Mr Gerry Simpson, senior refugee researcher and advocate for Human Rights Watch during the launch of a report on the plight of refugees in Nairobi’s Eastleigh area. The study accuses Kenyan police of torturing refugees and asylum seekers of Somali origin. [PHOTO: MBUGUA KIBERA/STANDARD]

 

By M M MUHUMED

Nairobi, Kenya: Kenyan security forces have for several months committed abuses including rape, beatings and arbitrary detention against about 1,000 refugees and asylum seekers in Eastleigh.

The claims were made in a scathing report by an international rights group released on Wednesday.

Titled, You Are All Terrorists — Kenyan Police Abuse of Refugees in Nairobi, the report said the security agents also targeted the Somali Kenyans, a pattern of discrimination and mistreatment the group says it had reported on years earlier.

The motivation for the abuses appeared to have little connection with the country’s national security concerns as security forces extorted victims and stole money, cell phones, jewelry and even a music system, said the New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW).

The report recounts horrifying tales of women describing rapes —including two cases of gang rape — in homes, side streets, on wastelands, and in some cases with children close by. According to the report, victims also described how police beat, kicked and punched them — including women and children — in their homes, in the street and in police vehicles, causing serious injury and long-term pain.

“Almost every refugee and asylum seeker Human Rights Watch interviewed about police abuses they faced in Eastleigh between November 19 and late January 2013 said the police repeatedly accused them of being ‘terrorists,’” the report said. Although authorities said they would investigate such abuses and publish their findings, the report said no findings have been published until now and no one was prosecuted, “fueling the well-documented culture of impunity in Kenya’s law enforcement agencies that appears to have encouraged the latest wave of police abuses in Nairobi.”

The group also said the motive of the ‘wave of abuses’, which lasted for nearly three months, may had been to retaliate for some 30 attacks on law enforcement officials and civilians that rocked the country since October 2011, when Kenya sent its troops to Somalia.

“Almost every one of the 101 people interviewed for this report said police demanded victims pay them large sums of money and then let them go,” said the report, recounting the tale of a Somali woman who said a man and his wife offered Sh15,000 (US$181) to the police so as to win their release as well as her daughter and herself.

“The police agreed but said, ‘If we release you now, other police will arrest you again,’ so they kept us in the truck for six hours, until midnight. Then they just let us go,” the woman told the researchers on February 4.

A mother of four described how officers gang-raped her on February 4 after she was arrested by two policemen and a woman.

HRW said: “In fifty cases involving rape and serious violence in which officers accused their victims of being terrorists or coerced them into paying money, Human Rights Watch concluded the abuses amounted to torture under the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (Convention against Torture).”