Kenya | ukwatch.net

Trained in Terror

Ellie Keen — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Phyllis Kipteo still does not know why Kenyan paratroopers dragged her husband from their home in the middle of the night four months ago. The following morning she went to the military camp at Chepkube in Kenya’s Mount Elgon district close to the border with Uganda, but the soldiers there could tell her nothing. She last saw him through the barbed wire fence of the camp; he was naked, bruised and couldn’t walk.

Her story might sound an ordinary tale of military brutality except that the soldiers who tortured her husband and may have killed him are the first graduates of a new British counter-terrorism training programme for foreign forces.

“Operation Monogram” provides counter-terrorism training and equipment to foreign security forces in parts of the world the British government believes are hotbeds of violent extremism that could threaten the UK. Kenya is one of the first beneficiaries of the programme because it shares a border with war-torn Somalia and because of its own experience of terrorist attacks, in particular the US embassy bombing in 1998.

Among its graduates are 20 Para, a parachute regiment in the Kenyan army. But rather than being deployed along the Somali border, units from 20 Para were sent into the district of Mount Elgon, Kenya’s second highest peak on the border with Uganda. Mount Elgon is a national park and protected forest where a little-known insurgent group, the Sabaot land defence force (SLDF), has terrorised the population and claimed the lives of at least 600 people since 2006.

The Kenyan approach to counter-insurgency in Mount Elgon district was strikingly reminiscent of the British in their brutal suppression of the Mau Mau rebellion in the 1950s. Soldiers went from village to village rounding up nearly all of the male population of the district and taking them to military camps for “screening”. On the way and upon arrival in the camps the men were beaten severely; some died. Then the survivors were forced to line up and bite the back of the man in front of them. Informers in a Land Rover with blacked-out windows decided who was a member of the militia and those deemed innocent were then set free.

Human Rights Watch interviewed dozens of victims of the military screening who complained of problems breathing, urinating, walking, and sleeping after severe beatings. Prison officials say they treated dozens for severe injuries who were delivered to the jail after being detained in the military camp. Some 800 suspects were remanded in jail and between March and May 4,000 were screened in total.

After an outcry, mass detentions are no longer the strategy of the Kenyan military and the authorities say an internal investigation is under way into the allegations of abuse. However, spokesmen simultaneously deny that their forces are capable of torture.

Initially the British military appeared to accept the assurances from the Kenyans. Britain has important strategic interests in Kenya. Besides being an important ally in counter-terrorism Kenya is the hub for a UK programme to train African forces for peacekeeping operations. Furthermore, the UK uses Kenyan territory for training British infantry in jungle and desert warfare.

This week, however, Human Rights Watch provided hard evidence suggesting that the Kenyan assurances given to the British are worthless. An off-duty prison guard who was on leave in Mount Elgon said he was arrested by a group from 20 Para and beaten to within an inch of his life, apparently because it suspected his brother of involvement with the SLDF. He identified the unit and the officers who beat him. They later apologised.

Presented with the facts, prominently reported on Channel 4 News on Monday, the UK government has now threatened to suspended military training of Kenyan forces and has encouraged the Kenyan authorities get to the bottom of the abuses in Mount Elgon.

This is the right thing to do. But rather than waiting for human rights organisations like Human Rights Watch to point out the shortcomings of its counter-terrorism collaboration with African and Middle Eastern security forces, the British government should be working proactively to ensure that these security forces act according to the law. The US, which is involved in the same places for the same reasons, should follow suit.

Another recipient of UK and US assistance and diplomatic support is Ethiopia, whose security forces have committed war crimes and serious human rights abuses in the course of their counter-insurgency operations in Somalia and in the Ogaden in eastern Ethiopia. Both London and Washington have failed to speak out against those abuses let alone reviewed their assistance to Addis Ababa.

Back in Mount Elgon district, Phyllis has filed a habeas corpus case against the Kenyan government. She wants to know what happened to her husband – and so do the families of other “disappeared” – but many cannot afford lawyers. More than 40 people are still missing, last seen by their relatives being bundled into military trucks in the early hours. “This is how counter-insurgency is done,” senior police and military officials told me. If this is how it is done in Kenya, or any other front in the fight against terrorism, then Britain should have no part in it.

Ben Rawlence is Kenya researcher for Human Rights Watch

ISSE addresses students during week of debates at the University of Sussex

tim — Tue, 20 May 2008 12:18:38 +0000

The International Students for Social Equality recently took part in a “One World Week” of debates on international topics, organised by students at the University of Sussex. The ISSE has been campaigning to set up a student society on the campus and has held three meetings this year—on the Russian Revolution, the Iraq War and the May-June 1968 uprising in France.

After receiving an invitation from event organiser Oniicosi Luqman, the ISSE provided speakers for a number of sessions that were attended by up to 20 students.

Several students signed up to the ISSE. Student union communications officer Koos Couvée said that “it was great you guys talked about things from a broader, international viewpoint. We have never heard such ideas before here and they really had an impact.”

The first session of “One World Week” posed the question “Kenya: Can the new government guarantee fair elections, stop tribal tensions and end corruption?”

