HUMAN RIGHTS-KENYA: Asians Appeal For Government Protection.

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru

NAIROBI, Mar 20 1998 (IPS) - Representatives of Kenya’s Asian minority have appealed to President Daniel arap Moi to protect them from a wave of blackmail and extortion which, they say, also involves a gang of police from the Criminal Investigation Department (CID).

The extortion has been going on for four months, according to the Kenya Hindu Mission, which represents some of the roughly 70,000 Kenyans of Asian origin. The Mission has issued a statement urging the government to step in and stop the abuse.

” These activities of dishonest and disloyal police officers are bringing a bad name to the entire police force and government,” said the statement, a copy of which was made available to IPS this week. “We hope these nefarious activities are checked by the higher authorities forthwith.”

According to the Hindu group, the gang, made up of “a few CID officers” has been using the pretext of searching Asian business premises or residences for heroin and cocaine.

“They carry syringes and sachets of drugs themselves and in the course of the search claim to have discovered the illegal drugs from the Asian’s possession,” said the statement, which was also published in the ‘Daily Nation’ newspaper.

The racketeers, who reportedly operate in a group of five, produce police identity cards when confronting their victims and have walkie talkies and handcuffs.

Kenya Hindu Mission founder Pavan Sharma told journalists here that those who refused to cooperate were manhandled. “The Asian is handcuffed and told to go on foot with the CID-led racketeers to CID headguarters,” he said. “Usually, they succeed in extorting money and handcuffs are removed.”

The victims reported to the Mission that they had been made to part with cash ranging between 500 and 2,500 U.S. dollars each. The Kenyan police has confirmed the extortion, but says it could be the work of dismissed police officers working in cahoots with criminals.

Nairobi police boss Njiru Kyanda told a press conference here on Wednesday that he had ordered a probe into the racket. He urged the Asian community to be firm and refuse to be extorted by the gang. However, Sharma was not fully reassured. “If any of our colleagues is harmed, the entire Asian community wiil close their shops for a week in protest,” the ‘Daily Nation’ quoted him as saying on Thursday.

Asians, who make up just 0.23 per cent of the country’s 30 million people, are mainly descendants of labourers brought in by the British colonial administration to build the East African railways linking Kenya and Uganda during the 19th century.

In recent decades, they have often been in the firing line here. One of their tormentors, opposition politician Kenneth Matiba, who heads the unregistered ‘Saba-Saba-Asili’ party, has made the Asian issue a key plank in his party’s platform.

Matiba, in what has become now his trademark slogan, never tires of remarking: “You just drive round Nairobi, and what you see is that all the shops are owned by Asians. You go to Mombasa, all the shops are owned by Asians”.

Mombasa, located some 500 kms southeast of here, is Kenya’s second largest city, and its main outlet to the Indian Ocean.

In Februry, Marsden Madoka, a minister in the office of the president, warned about an influx of Asian migrant workers to Kenya. “There have been cases of foreigners being issued with work permits as shop attendants while ordinary Kenyans go without jobs,” he said.

Part of the problem may lie with rising unemployment, which in Kenya as elsewhere, prompts people to look for scapegoats, especially visible minorities.

More than 2.7 million Kenyans are jobless, according to professor Raphael Munavu of the University of Nairobi, who said unemployment had been aggravated by the fact that educational and training institutions had been producing graduates much faster than jobs were being created.

“In the past two years, the annual output into the job market has risen to half a milion while only 240,000 job opportunities are available,” he told a recent workshop here.