On December 20, the head of
Kenya’s National Police Service issued a report about the country’s 2013 crime rate.
The good news was that crime rates had fallen 8 percent compared from the
previous year. Inspector General David Kimaiyo attributed the decrease to what
he called “public cooperation with the police and the increased police
mobility.” He even introduced the notion of “community policing,” a popular model
based on engagement and partnership between the police and the community.
According to the report, economic
crimes decreased by 21 percent, theft of livestock by 17 percent and offenses
against persons by 7 percent. The bad
news, however, was an increase in some crimes, such as robbery (10 percent),
homicide (6 percent), rape (22 percent) vehicle and other thefts (3 percent)
and robbery with violence by 9 percent. There were also 509 incidents of mob
injustice in 2013. The terrorist group Al-Shabaab killed 111 persons, 71 of
whom died during the Westgate Mall bombing.
Oddly, the police report was
remarkable in what it failed to mention: extrajudicial killings. Kenyan human rights organizations have
criticized the government for sponsoring such crimes. In November 2013, Muslims
for Human Rights (MUHURI) and the George Soros-funded Open Society Initiative
issued a report titled, “We Are Tired of Taking you to Court: Human Rights
Abuses by Kenya’s Anti-Terrorism Police Unit,” that concluded the Kenyan
government was running a police death squad that targets suspects with links to
terror groups. Most of the extrajudicial
killings take place, according to the report, in the heavily Muslim populated
city of Mombasa which has become a hotbed for Al-Shabaab recruitment. In 2012,
Sheikh Aboud Rogo, a cleric on the U.S and UN sanctions list for providing
“financial, material, logistical or technical support for Al-Shabaab” was killed in the streets of that city. In
October 2013, Sheikh Ibrahim Omar was also shot dead in Mombasa after
allegations of involvement with the Westgate Mall bombing. More than 20 others
met the same fate in 2013 or simply disappeared. According to the report, a
Kenyan police officer told a detainee, “We are tired of taking you to the
court. Next time, we will finish you off in the field.”
The government resorts to these unlawful
killings, according to human rights groups, when it is unable to build a strong
case against terror suspects. These groups have asked both the United Kingdom and
the U.S governments to suspend aid to the Ant-Terrorism Police Unit (ATPU) due
to its direct involvement with these unlawful killings. The unit receives
training and funding from Washington and London. This elite counter-terrorism
unit has regularly arrested suspects but the number of terrorists convicted in
courts remains dismal.
The Kenyan government denies that
it is culpable for extrajudicial killings. The usual government response has
been that the suspects died in a gun battle due to intra-rivalries (for good effect,
the police display weapons to the mass media), that rogue political officers
are the ones to blame, or, in the case of disappearances, the suspects simply fled
to Somalia. A radical cleric in Mombasa has in fact lamented, “The government
is murdering us.”
Extrajudicial Killings are not
new in Kenya. In 2008, a government-funded group, Kenya National Commission on
Human Rights, issued a report, “The Cry of Blood,” that identified police as
responsible for the killings and disappearance of more than 500 young men. The
report classified these extrajudicial killings as crimes against humanity
because they deprived the victims of all due process.
The general view among human
rights groups is that the extrajudicial killings, instead of stemming the tide
of religious radicalism, alienate many Muslims who could otherwise serve as
partners in the war against terror. As Jonathan Horowitz of the Open Society
and the co-author of the group’s report has argued “[The ATUP’s conduct] has
“eroded the rule of law in Kenya and created distrust between the public and
police, creating conditions which can provide fuel for terrorists.”
That is, after all, what
Inspector General Kimaiyo has been advocating: community policing.
(Written by Hassan M. Abukar. Reprinted with permission from African Arguments, January 16, 2016).
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