World Socialist Web Site correspondent Ann Talbot explained that the crisis that afflicted Kenya after the elections earlier this year “was not a conjunctural episode that can be addressed by reform of the constitution, by better oversight of public institutions, or by widening the political elite to include previously excluded groups.” Kenya was undergoing a systemic breakdown of its political system, which was one expression of a far more generalised crisis in Africa, she said.

Talbot agreed with first speaker, Kenyan freelance journalist Julius MbaLuto, that “the outbreak of what has been described as inter-tribal violence in Kenya has nothing to do with any peculiar propensity of African people for such conflict.” At independence in 1963, the British handed power over to the Kikuyu elite, which then enriched itself at the expense of the majority of the population, including the Kikuyu poor.

For almost half a century, this elite has failed to carry out an effective programme of land reform, one of the most basic elements in the programme of bourgeois democracy, or bring about economic improvement for the vast majority of poor. Although Kenya was held up as an African “success story,” its high economic growth has not benefited the majority of the population, more than half of whom live on an income of less than US$2 a day and at least half on less than US$1 a day.

This situation resulted from the subordination of the ruling elite—of whichever faction—to the interests of the major capitalist powers, the international financial institutions and the giant corporations that dominate the world economy. For a short time after independence, as long as the Cold War lasted, Kenya’s new rulers had a certain room for manoeuvre. But no more, Talbot explained. Subjected to IMF Structural Adjustment Programmes that demanded previously protected markets be opened up to global finance capital, the result has been rapid deregulation, privatisations and public spending cuts accompanied by increased looting of the economy.

Talbot explained how Mwai Kibaki and his Rainbow Coalition had won victory in 2002 by promising reforms and an end to the corruption associated with the previous Moi regime. The Orange Democratic Movement of Raila Odinga, a former member of Kibaki’s government, became the focus of those who were excluded from this “feeding frenzy,” she said. Their inclusion in the new power-sharing government is part of a vast wealth grab. Almost half of MPs have become cabinet ministers or assistant ministers and are entitled to huge salaries and other benefits. Odinga, who is now prime minister, has a fleet of cars and a 45-strong personal bodyguard.

Talbot said that the post-election violence was prepared in advance. It was state repression aimed at the poorest strata of the population, which had a class, rather than tribal character. Politicians on both sides were prepared to sacrifice the lives of almost 2,000 of their fellow countrymen in pursuit of wealth and power. These politicians now sit in the same cabinet and talk about returning the displaced people to their farms and homes. “A cabinet composed of people of this stamp are not about to resolve any of the political and economic problems that confront Kenya. They are part of the problem,” she added.

She concluded by calling for a new political perspective to address the problems that confront the mass of the Kenyan population. Genuine economic development can only take place in Kenya on the basis of the socialist reorganisation of the world economy to meet the needs of the majority of its people.

The Obama campaign

ISSE organiser Marcus Morgan spoke at the session, “The US people want change. Can Obama bring it?”

Morgan explained how the growing economic crisis and resulting social tensions have thrown the Democratic Party into crisis and seen it fracturing along racial, ethnic, gender and other demographic lines.

The bitter conflict between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, despite there being no public expression of major policy differences between them, signifies a deep divide in the US ruling elite. Although Obama had tapped into broad and deep discontent, particularly among young people, over the war, economic insecurity, and the corruption and criminality of the Bush years, he has been carefully groomed as the candidate of “change” by a faction of the Democratic Party that sees a shift in foreign policy as the only way to defend US interests around the world.

Morgan reviewed the historical evolution of the Democratic Party and the collapse of American liberalism. The “New Deal” reforms advocated by the Democratic Party under Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the Great Depression had proved to be the high point of US liberal reforms, he said.

Following World War II, however, the Democratic Party no longer presented itself as the party of the “working man,” but as the defender of the “middle class.” Workers, it was said, would improve their lot by benefiting as consumers from the economic growth and general prosperity of the country.

The late 1960s and early 1970s saw the post-war boom beginning to unravel against the background of civil rights struggles, the Vietnam War, urban riots and a wave of strikes. “As the promise of rising living standards through the expansion of the consumer society faltered, the Democratic Party sought to refashion itself under the banner of identity politics,” he explained, becoming an unstable alliance of competing interest groups, which included the civil rights establishment and more privileged layers of blacks and other minorities, feminist organisations, gay rights groups, trade unions and environmentalists.

Working class support for the Democrats was further eroded as the party supported demands for the restructuring of the US economy in the face of its global competition. It was Democratic President Jimmy Carter, Morgan recalled, who initiated the first major attack on the reforms of the New Deal and began an offensive against the wages and living standards of the working class.

If there was one telling indication of Obama’s real political agenda, Morgan added, it was when, in an unguarded moment, he spoke of the “bitterness” of working class voters in Pennsylvania over wage-cutting, layoffs and deepening economic insecurity, and the indifference of both Republican and Democratic administrations to their problems. Following a media campaign, Obama apologised for his “blunder” and remained on the defensive for the remainder of the Pennsylvania campaign. This episode demonstrates how completely American liberalism and the Democratic Party are dedicated to suppressing discussion on the fundamental class tensions and interests that dominate American society and opposing the development of an independent socialist perspective in the working class.

