Police brutality on children is in tune with ongoing State excesses

19 January 2015 will forever be etched in the minds of Kenyans as the day the State attacked children at a playground. 

Images of screaming children running from billowing teargas and officers in full riot gear complete with accompanying dogs filled the Internet, exposing to the world the sort of violence meted out by the State on demonstrators, even when those demonstrators are children.

It’s not the first time that unarmed, peaceful demonstrators in Kenya have been met with brutal force, but it certainly is the first time that police were responding in such a violent manner to children demonstrating.

For those who choose not to remember, Kenya has a rich history of children exercising their democratic rights as stipulated in article 37 (See examples here and here).

Whether children should demonstrate or not is certainly not a legal question but rather a moral one. In the past children have demonstrated for a variety of reasons, demanding adequate educational resources or the transfer of a teacher or even just over the sort of food served in dining halls. Most of these demonstrations were peaceful, with no injuries or destruction to property.

That police were deployed to a children’s playground on the day that these same children were demonstrating against the illegal fencing-off of their playground is symptomatic of the heavy-handed approach to democratic rights that this regime has been employing.

FATE OF ACTIVISTS

It’s no secret that police in Kenya have been increasingly brutal towards demonstrators. The Occupy Parliament protest was met with brute force, tear gas, dogs and batons, yet the protestors were seated at the time.

It seems that this is now the standard response of the police to any form of public dissidence – to brutally bring the demonstration to an end by all means necessary, regardless of who is protesting.

One has to question why this is so, why we as a society accept that it was certainly the fate of activists to be brutalised. Was it the narrative that these human rights defenders were “being paid by foreigners” that made it so acceptable to be beaten and injured?

The idea that a person can be paid to demonstrate for human rights is a tragic fallacy of logic, an irrationality that has been swallowed wholly by a complacent, lethargic and morally bereft citizenry.

 It is this lack of a moral compass that directs the same brutal regime to attack even children for exercising fundamental democratic rights, an indicator that the Jubilee government apparatus is afraid of its populace and lacks legitimacy.

LUDICROUS CLAIM

The events on Monday cannot be brushed off so lightly – there is video footage of a police officer threatening to shoot at the gathered children. The police at the school compound were already an unnecessary, intimidating presence, but to go further and threaten to shoot at children and then fire teargas at them is indicative of how debased their actions and intentions were.

It’s fortunate that these children were not critically injured, and that the few who were hurt have since been discharged from hospital.

Tear-gassing children is an abuse of human rights, and for that there can be no acceptable defence or excuse. To claim that children shouldn’t have been located within school a compound during school hours is ludicrous. The real question here is not why the children were at the playground, but why riot police armed with weapons were deployed to a school.

The land in dispute has since been confirmed to belong to the school, and the Cabinet Secretary for Lands, Charity Ngilu, has since accepted that the matter could have been better handled, after a rather scathing, public berating by the President.

STILL UNRESOLVED

Cabinet Secretary for Internal Security Joseph Nkaiserry has also issued an apology, after at least one police officer who was in charge at that fateful event was suspended. In all this, the fact that actions of the police broke the law and the identity of the person who grabbed the school land are still unresolved questions.

Even if the children eventually recover from their ordeal and the school’s rightful ownership over the land is restored with a new title, pertinent questions remain. Who grabbed the land in the first place, and who deployed the police officers to protect that property?

Most importantly, it’s time the nation asked its leaders why they seemingly protect land grabbers with riot police and will even take the blame for their activities.

Certainly we must ask why this regime is keen to use brutal means to quell voices that demand citizens’ rights, even when those voices are children’s voices.

Twitter: @bettywaitherero