Needed: Inquiry into police violence in Luo Nyanza

A man who was shot during protests in Kisumu being attended to by Kenya Red Cross staff at Jaramogi Oginga Odinga Teaching and Referral Hospital in Kisumu on October 26, 2017. PHOTO | ONDARI OGEGA | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • Although lower in scale than what happened in 2007, the post-election violence of 2017 has been severe.
  • The interest in this connection has given rise to the “Luo Lives Matter” campaign.

Two dominant narratives emerged in the context of the disputed results of the 2007 presidential elections.

The first was that President Mwai Kibaki’s Party of National Unity had stolen the election, which Raila Odinga, the Orange Democratic Movement candidate, had won.

This narrative was responsible for the strong push for “justice”, meaning electoral justice, which came to be associated with ODM followers.

The second narrative was that ODM supporters were responsible for the violence that occurred in 2007 and that PNU supporters were only innocent victims, who played no part in the violence.

KILLINGS

The view that only ODM supporters perpetrated violence was behind a call for “peace”, which came to be identified with PNU supporters. It was a call to end the killings.

Thanks to subsequent investigations, initially by civil society organisations and later by official commissions of inquiry, the country came to know a little more than what these two narratives represented.

While the Kriegler Commission failed to make a finding on the claim that Odinga had won the 2007 election, the Waki Commission demonstrated the typologies of violence committed over the two months, which was only halted by the signing of the National Accord.

The commission showed that while ODM followers were responsible for the initial violence, the PNU side later organised and carried out retaliatory attacks which were of equal severity.

The commission also found that, acting as a private militia at the behest of the PNU side, the police became participants in the violence. Thus, this characterisation of the violence transcended the simple narrative that PNU was all peaceful while ODM was all violent.

The 2017 presidential election shares similarities with the election in 2007 in that, first, the results in both elections were disputed and, secondly, both elections were followed by violence.

CRACKDOWN

Although lower in scale than what happened in 2007, the post-election violence of 2017 has been severe, exacerbated by the brutal crackdown on opposition protesters demanding reforms at the IEBC, ahead of the fresh presidential election that the Supreme Court eventually ordered.

There are also differences between 2007 and 2017. While inter-communal violence was prominent in 2007, this has thankfully been minimal in 2017. Secondly, while State actors organised militias to perpetrate violence in 2007, the militias maintained a distance from the State.

By contrast, alleged militias have operated side-by-side with the police, mounting organised resistance to opposition protesters, leaving unresolved claims that these are members of Mungiki.

A number of factors explain the lower levels of inter-communal violence in 2017. First, the basis of the Jubilee Party, positioned as a pact to address Kikuyu/Kalenjin violence which has traditionally been a significant part of the country’s electoral violence, is holding, and has prevented the antagonism that characterised the election-time animosity between the two communities.

Second, although heavily brutalised by police and unforgivingly mischaracterised by the political establishment, opposition supporters seem to have heeded pleas by their leadership not to attack supporters of the Jubilee side, thus preventing retaliatory violence.

SURPRISE

Third, the element of surprise, which greatly worsened the 2007 violence, is no longer in play. The 2007 violence left enduring fear among citizens, forcing them to fashion their own defence arrangements against inter-communal violence.

These arrangements range from organised local vigilante groups, to temporary or permanent migration from places where people feel vulnerable to violence.

The effect of this migration is that poorer urban neighbourhoods are often divided into mutually hostile enclaves where people feel safe enough to live.

The one thing that remains constant between 2007 and 2017 is the police violence on citizens. Police killed people in 2007 and are doing so again in 2017. Official reaction to police violence also remains predictable.

When he appeared before the Waki Commission, the then Commissioner of Police, Hussein Ali, denied that police had used excessive force on demonstrators, asserting that rather than being viewed as villains, police had saved the country. He claimed that only 600 people had been killed during the violence.

GUNSHOT WOUNDS

However, the commission would go on to establish that 1,133 people had been killed, almost twice the number police were prepared to admit. Of these, 405 died of gunshot wounds. A further 557 suffered gunshot wounds which they survived. In Kisumu, the epicentre of police killings, 30 of the 50 people killed had been shot from behind.

In the wake of the police violence after the 2017 elections, police have denied the killings, terming Amnesty International’s claims that at least 33 people were killed in Kisumu as “totally misleading and based on falsehoods.”

In 2007, a full picture of police killings only emerged because an official inquiry was held. It is not unlikely that far more than 33 people have been killed in 2017.

The Waki commission’s analyses on PEV killings included categorisation by ethnicity. According to the commission, of the 1,133 people killed, 278 were from the Luo community, and were the largest ethnic group killed in the violence.

There has been recent interest in the connection between ethnicity and police violence, amid claims that the government has deployed a programme of ethnic cleansing in Luo Nyanza.

INVESTIGATION

The interest in this connection has given rise to the “Luo Lives Matter” campaign.

Whether or not the 2007 killings support the emerging claims that police are targeting the Luo community is something that needs investigation.

Another issue of interest is the public attitude towards police violence. The 2007 violence produced substantial public outrage, helping to drive the decision to institute an official inquiry.

There has been no comparable outrage this time round, and the “Luo Lives Matter” campaign is a reaction to this fact. Could it be that police violence is objectionable only if it is against some ethnic communities and not others?

At the heart of the ongoing political crisis is a sense of exclusion, in part driven by perceptions that law enforcement in public order situations is subject to discriminatory approaches.

As part of the approaches to addressing the crisis, it is necessary to think of an official inquiry into the police violence in Luo Nyanza, similar to the response to the PEV.