Morgan’s appraisal drew a sharp response from the Stop The War Coalition speaker on the platform who was opposed to a socialist critique of Obama and the Democrats. She insisted that Obama was the best of a bad bunch, and that it was a question of uniting the discontent that will emerge, largely of a local and ethnic character, into a “national forum” pledged to “mass radical action.”

Israel and Palestine

Jean Shaoul, who writes on Israel and Palestine for the World Socialist Web Site, spoke at a session considering the questions, “Palestine—How can the Palestinians be liberated? What does the division between Hamas and Fatah mean? Can a majority of Israelis be won to supporting Palestinian rights? Who is precluding the two-state solution?”

Shaoul made it clear that it is only possible to understand the failure of the struggle to liberate Palestine from the standpoint of Leon Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution.

She explained how shortly after Israel defeated the Arab nations in the 1967 Six-Day War, Yasser Arafat and his Fatah faction came to dominate the Palestine Liberation Organisation. Although it was a popular and radical mass movement, its perspective was one of a democratic, secular, capitalist state where the Palestinian bourgeoisie would be free to exploit its own working class.

Arafat and the PLO sought to work through the various Arab regimes, which were entirely dependent on a world market dominated by the imperialist powers and who were ultimately fearful of the threat to their rule posed by the working class. As such, they had demonstrated their inability to either achieve genuine independence from imperialism or secure the democratic rights and social needs of the workers and peasant masses they exploited.

“One after another, all of these regimes betrayed the Palestinians with tragic consequences,” Shaoul added.

Along with oil revenues, backing from the Soviet Union had allowed the Arab regimes a certain room for manoeuvre in their dealings with the major powers. But the first Gulf War in 1991, which unfolded during the final days of the USSR and amidst the drive to restore capitalism, saw the majority of the Arab regimes line up unambiguously with Washington. This left Arafat completely isolated. In 1993, he was forced to sign the Oslo Agreement, officially renouncing his original perspective of freeing the whole of 1948 Palestine and accepting a two-state solution.

The Palestinian Authority set up under the Oslo agreement, Shaoul continued, was to be the vehicle for the Palestinian bourgeoisie to exploit the working class and become fabulously wealthy. Fatah became associated with corruption, waste and inefficiency that even Arafat’s prestige could not disguise. While Arafat himself ultimately baulked at Washington’s demands to accept Israel’s dictates, his successor, Mahmoud Abbas, pledged himself to peace on whatever terms Washington and Tel Aviv demanded.

Shaoul described how Hamas offered no alternative, but was a retrogressive development of the Palestinian national movement. Its explicit call for an Islamic state, she said, would involve the subjugation of non-Muslims and the mass expulsion of Israeli Jewry. In its ideology and methods, Hamas mirrors the Zionist extremists, who claim all of Palestine as a Jewish state with no room for other peoples.

Hamas, too, has all but accepted a two-state solution, Shaoul continued, making an offer recently to the Israeli government to accept a Palestinian state on the pre-1967 borders along with its promise of a ceasefire.

Such a state, even if realised, would be economically unviable other than as a heavily fortified investment platform for the transnational corporations from which to brutally exploit the working class and peasantry.

The liberation of Palestine is only possible as part of a perspective of ending the artificial patchwork of capitalist states in the Middle East and through the unity of Arab and Israeli workers, youth and intellectuals in a combined struggle to establish the United Socialist States of the Middle East.

Shaoul rejected the conception that the Israeli people are collectively responsible for the oppression of the Palestinians. Israel is beset by class and social conflicts and has a strong and militant working class that opposes its government’s social and economic policies.

The fate of the Middle East, Shaoul said, “will, in the final analysis, be decided in the US and Europe, either by the political representatives of big business implementing their plans for the region’s military and economic subjugation, or by the major battalions of the international working class doing what is politically necessary to prevent this.”

Share Land, Not Power

Ellie Keen — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 23:57:05 +0000

“Until the antelopes have their own historians,” counsels one sage, “History will always glorify hunting.” There is succinct truth in this expression as revealed in the reportage of the Kenyan crisis over the past month.

The local press saw the events within the jaundiced prism of “post-election violence”, parroting political reductionism that cushioned nefarious politicians from exposure, and punishment.

International journalists, with very few exceptions, fared a lot worse; to them this was a self-fulfilling prophecy, quoting Joseph Conrad’s 19th century haunting travelogue across Africa, Heart of Darkness, as evidence.

The two narratives have been simplistic and misleading, if not outright fraudulent. But both have succeeded in throwing us off the spoor.

But there is no doubt that Kenya is one of the most unequal societies in the world, a land of “ten millionaires and ten million beggars,” as populist politician Josiah Mwangi Kariuki put it, before he was brutally murdered in March 1975.

Several diagnoses have been suggested on what ails Kenya; namely, the failure of Westminster democracy and its “winner takes all” mould (hence Gordon Brown and others’ prescription of power sharing); colonialism and its superficial borders (as though there is a state in the world with “natural boundaries”); tribalism – whatever that means – and the domination of the national economy by one community.

