Tribal Militias still threaten Kenya

The hired hooligans who terrorized Kenya after the 2007 elections are still there. They could emerge from their hibernation anytime when their paymasters tell them to do so. The dogs of war can bark and bite whenever they are unleashed by the merchants of death who are about to be exposed by Moreno-Ocampo. The trouble is that the moment the ICC prosecutor touches them, the hooligans are likely to strike again. This time even more deadly than before. The unsubstantiated story goes that AK-47 guns have been purchased from Somalis and the hoodlums are only waiting for orders from their wicked commanders and financiers. The most disturbing thing is that some of the commanders sit in our Cabinet and they have been responsible for frustrating all efforts to punish organizers of the post election bloodbath.

When the country was in real mess we called in Kofi Annan to remove us from the political quagmire we sank ourselves into. Though not so conspicuously, we seem to be still sunk there. One of the first steps he took was to establish unambiguous steps which smoothly pulled us from the cesspool of tribal confrontation. He actually named the steps as agendas. Today Kenyans are preoccupied with Agenda Four which concerns long term issues and solutions involving Constitutional, institutional and legal reforms; land reforms; poverty, inequality and regional imbalance; unemployment particularly among the youth; consolidation of national cohesion and unity; transparency accountability and impunity. These are all extremely important hurdles for the country to jump before we can really claim to have sorted out all the latent causes of the 2007-8 post election conflict.

Be that as it may, it is Agenda One that poses a great threat to Kenya’s stability today. The Agenda was concerned with the immediate stoppage of the violence that tore the country apart. Though the bloodbath as it occurred after the 2007 elections has stopped, the country can hardly be said to be peaceful. The animosity between certain tribes of Kenya, fanned by the paymasters of the hooligans now threatened by Moreno-Ocampo’s possible criminal charges, seems to have gone underground. Some of the paymasters are holding Cabinet portfolios which grant them an automatic audience with the people wherever they go. Using their ill-gotten powers, they continue to agitate xenophobic feelings among members of their tribe in preparation for the day they will meet their fate with Moreno-Ocampo.

When Kofi Annan stepped into the scene in January 2008 he identified Agenda One as immediate action to stop violence and restore fundamental rights and liberties with the aim of stopping all incidents of political violence. By March 2008, the Ghanaian diplomat had succeeded to substantially end all political violence in the affected areas.

Today his own office reports that while widespread rioting arson and killings have stopped, political conflict at the national level tend to trickle to the local level resulting in renewed threats of violence, particularly against IDPs. The respected diplomat’s report says the end of political violence has not translated into a violence-free society and gang violence and armed crime has increased.

This is an extremely worrying situation. Talking about Agenda Four may be extremely important, but leaving the problems of Agenda One not fully solved still leaves the country in a political quagmire. Our leaders don’t seem to be concerned with that problem. Instead they are so preoccupied with their own self-interests even when they are talking about ICC or the TJRC. Kofi Annan’s office clearly says new forms of violence in the flashpoints beyond post election violence affected districts such as cattle rustling, cross border incursions from Somalia, Uganda and Ethiopia still occur. And he warns that new political violence is likely to repeat similar patterns in the same regions may be caused by subterranean tensions of an ethnic character. This is an extremely disturbing situation; yet our leaders, the President and the Prime Minister included, are tightlipped about it.

Agenda One was also concerned with the disbandment of illegal groups. These include the Mungiki, Taliban, Kamjeshi and Chinkororo a Machuma. Everyone in Kenya knows that these are terror gangsters in the payroll of politicians, including some sitting in the current Cabinet. Those who are in powers in Kenya today know they won party nominations through violence and they ended up in Parliament through violence and got themselves appointed in the Cabinet through violence because everyone knows leaving them out could end up in another bloodbath since they all have gangsters with chilling names that constantly threaten peace and security in the country.

Because organized gangsterism in Kenya has proved to be an important political ladders to power and prosperity, no one in the political class want to dismantle them. They are a guarantee to power and unquestioned village despotism which is the prerequisite of national dictatorship. So no one in Kenya’s political power wants to even discuss the number of such gangsters in the country. The chances are that every Member of Parliament has one in his or her constituency. This makes it extremely difficult for the subject to be sincerely discussed in Parliament, leave alone the Cabinet where some well known Minister are said to be the highest paying masters of the most heinous terror gangsters. Talking of the demobilization of such gangsters in Kenya is building castles in the air.

In his report Kofi Annan says so far no organized gangster group has been disbanded due to political support. The crackdown of Mungiki in 2004 showed some success but in March 2008 the group was revived. The report says military operation to clamp down on SLDF in Mount Elgon in March 2008 saw 92 suspects arrested in post election affected areas. The report says groups for political hire have hibernated, but members are reorganizing autonomously into criminal gangsters.

The reports adds that between August and September 2008 human right bodies released accounts of torture by the military in Mt. Elgon and systematic execution of the suspected members of an illegal group by police “hit squad”, and since the release of the report the groups seem to have reorganized and their presence poses a dilemma for everyone concerned with human rights – rights’ defenders advocate for sanctity of human life while ordinary citizens seem to support extra-judicial killings of suspected illegal group members. The report further explains that arrests kicked off amnesty debate as civil society groups raised concern that suspects from one community which organized retaliatory violence were not arrested. The details of these activities will come up during the ICC trials at The Hague, so Agenda One issues are far from exhaustion.

What is most shocking about Agenda One is that none of the groups have been disarmed. As a matter of fact it is believed they are more armed with heavy weaponry obtainable in Nairobi’s Eastleigh area where the Somalis have established a little Mogadishu in the city. Kofi Annan’s report says no arms have been recovered from political gangsters in Kenya. The report says between 2008 and March 2009 there have been 2,800 firearms recovered from civilians.

It further says in February 2009 there were five arms caches intercepted in Nandi but none of these arms was specifically recovered from illegal political groups, which did not use firearms in the post election violence but instead used peacetime agriculture or kitchen tools. According to Annan widespread allegations of increased armaments among the ethnic groups in preparation for future violence have been reported. All this is extremely bad news for the future of political stability in the country and clearly indicates that Agenda One’s goals are far from being achieved. Yet our leaders are saying nothing about the matter. What a terrible shame!