Something not unusual happened in Isiolo last week. As they have done countless times before, police rounded up a group of young men accusing them of being Al Shabaab followers or sympathisers.
The accused were later released and the accusations dropped in a puzzling turn of events. Sometime ago, another group of young men from the same county were rounded up by people suspected to be law enforcement officers. Those ones were unlucky. No word has been heard from them since.
Even the young men from this past incident are living in fear. What will happen to them next?
These and other forced disappearances mostly by enforcement officers give rise to a number of questions; is to be accused of being a member of a terrorist organisation enough reason for one to be killed?
Extra-judicial killing is the slaying of a person by law enforcement officers without the sanction of any judicial proceeding or legal process. Extra-judicial punishments are mostly seen to be unlawful since they bypass the due process of the legal jurisdiction in which they occur.
Extra-judicial killings in Kenya often target young people suspected to be criminals or increasingly, people suspected to be terrorists or their sympathisers. Leading political leaders, religious, and social figures are also sometimes victims of such criminal acts.
This does not include cases where State agencies act under motives that serve their own interests and not the State’s, such as to eliminate their complicity in crime or commissioning by an outside party.
The most saddening part is the deafening silence by the country’s top leadership about what many in Kenya increasingly see as a dark stain on our country. Even the deaths of lawyer Willie Kimani, a taxi driver and his client never attracted the attention of the higher-ups. Nothing was said before it became a judicial matter; neither from the Presidency or any Department of State. The silence is frightening.
The loud murmurs that followed UN Rapporteur Alfred Alston’s report in 2009 still linger. Prof Alston had accused the government of knowing that the police were engaging in extrajudicial killings and doing nothing about it.
“His questioning of the very basis of the Kenyan state and in particular its institutions is totally unacceptable, and impinges on Kenya’s sovereign rights,” read a Government response. Perhaps the thinking remains the same. We are getting into an election year, such period in our political calendar is the time when people make choices about the leadership and who they best trust with their lives and property.
Increasingly, the generation between 16 and 30 years are becoming an endangered age group. Instead of reaping from the demographic dividend the young and dynamic population offer, ours is killing it; reinforcing the feeling that the young population is a burden.
In the last two years alone, over 300 young men and women have been killed for various reasons, but mainly due to suspicion of terrorism-related activities.
But then, what serious government keeps quiet when its prime population is decimated silently by law-enforcers? A study conducted recently showed that 122 young people were shot by police in the first eight months of this year alone. Most of these shootings were done outside the law. Young men of the Muslim faith in particular, feel most threatened.
Today, the flimsiest reason can lead a young person to jail or even cause death by officers who have no regard for the very law they are supposed to protect. Last month, police in Mombasa shot and killed three young women who had allegedly gone to the police station to seek the services of the law enforcers.
Unverifiable video doing rounds on social media shows one of the girls was not only shot but her body was doused with kerosene and burnt. That was beastly, to say the least.
In 2017, Kenyans will go to the polls to elect a new government. Human rights groups ought to bring up extra-judicial killings as a political agenda. Kenyans should elect a government that clearly shows it is concerned about the lives of its people.
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On this, the Jubilee-led government has shown least concern prompting the question; do the police have the blessings of the highest authority in the land? Surprisingly, foreign leaders including US President Barack Obama are the ones showing concern about this form of executing justice. Our leadership generally remains mum.
Do they not hear nor see any evil? Yet extra-judicial killings could as well be one of the defining themes of next year’s elections especially considering the sense of grieve among Muslim communities. If the Government does not address this issue way in advance, lip service response a few months to the election won’t assuage the suspicion nor cure the fear.
The death of any Kenyan in the hands of those who should protect them is regrettable. It erodes the confidence people have in the institutions of Government. But that goes beyond the real problem facing the police force.
For so long, the focus had been on the hardware stuff; houses, motor vehicles, guns and ammunition. But the training of the police to respect the universal rights of the people and the law is equally very important.
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