These prognoses are persuasive but defective. While it is true the imposition of western models of government ignored any home-grown structures of governance, as Basil Davidson elaborates in The Black Man’s Burden, the actual birth pains for most of Africa, as manifest in the countless coups that destabilised the continent through the 1960s to the 1980s, were largely instigated by the west.

Tribalism and the domination of the economy are political expressions. Uganda’s Idi Amin dreamt about the latter and subsequently expelled 80,000 Asians from his country in 1972. Jomo Kenyatta did it piecemeal from 1968 through a raft of oppressive, discriminatory legal instruments. Now someone thinks the Gikuyu are the problem. Next it will be someone else.

The ongoing mediation team, as with other past initiatives, have managed to skirt around the core issue, albeit shyly scratching its surface: land.

Land is what Me Katilili wa Meza and the Giriama people at the Kenyan coast, Waiyaki wa Hinga and the Gikuyu people in central Kenya, and the Nandi’s Koitalel arap Samoei in Kenya’s Rift Valley invoked over 100 years ago in their resistance against the British. As the Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong’o observes in Writers in Politics, among others, land wasn’t just a means to a livelihood but the very basis of the people’s social existence.

At the height of the British rule in Kenya, less than 1,000 white farmers held more than eight million acres of the nation’s best land – virtually all the available arable land – acquired through brute force or shrewd conning.

The Maasai, for instance, who were the original inhabitants of the Rift Valley, lost their land through dubious “treaties” that allowed their forcible removal from their homelands to pave way for white settlers. The land in question covers the vast Laikipia plateau stretching across two million acres of mountain, savannah and forest, from Mount Kenya in the east to the Rift valley in the west.

The uprooting of the Kikuyu from their farmlands in Central Kenya triggered the Mau Mau armed insurgency that lasted one decade, one of the bloodiest periods in Kenya’s history.

Kenya’s founding president Jomo Kenyatta, mistakenly jailed as the leader of Mau Mau, emerged from incarceration preaching “suffering without bitterness,” specifically urging the white settlers to “stay on and farm the land”. And stay on and farm they did – but for the 780 white settlers who sold their land under the Settlement Transfer Fund Scheme.

Under this project, the British and West German governments and the World Bank contributed £20m towards land buy-out for redistribution. Only 1.2 million acres of the eight million acres held by settlers had been distributed by the end of 1971 when the scheme was wound up. To date, up to six million acres of land is estimated to be in settler hands, as happened 60 years ago.

Other lords of poverty include Kenya’s political elite. According to the Kenya Land Alliance, a consortium of local NGOs pushing for social and land reform, more than a half of the arable land in Kenya is in the hands of just 20% of the 33 million Kenyans. Sixty-seven per cent of the population are squashed in less than an acre per person. A whopping 13% of the population is landless.

To demonstrate the obscenity of Kenya’s political elite, two influential families hold between them land the size of one of Kenya’s eight provinces. A former legislator owned an entire constituency, so the people he represented in parliament were not his constituents but subjects.

There are historical parallels between what’s happening now and then. After the Mau Mau armed resistance, a political settlement was sought through the Lancaster House Conferences between 1960, 1962 and 1963 that among others, upheld the sanctity of the title deed, thereby legitimising the theft of the people’s land.

Today, Kenyans are facing a forced political settlement going by the pronouncements from the Big Brothers. The US Congressional Subcommittee on Africa and Global Health concluded last week that what’s happening in Kenya is a “political conflict with ethnic overtones”, while European Union Development Commissioner Louis Michel warned that “those who push Kofi Annan to fail will pay for the consequences”.

In the meantime, the settlers who took the people’s land before independence still hold it. They use the fertile red volcanic soils to grow tea, coffee and horticulture while the expansive savannahs have been converted into eco-tourism sites where they draw the rich tourists. In 2004, for instance, the combined earnings from tea, coffee, tourism and horticulture grossed about £1 billion, nearly half of Kenya’s annual national budget. Yet only 31% ended up in national coffers as tax and real earnings to Kenyans.

The rest went to largely British individuals and multinationals, validating Walter Rodney’s treatise in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa that political independence in Africa did not mean economic liberation for the people and that the blood-sucking vampire, I mean, Empire is still intact.

Douglas Alexander, the British International Development Secretary, made a pitch for Kenyan roses this Valentine, saying their purchase would help an economy under a huge strain. That’s very well, only that he didn’t say 83% of the sector’s total income goes to British firms like Homegrown and Sulmac.

If the British are not visible at the ongoing mediation, it does not mean they are not being heard. They learnt long ago, I suppose, one does not speak with his mouth full.

Kenya: The Colonial Legacy Behind the Crisis

Tim Holmes — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 21:15:41 +0000

As the once-peaceful African nation of Kenya has descended into an orgy of violence after its disputed election result, the reaction in the west has been one of outrage based largely on ignorance. Both politicians and the media have failed to fully understand the role of Kenya’s colonial past in the current crisis.

Late last month, the government of ruling President Mwai Kibati declared that he had won the country’s election. But all the indications are that the election was rigged in the closing stages, after his main challenger Raila Odinga had surged in the early exit polls.

With nearly half the vote counted Odinga had 57 percent of the vote compared with 39 percent for Kibaki. However, when the results were announced Kibaki had supposedly won by 46 per cent to 44 per cent.

