/CORRECTED REPEAT*/RIGHTS-KENYA: Land Battle Moves to the Courts

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Joyce Mulama

NAIROBI, Oct 19 2005 (IPS) - Displaced in the course of one administration, left landless by the next, Wanjiku Njoroge Rumiritu’s tale is not a pleasant one.

More than a decade ago, violence that swept Kenya’s western Rift Valley province forced her to leave home.

“That was our family land. It is the one I grew on, and raised my children there as well. Without it, I have no other place to go,” the 62-year-old Rumiritu told IPS in the capital, Nairobi. “I went back a few months after the situation improved, but found new occupants who threatened to kill me if I set foot there again.”

The violence occurred ahead of Kenya’s first multi-party election in 1992, when ethnic rivalries were stoked to undermine opposition support in the Rift Valley province: the region with the largest number of legislative seats. Politicians from the Kenya African National Union (in power until 2002) allegedly incited members of the Kalenjin – the ethnic group of then president Daniel arap Moi – to attack the Kikuyu, Luhya and Luo groups.

This was done amidst calls for “majimbo”, an ethnically-based system of government which some believe advocates regional ethnic cleansing through the return of non-indigenous peoples to their areas of origin.

According to the Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC), a non-governmental organisation, 15,000 people died in the ensuing clashes – while about 300,000 were displaced in the Rift Valley and western provinces (the United Nations Development Programme puts the estimate lower, at 200,000). IPS was unable to obtain government figures on the number of persons affected by the clashes.

There was renewed ethnic violence in the Coast Province before the 1997 general elections, when opposition supporters again found themselves targeted – and violence and revenge attacks in the Rift Valley, in 1998. The New York-based Human Rights Watch says the various episodes of politically-driven ethnic clashes claimed about 2,000 lives – and displaced some 400,000.

Uba Omari, a survivor of the 1997 clashes, told IPS that she was tortured by security agents who accused her of hiding weapons in her private parts. As a result, Omari says, she was obliged to flee with her two children.

“I was forced to run for dear life because of what happened. When I went back later after calm had returned, I found unfamiliar faces occupying my land, which they said they had been given by authorities, and even showed me a title deed for it,” she noted during an interview in Nairobi.

Now, about 500 of the people displaced during the clashes have filed a suit against government in a bid to be resettled on their land. Their hope is that the courts will force authorities to implement a recommendation made by a commission appointed in July 1998 to investigate the violence.

Led by Justice Akilano Akiwumi, the commission issued a report in 1999 calling for displaced persons to be resettled – and officials accused of masterminding the clashes to be prosecuted. Persons in both the previous and current governments were named in the report.

However, the document has since been shelved and no action taken against political leaders or government officials, says Davis Malombe – assistant programmes officer in a KHRC department which researches issues related to impunity.

“This complacency by the state has brewed and perverted the gruesome culture of impunity, where crimes committed against humanity are either ignored or given very little attention to make the perpetrators less accountable before the law,” he says. (Human rights bodies have now embarked on a nationwide initiative dubbed the ‘Campaign Against Impunity’ to have those implicated in the clashes brought to book.)

Similarly, activists such as Odenda Lumumba, national coordinator of the Kenya Land Alliance, claim the National Rainbow Coalition government has made little progress with resettlement despite having been in power for two-and-a-half years. The alliance is an umbrella body for civil society groups which lobby for land reform.

“It is a disgrace that some of the victims still remain IDPs (internally displaced persons) more than ten years down the line, with no government resettlement scheme for them,” she told IPS.

Lands ministry spokesperson Mary Ngaruma says resettlement of those displaced by violence is underway.

“The exercise began last year. The government has been authenticating the cases and has so far resettled some of those who were genuinely dislodged,” she told IPS.

Ngaruma could not give a figure for how many persons had been resettled, however – and the head of another ministry even appeared unaware that such an exercise was being undertaken.

“Consultations are going on between my ministry, the ministry of lands and the office of the president on the formation of a committee to work out the modalities for resettling the victims of the clashes,” Justice and Constitutional Affairs Minister Kiraitu Murungi noted recently.

“As soon as modalities are worked out, resettlement will commence.”

If Rumiritu does get her land back, there are some wounds that resettlement is unlikely to heal.

“The police officers were torching our houses, killing our families and raping women,” she says of the 1992 violence.

“I lost four of my five children, plus my husband in the violence that displaced me. I had to leave my five-acre piece of land and run to safety. I now live as a squatter.”

(* The story moved 18:59 GMT Oct. 18, 2005 contained two errors. Please note that while Wanjiku Njoroge Rumiritu was forced off her land in the early 1990s, she does not form part of the group of 500 displaced persons who are taking government to court in a bid to be resettled. In addition, paragraph 18 erroneously implied that Kiraitu Murungi is Minister of Lands, rather than of Justice and Constitutional Affairs.)