When blood colours the waters of the mighty Tana

A severed little finger of a child at the entrance of Masjid Malik invites you to sample the horror of the latest massacre at Kilelengwani Village, Tana River.

Thirty eight people died here last week when a band of marauding militia attacked the sleepy village in the wee hours of the morning. The finger at the entrance of the mosque, the only structure left standing in the village today, must have belonged to one of the two children who were hacked to death as they sought refuge in their place of worship.

That gory scene is repeated in several other burnt houses and footpaths that dot this desolate hamlet, the location of the latest spate of ethnic violence in Kenya. The gravity of the matter is registered on the faces of every man and woman you meet here, most of whom say it will take them some time to go back to their homes, despite a heavy but belated security presence.

The country, and particularly the fertile Tana Delta, is yet to come to terms with this latest episode of madness, but for the locals, what remains most shocking is the sheer brute force with which the over 200 attackers raided their village last Monday.

“They came from three directions,” Omar Shoba, a villager, says. “One group went for the police camp as the other started torching houses and killing everyone in sight.” Women and children began running towards the mosque, which is right at the centre of Kilelengwani. The raiders followed them there.

“They broke the door to the mosque and found six women and two children cowering inside,” Shoba explains, then, with his voice failing, sends the chilling message home as he points to a number of badly mutilated bodies still lying inside the mosque: “Then they butchered them.”

Caleb Kinale, a Kenya Red Cross official based in Garsen, says his team of has been camping in the Tana Delta for over a month, trying to diffuse the simmering tension between the Orma and the Pokomo.

On the night of the attack, they were headed towards the Dide Waride area when, just four kilometres from Kipini, they came across armed policemen fleeing in the opposite direction.

“When we asked them what was happening, they told us that Kilelengwani was under attack,” says Kinale, his recollection of events, though unverified, serving to explain how the raiders managed to go on a killing and destruction spree unchallenged by security forces.

What happened later that night seemed to poke fingers in the eyes of the police. As the country’s security chiefs toured the area from the comfort of helicopters, down below, the Ormas were busy planning a revenge attack against the Pokomos.

By sunrise, they had killed four people and burnt down over 100 houses in Anasa, Mbelezoni, Shirikisho, Nduru and Semikaro. Like in Kilelengwani the night before, security officers had camped at the Semikaro Dispensary when the Orma struck, and seemed overwhelmed by the sheer bestiality of their force.

A week earlier, suspected Orma raiders had attacked Chamwanamuma village, killed 11 people and seriously injured tens of others. But the largest loss of life occurred at Riketa, were 52 people were killed and 10 seriously injured. Godana Bodole, 58, lost his wife and 11 children in the massacre.

“The raiders struck at around 5am and began torching houses as they hacked or shot with arrows anyone who tried to escape from the burning houses,” he says. Among the dead was an elderly woman who, according to witnesses, was unable to escape from her burning house as the arsonists had blocked its door.

The reason for the attack, it was alleged, was that the attackers were looking for their missing flock, which they believed had passed through Kau and crossed River Tana to Ozi.

Over 100 houses were burnt down and the mosque and a nearby health centre vandalised. Several people who sustained bullet wounds were admitted in various hospitals in Kipini, Witu and Malindi.

In the past, there have been intermittent skirmishes in the Tana Delta, but the magnitude of the current ones, which by last Friday had left 108 people dead, has never been witnessed in the area since the pastoralist Orma and farming Pokomo communities first went for each other’s jugular back in the ’70s.

The villages that bore the brunt of the violence this time round are Riketa (52 killed), Kilelengwani (38 killed), Kau, Kikomo and Semikaro. Most, if not all, of these villages are far-flung.

They are hard to access, courtesy of the rough terrain, and the main urban centres of this unwilling war zone are Tarasaa and Garsen.

Tarasaa sits at the junction of Ngao and Golbanti/Oda villages, 12 kilometres from the main Malindi-Lamu-Hola Highway and more than 30 kilometres from Garsen further north.