Election observers were quick to point out that Kenya’s election commission ignored undeniable evidence of vote rigging. For example, in one district Kibaki’s total went from 50,145 votes after voting closed to 75,261 votes the next day. “The presidential elections were flawed,” said Alexander Graf Lambsdorff, the chief European observer.

Within fifteen minutes of the announcement, Kenya erupted into violence. The world has watched in horror as one of the most stable nations in Africa has plunged into anarchy and bloodletting.

Before the bloodshed started Kenya was in a position most African leaders would envy. Its stunning beaches, game parks and wildlife were the centre of a billion-dollar tourism industry. Its economy was growing at 7 percent. And compared to its warmongering neighbours – Somalia, Sudan and Congo – it was at peace.

Not any more. Up to a thousand people have been killed since the election, with hundreds of thousands made homeless. The reports coming from the country are horrifying – no more so than when up to fifty women and children were murdered in a church in western Kenya.

The people murdered in the church were Kikuyu, the biggest tribe in Kenya with about 22 percent of the population. The Kikuyu are also the tribe which historically has benefited the most since their country achieved Independence from Britain in 1963.

Kenya’s first president and elder statesman Jomo Kenyatta, was a Kikuyu as is the current President, Kibati. Both were seen as favouring their tribe over others, when it came to political appointments, money and access. In a country still rife with corruption and poverty, it helps to have a relative in a position of power.

Kibaki’s critics point to the fact that many of the top officials in his government — including the ministers of defense, justice, finance and internal security — are Kikuyus. Over the last five years, resentment has grown against him and the Kikuyu in general.

Both the BBC and leading liberal newspaper in Britain, the Observer, were quick to argue that the political tensions in the country were sown a decade ago when Kibati’s predecessor as President, Daniel Arap Moi – who had ruled practically as a dictator – was forced to introduce multi-party politics.

Moi was not a Kikuyu, he was from another tribe called the Kalenjin, which makes up about twelve per cent of the Kenyan population. The Kalenjin, who are the dominant population in the beautiful Rift Valley that carves through Western Kenya, felt threatened by the move to democracy. Moi allowed the Kalenjin to undertake a killing frenzy against the Kikuyu in the area.

Although disputes between the Kalenjin and Kikuyu, as well as wider tribal tensions are undoubtedly part of the current problem, there are other issues at play. “You have to understand that these issues are much deeper than ethnic,” argues Maina Kiai, chairman of the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights. “They are political,” he said, and “they go back to land.”

They also go back to the British. To understand the current crisis in Kenya you have to understand the devastating colonial legacy of the British and other colonial powers in Africa. Firstly, the country’s boundaries were drawn by the colonial powers with no regard for the ethnic breakdown on the ground.

As Richard Dowden, the director of the Royal African Society, has quite rightly pointed out: “Africans played no part in the creation of their nation states. Their boundaries were drawn on maps in Europe by Europeans who had never even been to Africa and with no regard for existing political systems and boundaries.”

So you could argue that the current outpouring of “tribalism” as it is being called in the Western media is the direct result of imposed colonial policies, stretching back decades. Although, as Dowden, points out, Kenyans now feel proud to be Kenyan, their tribal heritage is probably of more importance to them, than being Kenyan.

So in the Rift Valley, the anti-Kikuyu feeling does not just go back a decade to the times of Daniel Arap Moi, it goes back all the way to independence, when the British government bought out Britons who owned huge, picturesque farms that nestled in the valley on prime agricultural land.

Instead of redistributing that land to the people who had lived there for centuries, like the Kalenjin and semi-nomadic Masai, Jomo Kenyatta’s government gave much of the land to other Kikuyu’s. Even today many of the top farms in the Rift Valley are still owned by White settlers or their descendents.

Resentment over land has built up over the past four decades, as it has in other parts of Africa. The British could have prevented this by establishing a system of fair land redistribution when they left, but they did not.

For example, in 2004, the Kenyan government rejected demands by the Masai for the return of one million hectares of land leased to British settlers over 100 years before. Signed on Aug. 15, 1904, with the illiterate Masai using thumbprints, the document said the Masai leaders “of our own free will, decided that it is for our best interests to remove our people, flocks, and herds into definite reservations away from the railway line, and away from any land that may be thrown open to European settlement.”

Although the Masai had no idea what they were signing, they have failed in their attempt to get their land back. In 2004, the Masai tried to forcibly invade some of the farms, leading to over one hundred being arrested and at least one person shot dead by Kenyan police, who were protecting the farmers. When the Masai tried to march to the British High Commission in downtown Nairobi, they were fired upon with tear gas.

“We’re now squatters on our own land,” said Ratik Ole Kuyana, a Masai tour guide. “I’d rather spend my days in prison than see settlers spend their days enjoying my motherland.” The government could not be seen to give in to the Masai, as scores of other ethnic groups in Kenya also have historical grievances against the British or the Kikuyus.

Apart from land, Britain left behind a colonial machinery that invited corruption and the enhancement of the elite to the detriment of the poor. Caroline Elkins, associate professor of African studies at Harvard University and the author of “Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya” argues “Far from leaving behind democratic institutions and cultures, Britain bequeathed to its former colonies corrupted and corruptible governments. Added to this was a distinctly colonial view of the rule of law, which saw the British leave behind legal systems that facilitated tyranny, oppression and poverty rather than open, accountable government.”

