Africa: Who is killing the young men of Kenya?
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Africa: Who is killing the young men of Kenya?
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
The Globe & Mail - Dec 26, 2007
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20071226.kenya26/BNStory/International/?page=rss&id=RTGAM.20071226.kenya26
Who is killing the young men of Kenya?
By TIM QUERENGESSER
NAIROBI " For the past six months, corpses have been bobbing up in
Kenya's rivers and rotting in forests; they have been dumped
unceremoniously beside roads and in morgues " hundreds of young men,
most dispatched with a single bullet to the head.
In its chilling preliminary report on the subject late last month, the
Kenya National Commission on Human Rights said 454 alleged members of a
violent gang called the Mungiki had been summarily executed in a
massive, extra-judicial crackdown, and it suggested the police were
linked to the deaths. Since then, they have done 60 more postmortems on
corpses, all with similar wounds.
Like many here, Henry Njuijuna isn't particularly troubled by the
revelation.
Some of us work too hard and get thrown out of school for lack of
money for tuition, so when someone takes the shortcut of being a
Mungiki to make money, I don't have sympathy with that, says the
33-year-old filmmaker, who grew up in the same poverty as the
gangsters. I sympathize more with the police. In a society where an
honest road from poverty to comfort has emerged for those outside the
ruling elite " and where the Mungiki have victimized people for decades
" what might have created outrage in the past has the growing middle
class here shrugging its shoulders.
Even with an election scheduled for Dec. 27, the killings have not
become a high-profile issue. Only a handful of opposition MPs has
mentioned the issue during their campaigns.
The police crackdown that human-rights groups believe is behind the
alleged executions was the response to a murderous Mungiki rampage
earlier this year. Hundreds of people were killed, some of their
severed heads left in downtown Nairobi, the skin peeled back as though
they were bananas. Men with automatic rifles opened fire on motorists,
killing dozens.
The calls for retaliation were immediate. By June they had become so
fierce that President Mwai Kibaki swore he would wipe out the Mungiki.
His is the first regime to take on the gang, whose name means the
multitude in Kikuyu. Former presidents have collaborated with the
group to tighten their grip on power.
Mr. Njuijuna does worry that police may be killing whomever they please
" he blames them for the deaths of several friends " but he also says
there is no other way to contain the Mungiki. Kenya's judicial system
has been unable to rein them in, he says. Police are in a Catch-22.
Kenya's police reject the human-rights report and have called for it to
be retracted unless there is concrete evidence. We don't kill, we
don't murder; I hate to disappoint you, the force's chief,
Major-General Hussein Ali says. Mr. Ali promised to provide detailed
information about investigations into the bodies being found, but has
yet to do so.
In truth, no proof exists that police are the killers, but the force's
lack of interest in investigating hundreds of execution-style deaths is
telling, says Maina Kiai, head of the human-rights commission. If the
police are not responsible, why are they unable or unwilling to
investigate? he asks, adding that the commission's findings remind him
of Idi Amin's Uganda.
Samwel Mohochi, director of the Independent Medico-Legal Unit believes
it is not just the police, but Kenya's government that is involved.
Our take is that there is state complicity, he says.
The group has provided independent postmortem reports on 18 bodies that
turned up after the crackdown. All of them found that the victims were
shot at near contact range, including cases where police agree they've
killed a suspect but claim to have been engaged in a shootout.
Shootouts occur at distance. These were gunshots to the back of the
head. That indicates a summary execution, Mr. Mohochi says.
Al-Amin Kimathi, chair of the Muslim Human Rights Forum, says dozens of
witnesses have come forward to the Forum to tell their stories,
including one man who survived an attempt by a killer squad to gouge
out his eyes, and who later saw several people executed who had been
arrested with him. Others have seen people lined up above Nairobi's
sewage lagoon and gunned down by police and pushed into the depths, he
says.
What's most disturbing, he says, is the lack of outrage from the
wealthy because the victims are from the slums or countryside.
Isn't it really a statement of what kind of society we are living in
now? We don't care when people are disappearing and turning up dead.
The problem is that everyone's yearning for space upwards and you very
fast want to cut off where you came from.
Human-rights groups have asked the Kenyan government to invite the
United Nations rapporteur on extra-judicial killings to investigate.
But there is concern the election could derail that. And the dearth of
political interest combined with a lack of a civilian oversight body
for police means there could be no fallout from the commission's final
report, which is due in January.
Maj.-Gen. Ali gives a long, intimidating stare when asked if the
reports will lead to internal investigations in his force.
All those are horror stories, he says. We don't investigate horror
stories. We don't have time for that.
*
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