Impunity in Kenya goes well beyond post-electoral violence
Nairobi/Geneva, 19 April 2011.
TRIAL (Track Impunity Always) and the EPAF (Peruvian Forensic Anthropology Team) act to seek redress for the victims of enforced disappearance in Kenya’s Mount Elgon District 2008 violence.
Hundreds of men taken by the military during the operation Okoa Maisha (“Save Lives” in Swahili) in Mount Elgon district in Kenya remain unaccounted for. Their families, twice victimized – by the armed group Sabaot Land Defence Forces (SLDF) and by Government forces –, continue being terrorized by former SLDF members turned government informers. Fear and lack of information on the means available to them internationally to seek justice have led to inaction by the families, perpetuating impunity in Mount Elgon. Numerous mass graves are known to exist, but strong military presence in the region prevents access to them. To date, no real investigation has been carried out and no human rights offender has been brought to justice.
Earlier this month, TRIAL and EPAF concluded a three-day workshop on international mechanisms to submit individual complaints for human rights violations and on the collection of ante-mortem data to effectively investigate enforced disappearances. Numerous lawyers and field monitors of Western Kenya Human Rights Watch (WKHRW) and other local organisations attended the workshop. WKHRW, a local NGObased in Bungoma, has been documenting human rights abuses and offering legal aid to the victims of torture, enforced disappearances and other violations committed by SLDF and State security forces in Mount Elgon district.
Since it emerged in 2006 to resist what they considered unfair land-allocation attempts by the government, the SLDF has been increasing its control over the villages in Mount Elgon district, occupying the land it claimed, levying taxes over the already impoverished population and terrorizing those who failed to follow their orders or join their ranks. Multiple cases of inhumane treatment, sexual violence and mutilation have been documented.
The response of the government to the abuses by the SLDF was initially lacklustre, fostering a climate of impunity. In March 2008, the government launched Okoa Maisha a joint military-police operation called to clamp down the activities of the SLDF. The population initially welcomed this operation but was quickly alienated by a strategy consisting of rounding up nearly all men in Mount Elgon district, taking them to military camps and torturing them sometimes to death to force them to identify members of the SLDF, or the location of weapons, later disposing of their bodies in the forest. Despite having taken place in the context of the general post-election violence, the abuses committed during operation Okoa Maisha were considered by the government a separate conflict and thus left out of the scope of the investigations and recommendations of the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission (TJRC) and of the Commission of Inquiry into the Post-Election Violence (CIPEV).
The TRIAL-EPAF training is part of a larger project to assist the families of the disappeared in seeking justice before international human rights organisms. Concretely, TRIAL together with WKHRW will soon submit numerous individual cases of enforced disappearances before the United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances (UNWGEID). These will be the first Kenyan cases submitted to the Working Group. The EPAF will simultaneously continue training local human rights monitors on the collection of ante-mortem data, with a view to establishing a database with a finite universe of disappeared persons and to map the location of mass graves.
For more information:
“All the Men Have Gone” – War Crimes in Kenya’s Mt. Elgon Conflict, Human Rights Watch July 2008 Report
