We all knew that terrible things were happening in Mt. Elgon. It's only with the release of the Human Rights Watch report that it has become quite clear how terrible.
The report was out on Monday; one of the recommendations was that military aid to Kenya ought to be reviewed (for which read suspended) in light of the seriousness of the war crimes they've discovered. War crimes? Yes. The SLDF has racked up over 600 deaths:
In early April 2008 WKHRW reported it had documented 615 deaths from 2006 up to February 2008.
It is busy clearing Bukusu out of the Mt. Elgon area and into Sirisia. The violence is systematic and politically-motivated; the aim is to remove those suspected of not voting ODM:
However, many of the more recent murder victims of the SLDF were politicians or party agents who competed against SLDF's favored candidates in the December 2007 elections. One chief in Mt. Elgon district described how the bodies of five people opposed to the favored candidates of SLDF in the general election were dumped in his area one morning with their throats cut. A retired civil servant said that, "Many of my neighbors had houses burnt and some of them were killed because they supported the wrong candidates." The SLDF militia on the rampage had a motto, "The MP should be one. The party is one." Meaning that no other parties should contest in Mt. Elgon, leaving the area open for the ODM candidates supported by the SLDF.
The government has not been left out of the fun. HRW relies on IMLU stats; since IMLU is independent, these are relatively reliable (and certainly preferable to government stats). Anyway:
IMLU interviewed 119 prisoners selected at random representing about 30% of the total of 400 detained at Bungoma prison. All of those interviewed had been tortured, with recurring patterns of injuries to the genitals, legs, back, and upper body
There's more.
All of the detainees interviewed by Human Rights Watch described systematic torture, affecting every single person picked up by the military-police operation and taken to Kapkota. These accounts were from groups of victims interviewed separately, of different ethnicities and in multiple locations, who were detained on different days throughout March 2008.
Further, government forces appear to be disposing of bodies in the forest:
In addition, a different military source told Human Rights Watch that eight bodies from Kapkota were flown in two helicopters and dumped in the forest, north of Kaptaboi village on April 2.
The death toll is unclear:
As of June 3, WKHRW has compiled a list of 72 missing people whom it says are confirmed dead, and a further 34 missing whose relatives could not confirm whether they were alive or not.89 The military and police spokesmen continue to maintain in public that no one has died and no one has been tortured. Meanwhile, a source within the operation claimed that as of the end of April, 184 known SLDF suspects had been "disappeared" by the army and police (and this figure had reportedly risen to 220 by the end of June.)
What now?
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This, despairingly, is an open thread.
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Boringly enough, accountability is the key. Everybody who's participated in torture and murder needs to face time in jail, and quickly. Yes, there's a land issue that needs to be solved, but the immediate problem is a law and order one, for which legal action is a necessary and sufficient remedy.
Once that's out of the way, we can resort discussing land rights in NGO-speak for the next deacde.