RIGHTS-KENYA: Torture Victims Seek Redress

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Joyce Mulama

NAIROBI, Aug 21 2003 (IPS) - Most of them were picked up at night by the dreaded secret police, driven to a torture chamber and after weeks or months of interrogation and torture, were set free.

The unlucky ones died in the dreaded chamber cells or disappeared.

Their crime: opposing former President Daniel arap Moi’s government in Kenya.

An estimated 2,000 people were tortured in Nyayo House during President Moi’s rule (1978-2002), at least a quarter of whom were killed, according to rights groups in Kenya.

Nyayo House, a 26-story building in Nairobi city centre, is the government’s Nairobi provincial headquarters.

A 12-foot wide gray steel door in the building’s underground car park slides back to reveal a steel barred gate behind which is a narrow corridor and 12 tiny cells. Here, Moi’s perceived political opponents were held naked, in dark waterlogged rooms, for days on end without food or water.

One of the famous inmates is Raila Odinga, now Kenya’s minister of Public Works, who was twice detained in Nyayo House, during the struggle for the restoration of democracy, in 1988 and 1990.

Moi is now gone, having lost elections in Dec. 2002. But his legacy remains: the torture chamber.

When the Nyayo House cells were first opened to the public in February, the new government of President Mwai Kibaki announced that it would turn them into "a national monument of shame".

Now rights groups are pushing government to adopt a truth and reconciliation commission to redress Kenya’s past.

A task force, known as the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation, has been conducting public hearings across Kenya, and found that the majority of Kenyans want such a commission to be established. "This is what we have included in our report and hopefully the government will implement it," a member of the task force told IPS this week.

The task force, which was appointed in April to look into the viability of such a commission, is due to present its report to the government early next week.

Retired South Africa’s Anglican Archbishop, Desmond Tutu, who was chairperson of his country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, was in Kenya last week as a guest speaker at a conference on Truth Commissions and Political Transitions, organised by the task force. Tutu warned Kenyans not to take the laws into their hands by fixing the alleged perpetrators of those crimes.

"When transition occurs, the nation has to come to terms with the legacy of previous regime plus human rights abuses such as abduction and torture," he said.

The Nobel Peace Prize laureate noted that it was important for truth to be told while addressing past injustices, in order to bring healing to both the perpetrators and traumatised.

Although many Kenyans have argued that tackling the past may reopen up new wounds, Tutu said, "We want the wounds to open up, burst the pus open, cleanse them, then hope to see them heal".

Opening the two-day conference, minister for Justice and Constitutional Affairs, Kiraitu Murungi, said the government would strive to confront past ills to promote national healing and reconciliation.

"We need to look at all these things, not from the position of anger and revenge, but from the position of trying to understand why they happened so that they do not happen again in this country," he said.

Task force chairperson, Makau Mutua, observed that most Kenyans were for an independent and effective truth commission to be formed immediately to address past abuses. "The view of the people is that impunity reigns high in Kenya and has to be punished accordingly," he said.

The idea of a truth, justice and reconciliation commission for Kenya came to the fore in February when the torture chambers were opened to the public.

The chambers were used to silence perceived political opponents.

Should Kenya adopt the idea of a truth commission, it will join the few countries in Africa, which have established such commissions to promote healing among their people.

South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was formed in 1995 after a Truth Commission Bill was signed by former President Nelson Mandela. Its mandate was to investigate gross human rights violations committed by the apartheid regime until 1993.

The commission, which held its first hearing in Apr. 1996, recommended reparation for victims.

In Sierra Leone, the TRC was established by an act of parliament in Feb. 2000 and conducted its first public hearing in Apr. 2003. It is expected to address impunity and help victims promote healing and reconciliation, and guard against repetition of atrocities caused by rebels in the nine-year civil war that commenced in 1991.

The rebels from Revolutionary United Front of Sierra Leone have been blamed for creating a community that exists as a living testimony to human cruelty and depravity – the amputees of Sierra Leone.

Rwanda has a similar commission, National Unity and Reconciliation Committee, which was formed after the 1994 genocide in which up to 800,000 people were slaughtered by Hutu militias.