeepers did not act when soldiers attacked an aid compound in the capital, Juba.

In the fighting between the army and former rebels, a local journalist was killed and aid workers were raped.

The clashes derailed efforts to form a unity government and end the civil war.

‘Structural dys-functionality’

In its statement, Kenya said Mr Ban’s decision to sack Gen Ondieki failed to address the root causes of the problem highlighted in the report.

“What is clear is that Unmiss [UN Mission in South Sudan] suffers from structural dys-functionality, which has severely hindered its capacity to discharge its mandate,” the statement says.

Kenya suggests the UN should have addressed the problems which are dogging its peacekeeping mission rather than “unfairly” blame them on one individual.

It is not clear how many of the UN’s 13,000 troops in South Sudan come from Kenya.

Accused of rape

In connection with the incidents which led to the sacking of Gen Ondieki, several people were arrested on Wednesday in Juba, officials said.

Among those arrested, eight are accused of rape, and eight others of looting.

The government of South Sudan had commissioned its own report on the July incidents but it did not make it public.

The UN has not yet commented on Kenya’s response to the secretary-general’s decision.

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Source: BBC

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Authorities say that the 57 were held when they arrived at the Recruits Training School at Moi Barracks in the city of Eldoret along with hundreds of genuine Kenya.

Defence Forces recruits, Nairobi News reports.

All of those arrested held letters telling them to report there on 31 October following a nationwide army recruitment process, the paper says.

According to Ali Samatar, the local director of criminal investigations, the fake letters were spotted because they “had anomalies and had not been genuinely issued by the State Department for Defence”, Kenya Standard reports.

He says he’s liaising with the armed forces to find out where the letters came from, but he suspects “that parents and brokers who masquerade as senior military and police officials were involved in one way or another”.

The offer of a job is the driving factor in a country where one-in-six young people are unemployed.

The incident comes at the end of the Kenyan army’s month-long annual recruitment scheme for men and women aged between 18 and 26 years.

Potential recruits were warned at the time that any attempt to use fake call-up letters, bribery and other acts of corruption to gain admission to the armed forces would be treated as fraud and prosecuted accordingly, Nairobi’s Capital FM reported in September.

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Source: BBC

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