It is the Kikuyus who have benefited the most from Britain’s legacy. Resentment against the Kikuyus is such that in Western Kenya it is the Kikuyus who have been forced to flee in heavily guarded buses from their homes and farms that have been burnt to the ground. As the International Herald Tribune reported “It is nothing short of a mass exodus. The tribe that has dominated business and politics in Kenya since independence in 1963 is now being chased off its land by machete-wielding mobs made up of members of other tribes furious about the Dec. 27 election.”

Kenya should feel let down by Britain in other ways too. In previous elections the UK has turned a blind eye to vote rigging and intimidation. To Britain’s credit it has poured aid money into the country, but has done nothing after watching millions being sliced off by Kenya’s ruling elite.

And in the current crisis it seems the UK was taken completely by surprise about a conflict which was essentially of its own making, and it should have seen coming. And instead of sending out a peace envoy as soon as possible, it was actually the Americans who did so first. Gordon Brown reacted to the crisis with the words “What I want to see is…” His words sounded eerily reminiscent of an old colonial master. It is a master that should shoulder some of the blame of a crisis that some now say constitutes genocide.

Justice for Mau Mau Veterans

Ellie Keen — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 22:21:38 +0000

As the Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC) prepares to sue the British Government for personal injuries sustained by survivors of the Mau Mau war for independence whilst in British detention camps in Kenya, Mukoma Wa Ngugi unravels the Colonial myths of Christianisation and civilization and exposes the reality of torture, murder, slavery, landlessness, dehumanization and internment.

In February 2008, the Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC) will file a representative law-suit against Her Majesty’s Government (HMG) in the British High Court on behalf of the survivors of the Mau Mau war for independence.

The KHRC is suing HMG for “personal injuries sustained [by the survivors] while in detention camps of the Kenya Colonial Government which operated” under the direct authority of HMG during the State of Emergency (1952-60).

But to understand the law-suit in all its implications, we have to look at Africa’s historical relationship to the West and separate the image from the reality. The Enlightenment of the 1600’s sought to civilize Africans, introduce reason and logic to them, and equip them with the key to heaven through Christianization. The reality masked underneath this image was one of torture, murder and slavery.

Later, colonialism used the image of a gentle stewardship to guide Africans along until they were civilized. The reality, as the KHRC suit shows, was landlessness, torture and dehumanization, whole population internment, outright murder and mass killings.

For the Westerners and Africans alike who have sought comfort in the images, the reality difficult to take. But the reality has been well documented. Adam Hochschild, writing in King Leopold’s Ghost, estimates that 5 to 10 million Africans died as a direct result of Belgian colonization in the Congo in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. And chopping off hands, quite literally, was a form of public control.

And between 1904 and 1907, 65,000 Herero (80 percent of the total Herero population) were systematically eliminated by the Germans in Namibia. In Algeria, during the war of independence (1954 to 1962), the French routinely tortured and ‘disappeared’ FLN freedom fighters.

These random examples illustrate an alarmingly simple principle: One nation cannot occupy another and seek to control its resources without detaining, torturing, assassinating and terrorizing the occupied. A modern day example of this principle at work is Iraq today where torture and killings under the occupation of the United States are rampant, even though the U.S. wants to sell an image of spreading democracy.

Colonialism, Legacy and the Mau Mau

In Kenya, British colonialism followed this same principle. Caroline Elkins’ Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag and David Anderson’s Histories Of The Hanged: The Dirty War In Kenya document tortures, hangings rushed through kangaroo courts, detention camps, internments, and assassinations, not to mention psychological warfare through fear and intimidation.

Independence however did not bring justice for Kenyans – certainly not for the Mau Mau veterans. Kenyatta, even before being sworn as president in1963, had denounced the Mau Mau as terrorists. Contrary to British propaganda, Kenyatta was never a member of the Mau Mau. In an interview, Muthoni Wanyeki, Executive Director of the KHRC, said that:

“On coming to power, [Kenyatta] proceeded, through the land ownership policies(and practices) of his government (and himself), to betray everything that the Mau Mau had stood for and to entrench the landholding patterns established under the colony¹

It is not a surprise that Kenyatta by the early 1970’s had a few detentions and assassinations under his belt. In the words of politician J.M. Kariuki (assassinated in 1975), Kenyatta created a nation of ten millionaires and ten million beggars. He wanted the Mau Mau platform of Land and Freedom erased from Kenyan memory.

In 1978 President Moi took over when Kenyatta died and continued with the same dictatorial policies. Irony is such that in 1982, Mau Mau historian Maina Wa Kinyatti was imprisoned by the Moi government in the same Kamiti Prison where the British in 1957 hanged and buried the leader of the Mau Mau, Dedan Kimathi, in an unmarked grave.

It was not until the Kibaki government took over in 2002 that the colonial ban on the Mau Mau was removed. Finally in 2007 a statue of Kimathi stands on Kimathi Street, something unimaginable under the Kenyatta and Moi regimes.

