Spate of disappearances, use of excessive force worry rights lobbies

Last year, rights lobby Amnesty International released a report that put the police in a spot over excessive use of force in the run-up to the August 8 General Election that resulted in untold death and suffering in parts of the country.

It was not an isolated case. In 2016, Kenya’s war on terror was put under the spotlight over a series of enforced disappearances throughout the country.

Many of these disappearances have become cold cases filed away in police stations with little attention.

The fate of the names and pictures of those contained in the yellowing and dusty files in unmanned mostly unlocked cupboards in police stations, becoming mere statistics of a police force operating under its own rules.

The International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, which Kenya has not signed, defines an enforced disappearance as “the arrest, detention, abduction or any other form of deprivation of liberty by agents of the state or by persons or groups of persons acting with the authorisation, support or acquiescence of the state, followed by a refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of the liberty or by concealment of the fate or whereabouts of the disappeared person, which place such a person outside the protection of the law.”

In Mombasa, a raid by police on Masjid Musa in the city’s Majengo area was the last time Hemed Salim was seen. He was arrested by police. His lawyer, at the time of arrest, said the police alleged that Hemed was in possession of a firearm inside the mosque.

Bundled them into a vehicle

The police later claimed Hemed and others escaped from a police vehicle while being transported to the station. He has not been seen since. He is now designated “a missing person presumed dead.” Jeremiah Onyango Okumu and Stephen Mwanzia Osaka both in their mid-20s, were among six men facing terrorism-related charges for the March 2012 Machakos bus station bombing. On the evening of June 26th 2012, the two along with two other young men, Salim Abubakar and Omar Shwaib were approached by several heavily armed men in civilian clothing and bundled into a waiting unmarked vehicle near the Likoni ferry.

Witnesses told various rights groups that they recognised the armed men as Anti- Terror Police Unit officers. The Likoni Ferry Police Post officers did not respond, even though the men were abducted nearby. The families of the four men never found their bodies.

While victims of these killings and disappearances are almost exclusively men, their wives and mothers are traumatised and in many cases never recover from the experiences they go through.

The men are bread-winners, and their unexpected disappearance or death has obvious ramifications on the welfare of the families they leave behind. The heartache is almost always, particularly in cases of mistaken identity, absolute and impossible to heal from.