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Victims of Kenyan Police Violence Seek Justice

by Rael Ombuor

   NAIROBI --

   In Kenya, the death toll from election-related violence last year
   topped 100, according to findings released by Human Rights Watch. HRW
   and other rights groups say most of the victims were killed by police.
   The families of those killed are demanding justice but say they don't
   know if their calls are being heard.

   Brothers Victor and Benard Okoth were in their early twenties when they
   were killed on August 9, during unrest sparked by results of the
   presidential run-off.

   Their mother Benna Buluma remembers the day.

   She says because of the tensions, people were stockpiling food so I
   woke up early to get some vegetables. Victor walked in and left his
   baby with her. Benard was just from his house. Then she says I heard
   them saying they were going to the main road. Police were already
   throwing tear gas.

   The family lives in Mathare, one of the informal settlements outside
   Nairobi, where most people support the opposition.

   Benna says there were gun shots. I never thought it would ever be my
   children. It was Benard that I saw first.

   She says she lay on his body until it was taken away by the police. She
   later found Victor at the morgue. She said she saw bullet holes in both
   her sons.

   VOA met Benna on the steps of the Mathare Social Justice Center, where
   she had come to check on her sons' case.

   Activist Kennedy Chindi works at the center, documenting and reporting
   police abuses.

   "During the elections, we documented 19 deaths in Mathare, as big as it
   is because it is Mathare and Babadogo. The extrajudicial executions,
   they become more rampant during elections because the police take
   advantage," Chindi said.

   The center says police gunned down 805 youth in Mathare and surrounding
   areas between 2013 and 2015. Most of the victims were young men aged 13
   to 20.

   Mathare resident Sarah Wangari says police gunned down her son as he
   walked home with four friends on November 18 of last year.

   She says it pains me because this was a 19-year-old, and these were six
   police officers. Was it so hard to take him to a police station if he
   had done something wrong?

   She says his body was riddled with 10 bullet holes. With Chindi's help,
   she is disputing the official police report that said the young men
   were thieves and that her son had a gun.

   Benna recently provided testimony about the killing of her two sons to
   the Independent Police Oversight Authority, or IPOA, the government
   body tasked with investigating police abuses. She wants whoever shot
   her sons to answer for murder.

   "IPOA got 63 cases between August and October election period, and we
   are at various stages of looking into those cases, investigating those
   cases," said Dennis Oketch, the head of communications at IPOA. "So
   far, we have terminated or closed at least two of those cases which we
   recommended to the director of public prosecutions."

   In those two cases, IPOA established that police clobbered to death a
   six-month-old baby in her parents' house in Kisumu, and that a
   9-year-old shot was shot by police while on a balcony of her family's
   house in Mathare. But IPOA said it could not determine the specific
   officers involved.

   Oketch said investigations into other killings during the electoral
   period are at the advanced stages.

   "A good number of the around 20 are undergoing internal legal review,
   and after legal review we will be advancing them to the attention of
   the Director of Public Prosecution," Oketch said.

   But the families of the victims have their doubts.

   Oketch told VOA that since IPOA was created in 2013, it has
   successfully completed 640 investigations. However, critics say IPOA's
   recommendations rarely lead to consequences for the police accused of
   abuses.

   On March 9, President Uhuru Kenyatta and opposition leader Raila Odinga
   grasped hands and said they would work out their differences in the
   interest of the country. It was unexpected after the long and bitterly
   contentious election period.
   Benna worries her sons will be forgotten.

   "What kind of friendship is that? The first thing they would have said
   is that they want to talk about the loss of lives during the election
   period because people were killed and they know that many people were
   killed in different areas," she noted.

   Chidi, the activist in Mathare, says political reconciliation is
   impossible without justice.

   "There is so much worry among the victims and survivors, mostly of
   police extrajudicial executions, because most of them right now fail to
   understand how their fate will be, " Chidi said, "because the two
   principals have come together and they are now forming some committees
   without putting in the interest of the victims and survivors'ŚNow they
   are negotiating, the two of them, without the interest of those who
   died for their cause."

   He says the center will continue its work in Mathare, seeking justice
   for victims and their families.