But more important than a hero’s acre or a monument is a reckoning with the colonial legacy of torture, dehumanization and pauperization. Mau Mau veterans that are still alive, along with their children and grandchildren, live in abject poverty, landless and without formal education.

The past and current Kenyan governments have as yet to ask the British government to at the very least issue an apology for the atrocities committed against the Kenyan people. The Moi and Kenyatta governments, dependent on Western aid and while maintaining a vicious elite system, were not in a position to pressure Britain for an apology. Or even to pressure HMG to reveal the exact location of Kimathi’s grave so that his widow, Mukami Kimathi, can bury him.

This dependent relationship has allowed the British to commit crimes against Kenyans with near impunity. Forty plus years since Kenya’s independence, the British Army still uses Northern Kenya for military exercises. As a result of leaving unexploded munitions behind, “hundreds of Maasai and Samburu tribes people – many of them children – are said to have been killed or maimed by unexploded bombs left by the British army at practice ranges in central Kenya over the past 50 years” the BBC reported². With the legal aid of Leigh Day and Co Advocates, 228 survivors took the UK government to the British High Court. In 2002, a settlement was reached in which the UK government agreed to pay 7 million dollars plus legal fees.

Economic Justice and Forgiveness

Eric Williams’ Capitalism and Slavery³ shows how Western economies grew at the expense of African slave labor. Walter Rodney in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa⁴ updates the argument to include colonialism –Europe developed at the direct expense of Africa. Today we find that economic giants, Barclays Bank⁵, J.P. Morgan and Chase Manhattan Bank⁶ are direct beneficiaries of the slave trade.

Muthoni Wanyeki argues that “it has to be recognized that the UK (and all ex-colonisers) grew at great human expense and political-economic disruption and exploitation within the ex-colonies. It is on that recognition alone that current debates on ‘aid’/‘development financing’, trade and investment can shift as they need to.” The call for forgiveness and reconciliation then has to rest on the realization that colonialism was first and foremost an exploitative economic relationship.

Because the former colonizers continue to benefit from colonialism, while the victims of colonization continue to live in poverty, the governments of former colonizers have a moral duty to rectify the historical wrong in the present time. On the basis that colonialism as an investment is still paying off, the British cannot argue that they are not personally responsible for atrocities committed by their parents – they have inherited the economic well-being of a colonial system. They need to do right by this history because it is living.

The British government has as yet to issue a formal apology for the atrocities it committed. In the same way that Clinton expressed shame and sorrow for slavery without offering a formal apology, so did Blair for colonialism. One can express sorrow, regret and shame for causing an accidental death, but surely this is not enough for a systematic exploitation that causes millions to suffer and die.

It should be stated clearly that the authoritarian governments of Kenyatta and Moi are guilty of suppressing Mau Mau memory. And that there were thousands of Kenyans who collaborated with the British. But it should also be said that collaborators did not create colonialism, it is colonialism that created its functionaries. The real crime is colonialism.

And because colonialism if we are to be honest with history is a crime against humanity, the British parliament should at the very least pass a bill offering a formal apology to its victims in Africa. And the apology should also make provision for restitution.

Truth, Restitution, Reconciliation and Justice

While revolutionary in attempting to heal a wounded nation, South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission undermined the very concept of forgiveness and justice it espoused because it did not demand that the perpetrators address in word and deed the question of restitution. Muthoni Wanyeki on the TRC says that:

Within the human rights movement in Kenya (and in Africa more broadly), the TRC process in SA while hailed for its reconciliation potential has always been critiqued for its enabling of impunity and its lack of direct recognition of, compensation for survivors.

Even though a desired by-product, the struggle against apartheid was not waged solely for blacks to forgive whites, or for whites to ask forgiveness, but to bring economic, social and political equality for all South Africans. So then here is the irony of the TRC – the perpetrators go home to their mansions, the victims back to the township.

To put it differently, after the TRC hearings the victims go back to a life of poverty, they remain without the means to feed, cloth or educate their children. Freedom comes without the content – it’s just a name – it has no meaning. Under these circumstances, forgiveness, healing and justice cannot exist without restitution.

The British government, which had the largest empire in the world, has cause to fear losing the Mau Mau law-suit. Once it begins where it will end? In neighboring Uganda? India? Malaysia? Or Jamaica? And if the British lose, will this set precedence for the victims of French, Belgian or Portuguese colonialism? The British government knows that losing one law-suit will open closed colonial closets all over the world.

It is precisely because this lawsuit has huge implications for the victims of colonialism all over the world that it deserves the support of all those who understand that history is still acting on us and that justice cannot exist without some form of restitution even if it comes in the form of the whole truth.

Identifying the graves of the disappeared, so that their relatives can rest; the numbers of how many killed, so that nations account for their dead; the names of the guilty, so that they may be brought to justice or forgiven; initiating the return of what was stolen: all these issues resonate with formerly colonized peoples.

For Muthoni Wanyeki says that “We see this case as being part of the process of understanding and coming to terms with our past…particularly given that our past impacts so clearly and evidently on our present.” African people in the continent and Diaspora should support the Kenya Human Rights Committee by calling on the British government to account for its torture of Mau Mau detainees.