When it rains, most parts of this region are rendered inaccessible because the roads become impassable. The remoteness and inaccessibility is compounded further by the isolation in which each village stands.

Many of the manyattas here are clusters of traditional houses patched here and there. The Pokomo live along the River Tana while the Orma prefer the higher grasslands, even though there is a slight current push to settle along the river and do some farming.

It is only at the biggest Orma village of Oda that the two communities live side by side, separated by a single dirt road leading to the remote hamlet of Ozi. And Oda has produced some of the most prominent sons of Tana River, including the late Permanent Secretary Fares Kuindwa, former DC and Ambassador Hussein Dado and former Garsen MP Molu Shambaro.

The current Garsen MP Danson Mungatana comes from the most populous Pokomo village of Ngao, also the most developed. The former Assistant Minister for Livestock Development and Galole MP Dhadho Gadhae Godhana comes from Hola, further north.

Because of the scattered nature of these villages, it has been difficult for the government to provide adequate security for their residents, leaving them quite vulnerable.

As a security measure, perhaps, the government introduced the Kenya Police Reserve (KPR) system, where virtually every village is guarded by youthful men inadequately trained for the job. The KPR is provided with the ancient Mark 4 rifles, or a G3 rifle here and there, and supplied with a limited number of bullets that usually run out for months on end.

Administration Police posts are found at Tarasaa, Garsen, Witu and smaller ones at the convenience of the Provincial Administration. The biggest regular police station is at Gamba, along the Minjila-Lamu Road.

This station is believed to have been set up in the 1980s to counter the shifta menace that was rampant then and to check vehicles plying that route. Hardly has it served the purpose of providing security to the villages in the area.

Police road blocks are to be found at Kanagoni (on the border between Kilifi and Tana River counties) on the Malindi-Lamu Road, Minjila and Witu (at the border between Tana River and Lamu counties). Like their Gamba counterparts, the officers on these road blocks deal more with vehicular traffic than general insecurity in the area.

The establishment of Garsen District and the posting of administrators there has, however, seen the deployment of larger numbers of security personnel. Hola Town, which is the headquarters of the county and centre of power, is better equipped, security wise.

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Clashes bring out neglect in public hospitals

While children and women were the main victims of the ongoing ethnic clashes between the Orma and Pokomo communities in Tana River County, their plight was worsened by the lack of adequate medical care in the region.

When Kau village was attacked, the only dispensary serving many other villages along the River Tana was vandalised and health workers forced to flee the area.

Most of the injured had to be taken to Kipini Dispensary, a two-hour journey by speed boat. And when raiders attacked Chamwanamuma, all the victims were taken to the Malindi District Hospital.

The main referral hospital for Tana River County, Hola District Hospital, remains inaccessible due to the clashes. The hospital currently has two medical doctors and an equal number of clinical officers.

Its location — 93 kilometres from Garsen town — is only made worse by the poor state of the roads.

Despite the fact that the hospital has a working X-ray machine, there are no specialists to operate it and patients have to travel all the way to Garissa or to the Malindi District Hospital, which is now the zonal referral hospital for Tana River, Lamu and Kilifi counties.

In an interview with DN2, the Coast Provincial Director of Medical Services, Dr Maurice Siminyu, said because of the attacks, Ngao and Malindi hospitals were running short of non-pharmaceutical supplies and had to rely on partners like the Red Cross Society.

The Malindi District Hospital has been the beneficiary of recent infrastructural improvement, including the establishment of a high dependency unit and the upgrading of the main operating theatre, through the support of Italian donors.

But the hospital has a bed capacity of only 200, and this has been strained by the casualties from Tana River. Still, doctors at the hospital managed to conduct surgeries for all victims of clashes with gunshot wounds except for two whose bullets were lodged in the chest and were transferred to Coast General Hospital.