The Security Laws (Ammendments) Bill is a bad law and should not be in our statutes. Period! In a country where blatant impunity is our second nature and official sanction of forced disappearances and execution of unwanted persons is celebrated, more unchecked powers to security agencies will only accelerate our descent into a failed state.
Power comes with responsibility, and accountability; two virtues that are rarely embraced in our national leadership.
This Bill will license security officers to ‘terrorise’ us at will, trample on our liberty rights and gag us all from fair criticism of our institutional and individual weaknesses.
Contrary to its publisher’s claims, the Bill does not address the institutional weaknesses and operational ineffectiveness of our security agencies that is largely blamed for the rising insecurity. The Bill sanctions illegal actions already being practised by officers such as holding suspects for longer than 24 hours, spying on our phones, threatening journalists reporting on their excesses, implanting evidence on suspects, harrasing innocent Kenyans, extortion, etc.
The focus on the Bill also deflects concerns about other shortcomings: rank corruption in our forces, weak security intelligence, messy investigations, inadequate equipment, poor command structures, poor local cooperation, weak leadership of the forces, etc.
The US country report on terrorism 2013 concurs with the widely held view that the existing Prevention of Terrorism Act, Proceeds of Crime & Anti-money Laundering Act, and the Prevention of Organised Crime Act ‘provided a strong legal framework under which to prosecute acts of terrorism’.
The report reiterates that ‘limited resources, insufficient training, endemic corruption, poor coordination, unclear command, control and overt political interference’ hampers the work of the security agencies.
Our key challenge is at the border security where the report alleges ‘mismanagement, corruption, lack of capacity on border controls and systems for identification hampered the detection and detention of potential terrorists’. Clearly, inadequate laws is not the problem here!
The government’s dismissive response to Al Jazeera’s shocking exposition of police death squads is a pointer to the rationale for giving more powers to the security agencies whilst clamping down on our basic rights. We expect the government to institute an investigation into the executions, not denials; and for parliament to investigate the claims.
That’s what the US Senate did after allegations of torture of detainees at Gitmo by the CIA. And when the damning report of gruesome torture was released this week, Obama agreed it was ‘brutal’ and that ‘it is not who we are’ because it violates their democratic values and the rule of law. Already, calls for prosecution are mounting in the US, and at the UN.
The Al Jazeera findings only confirm what many knew already. The Kenya National Commission on Human Rights, a state organ, in its 2008 report titled ‘The Cry of Blood’ revealed by Wikileaks chronicled how over 500 persons were excuted by police.
It also announced in 2009 that it had a video testimony of the driver of a police death squad who he said had executed 58 people in one year. In February 2009, the UN Rappoteur Philip Alston published a report tabled in the UN in which he accused police of extra-judicial killing of over 1,000 suspects.
He termed our police then as ‘a law unto themselves’ who often ‘kill with impunity’, and reported the existence of a ‘systematic and well-planned strategy of elimination’.
In August this year, the US based Human Rights Watch published a report that accused the anti-terror police unit of killing terrorism suspects and forced disappearances, and quoted a member of the unit who told BBC in December 2013 that ‘we opt to eliminate suspects...in front of their families, starting with their leaders’; the same words used by police in the Al Jazeera expose.
Suffice it to say that several media investigative reports had also highlighted the policy of elimination of suspects by the police.
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Take Obama’s advice to the UN in September that we address the ‘root problems of terrorism - address the oppression, lack of opportunities, the hopelessness that makes individuals susceptible to appeals of extremism and violence’.
The Israeli option of persecution and elimination will only lead to increased radicalisation, not peace. We must abandon it, together with this Bill.
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