We have to become each other’s keeper of memory and see each atrocity perpetrated on the other as part our collective memory – whether we identify as Afro-Latino, African American, or African.

We have to make common cause because ultimately the struggle for the truth will not be won because the British High Court finds it just, or because the British Government decides to come to terms with its past, it will be won because victims across Africa, the Diaspora and other survivors of colonial atrocities will make common cause with the Mau Mau struggle and vice versa. Truth will come to light because we will have demanded justice and restitution before offering forgiveness.

It is only when an apology and restitution are offered, and the victim in turn forgives that for both the perpetrator and victim true healing can take place. For me, that is the truth of justice.

Kenyan writer Mukoma Wa Ngugi is the author of Hurling Words at Consciousness (Africa World Press, 2006) and the forthcoming New Kenyan Fiction (Ishmael Reed Publications, 2008). He is a political columnist for the BBC Focus on Africa Magazine.

Notes:

1. Wanyeki, Muthoni (Kenya Human Rights Commission Executive Director). Interview by Author via e-mail. October 15th, 2007.

2. UK pay-out for Kenya bomb victims. news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/2139366.stm July 19th, 2002

3. Williams, Eric. Slavery and Capitalism. New York, Russell & Russell, 1961

4. Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Washington, D.C. Howard University Press, 1981

5. Barclays admits possible link to slavery after reparation call. See observer.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,,2047237,00.html April 1, 2007

6. Corporations challenged by reparations activists www.usatoday.com/money/general/2002/02/21/slave-reparations.htm February 21, 2002

Britain should pay for its colonialism

JamieSW — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 12:57:59 +0000

Lately, saving Africa has become very fashionable. Hollywood celebrities are adopting African babies. Bono and Bob Geldof sing for Africa. And Bill Gates, former heads of state Bill Clinton and Tony Blair and a sprinkling of former World Bank officials have probably caused traffic jams there as they tout their campaigns.

Put aside the irony of Clinton doing little for Africa when holding the most powerful office in the world and now, as a private citizen, wanting to save the whole continent. In the “save Africa” caldron, you will find two active ingredients missing: Africans and modern African history.

Africans want former colonial powers to be held accountable for a history of suffering. One example is the lawsuit the Kenya Human Rights Commission plans to file in the British High Court on behalf of the survivors of what came to be known as the Mau Mau rebellion. (The commission is a nonpartisan, nongovernmental organization focused on human rights in Kenya.) The colonial government declared the rebellion a “state of emergency,” and it lasted from 1952 until the rebels’ defeat in 1960.

Kenya had been officially made a British colony in 1920. The rebellion began with the Kikuyu — the largest ethnic group — fighting against British rule and British settlers’ land grabbing. Some Kikuyu leaders mobilized fighters against the British through oaths of allegiance (the term “Mau Mau” was coined by the British, likely from the Kikuyu word for oath).

The British response, through the British army, the Royal Air Force and the help of Kenyan collaborators, was brutal, with innocents swept up along with the rebels. The official number of fighters killed was 11,000, but some estimate that tens of thousands more Kenyans died and as many as 1 million — mostly women, children and elderly men — were detained.

Because recent authoritarian governments suppressed Mau Mau history and threatened survivors with arrest if they tried to organize, the Mau Mau movement was not legally recognized in Kenya until 2003.

The lawsuit, to be filed in February, will now seek justice, alleging that from 1952 to 1960, the Kenyan colonial government killed and tortured Mau Mau detainees. A background document I obtained from the Kenya Human Rights Commission argues that because the injuries “were sustained in the detention camps of the Kenya colonial government” operating under the mandate of the British, it follows that the British government is liable. Further, it claims the British did not do enough to prevent the torture and abuse.

In her Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya,” historian Caroline Elkins estimates that more than 100,000 people died in the detention camps in the process of “re-education.” Thousands of others were shot in combat, hanged or killed as collateral damage, and the majority of the Kikuyu people were interned.

The lawsuit raises several questions: Can and should one generation be held accountable for another’s atrocities? Should citizens be held accountable — through the taxes they pay — for the atrocities committed by their governments? Should corporations and banks be held accountable for profits gained through past actions that hurt others?

Historical precedence answers in the affirmative. For example, Germany and Austria have paid billions of dollars to the Israeli government and individual Holocaust survivors for World War II atrocities.

But there is also a compelling moral argument for Mau Mau reparations. Philosophers have argued that, as moral beings, we have three sets of duties: helping those in need, doing no harm and alleviating problems inherited from the past to prevent further harm in the future.

We, the living, become accountable for the past, for the sake of the future.

For a British citizen, the wealth created by colonialism (not to mention slavery) is the foundation of today’s well-being in much the same way that the poverty created by colonialism is the foundation of the infamous Nairobi slums. Poverty and wealth can both be inherited.

If a society continues to gain from a past atrocity, doesn’t it have a duty to the children of the victims?

Forgiveness, justice and healing are closely related. In the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa, the perpetrator of the crime had to own up to the wrongs of the past, then ask for forgiveness.

But the perpetrators also should give back (a step missing in the South African commission), in one form or another, what they took from the victims.

The whole truth, an apology and a tangible gesture of righting the wrong would go a long way in making this living history truly a thing of the past.