RIGHTS: For Years, Kenyans Whispered about the Torture Chambers

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Katy Salmon

NAIROBI, Feb 25 2003 (IPS) - For years, Kenyans whispered about the Nyayo House torture chambers, hidden in the basement of a 26-storey government building in Nairobi’s bustling city centre. Innocuous-looking Nyayo House also houses the immigration department and the offices of Kenya Television Network (KNT).

Many people thought the rumours were an exaggeration until earlier this month when Kenya’s new government swung open the basement doors and invited the world’s press inside.

Former detainees, including senior ministers in the new regime, toured the tiny cells, reliving their hellish experiences.

Nyayo House was built in the early 1980s when President Daniel arap Moi was trying to consolidate power following an attempted coup against him.

Architectural plans show that the cells were specifically designed as torture chambers, with rubber seals under the doors so that prisoners could be held knee-deep in water and vents to pump cold or hot, dusty air into the rooms.

Under Moi’s paranoid leadership, thousands of political activists, academics, students and artists were arrested and held in dark, waterlogged cells for weeks on end without food or water.

The 26th floor of Nyayo House was the interrogation room, where prisoners were beaten until they confessed to fictional crimes.

Hundreds of people who simply disappeared in Kenya in the late 1980s are thought to have died in Nyayo House.

The National Rainbow Coalition government, which won a landslide electoral victory in December, bringing an end to the ruling KANU party’s 39 year reign, has promised to set up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to right the wrongs of the past.

Touring the cells, Cabinet Minister Raila Odinga, who was held in Nyayo House in 1988 and 1990, emphasised the need for Kenyans to hear about their terrible history to make sure that such atrocities never happen again.

”This was our Auschwitz,” he said, referring to the infamous Nazi detention camps. ”This is a history that we need to preserve so that our people can be reminded that the cost of freedom is dear. It is something that we need to preserve for posterity for our people in the future. That Kenyans will not again allow themselves to be led by a despotic regime that can design this kind of mechanism for the torture of its people,” he said. Giving survivors the chance to tell their stories will also help their own healing process.

”We want everybody who has gone through this process, fighting for multiparty democracy in this country, to be given opportunity of reliving that experience. It is a very therapeutic treatment that will be good for the future and for this country,” says fellow parliamentarian Wanyiri Kihoro, who was kept in Nyayo House for 74 days in 1986.

Without an opportunity for redress, there is a danger that victims might start taking justice into their own hands.

”If this issue does not get proper treatment there are possibilities of people settling scores, people taking the law into their own hands. And basically, the frustration that impunity is being allowed to take root in the country,” warns Willy Mutunga, executive director of the Kenyan Human Rights Commission, who was a political detainee during 1982 and 1983.

The political repression of the 1980s is just one of the human rights abuses that the commission will have to address.

Kenya has a gruesome history of unresolved political murders of prominent politicians like Foreign Minister Robert Ouko, going back to the 1960s, which also needs to be laid to rest.

Many Kenyans want investigations to go right back to the colonial era. When Kenya gained its independence from Britain in 1963, after a bitter struggle in which some 80,000 people died in British concentration camps, President Jomo Kenyatta told people to forgive and move on.

The remains of freedom fighters like Dedan Kimathi, who was hung by the British, were left in unmarked graves and forgotten about.

Today, for many Kenyans, it is time for Kenya’s independence heroes to finally be recognised.

”One of the demands we are putting to the government is to have Kimathi reburied and have a national heroes garden square where people who are great Kenyans can be buried for our history,” says Mungai Mbuthi of Release Political Prisoners pressure group.

Kenya’s government has not yet made clear the parameters of its commission or who will sit on it. It is likely that religious leaders and members of civil society will be appointed rather than judges, many of whom have collaborated with human rights abusers.

The highest lawyer in the land, Chief Justice Bernard Chunga, was recently suspended so that a tribunal can look into his role as the government’s prosecutor during the political clampdown of the 1980s. The other question to be answered is what punishment will be meted out to those who are found guilty.

South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission was quite lenient. As an incentive to get people to come forward, it granted amnesty to those who confessed fully and were able to show that there was a forgivable political motive behind their crimes.

Some Kenyan victims say they too are ready to forgive.

For Wahome Mutahi, a playwright who was tortured in Nyayo House in 1986, a simple apology from retired President Moi would be enough. ”I think Moi should apologise personally. It will do some good if people like him came out and said, ‘Sorry, it happened. We are sorry it happened.’ For me that would be very, very, very important,” he stresses.

Mutahi is one of the lucky ones. He was able to rebuild his life after his Nyayo House experience, using the ordeal as material for his plays and books.

Others were not so fortunate. Many people were destroyed by what they went through, unable to return to work, unable to trust anyone anymore. Thousands are still homeless after they were chased out of their homes in state-sponsored ethnic clashes during the 1990s. For these people, a simple ‘sorry’ will not be enough.