Wagalla victims still waiting for justice

[Muigai Mwaura]

As an aspiring member of our nations legal profession you will need to expand your repertoire of argumentative strategies beyond ad hominem attacks that consist of a hoarse ejaculation of the word "tribalist" every time someone says something you don't agree with. You might for instance try and back your assertions with concrete evidence.

"Wakili" you really must try harder.

Your friend,

Muigai "The Tribalist" Mwaura

[Muigai Mwaura]

"I note everytime I exposed your covert tribalism, you usually respond with insults."

http://www.mashada.com/forums/index....e=search#31870

You fired the first salvo sir, now you're acting like a dainty damsel shocked and awed by the ensuing crossfire. What gives old boy?

Your friend,

Muigai "The Tribalist" Mwaura

[XUDAYI]

GENOCIDE AT WAGALLA
The facts about the Wagalla Massacre and the quest for justice two decades later
By Salah Abdi Sheikh
In the morning of February 10th 1984, an event started shaping up across the North Eastern Province. The Kenya Air force started an early raid on towns, villages, water points and nomadic settlements across the Wajir district and the neighbouring parts of Mandera and Moyale districts. Their mission, to flush out all male Somali Degodias and shepherd them into the newly constructed Wagalla airstrip.
An early dawn raid on Bulla Jogoo, in Wajir town left the huts smouldering, women wailing and children crying. The military entered every compound, beating the male figure senseless and dragging them into military vehicles while raping the women and daughters and roughing up the aged and the very young. To top it up they sprinkled paraffin on the huts and set them a blaze.

They raided the mosques, removing sheikhs and their apprentices and the muezzins. They raided schools and detained teachers and subordinate staff, taking them to wagalla airstrip. They raided water points capturing the men and the herd boys leaving the livestock roaming unattended. They got hold of and arrested a former senator, tortured him and threw him on the back of their car, driving off to the wagalla.

For three days they continued searching for more men until they were sure that the target clan was completely wiped out from the face of the earth except at the cursed airstrip. The military kept their detainees under fence, forced them to strip and lie on their bellies. They shot anybody who resisted that order.

Wagalla airstrip is a small airstrip situated 9 miles west of Wajir town. It is one mile in length and a quarter of a mile in width. It was intended for light aircrafts of civilian nature so that the non-military air traffic could be diverted away from the Wajir airstrip, which is situated in the forces camp. In 1984, Wagalla airstrip was newly constructed and was fenced with razor sharp, very high wire, which could not easily be scaled. The airstrip had one gate. The area within the fence was void of trees or even bushes, the nearest shade is over 500 metres away. The surface of the airstrip was made of compact gravel with very sharp edges. The runway was so white that it could reflect sunlight into the eyes of the people inside the airstrip. This was where over 5000 men were detained on the morning of February 10th, 1984. The days that followed more men were being brought while those inside witnessed horrors that they have never imagined.

On the morning of February 10th, the main job of the forces was gathering as many men as possible while at the same time burning the houses and raping the women. This was a plunder of a life of a people on unimaginable scale.

On the afternoon of February 10th, the forces started torturing men in order to obtain information about guns. Rumours have persisted that people of the Ajuran clan were killed some days earlier and the degodia were blamed for it. But all the same men were tortured until they were bloody mess and could pose as an evidence threat to the forces and when nothing substantial in terms of information could be obtained were bayoneted to death. WitnessesÂ’ say that they watched the forces kick, punish with rods, chop off fingers and finish off men with a bullet or a bayonet in the belly. Over five hundred perished in this manner in the first day.

In the night of February 10th, some known police and air force men, searched for the faces of men they were known to them or had a grudge against and silently slaughtered them. By the morning of the next day bodies of men were scattered all over and were beginning to smell foul. Men were ordered to remove them from a midst the crowd and pile them at the far side of the airstrip. Naked, hungry and harassed men dragged the bodies of their friends to one side. But the killing did not stop.

On February 11 and 12, lists we called out and men on the list forced to lie on their bellies. Clothes and grass was piled on top of their bodies, doused in paraffin and lit. Most burned to ashes. The survivors of these fires have the scars to show.

On the evening of February 12, an order from above came which stated that civil servants be released. By then scores of civil servants had died, some could not prove that they were civil servants. While others have been scared so badly that they could not get to their feet. The order to release civil servants may have saved some but for some it was too late. Over 52 civil servants are known to have perished in the massacre.

A large percentage of the population confined in the airstrip died of thirst and dehydration while others starved. The temperature of this area in the months of January and February was not less than 400c and the cold at night could well be described as freezing. People died of the heat during the day and of the cold during the night. The bodies were strewn all over the airstrip and not enough men could be found to pile them up to one side. As the reality dawned upon the military, they started panicking and a plan to conceal evidence was mooted. So at first they started finishing off all men who showed extreme signs of torture. Witnesses and survivors say they forced men into queues and started killing them one after another. A survivor who was lucky to be the first to scale the fence in murderous rush for his life says “what jolted me into action was the gross scene of blood and death”. With certain death facing them men bolted and scaled the fence. The forces opened fire and shot nearly half of the crowed that surged towards the fence wire. Most of the survivors escaped with bullet wounds all over their body.

The airstrip by the fifth day was full of bodies and men wounded so badly that their death was a matter of time. The army called for more reinforcements and piled the bodies into Lorries and started throwing them far away from any village, town or settlement. They put contingents on all roads in order to scuttle any attempt at rescue. But some people took upon themselves to rescue the injured and collect some of the bodies.

An Italian nun Dr Annalina Tonelli, the principle of a local secondary school, three social workers and a businessman were instrumental in organizing for the rescue of most of the survivors. They painted their vehicles with Red Cross signs and followed the routes that armies used when disposing off the dead and the injured. Many a time, they were faced with an almost certain death but they continued anyway. They piled bodies into vehicles and buried them in mass graves located in strategic points in Wajir town. They collected the injured and arranged for their treatment by private clinical offices after the district hospital refused to assist the badly injured.

When the army got wind of the rescue attempt they drove back to where they hid the bodies and burned them to ashes. The rescue team was overwhelmed by severity of the actions of the Kenya army. They established some sort of refugee camps for the survivors and families but the authorities could no longer tolerate their actions.

The Italian nun was deported and the other members threatened with death if they continued to rescue the people or collect the bodies. But before that order was enforced they had smuggled names and photographs to their local members of parliament who managed to get to Nairobi and present their concern to the world press. The secret of Wagalla genocide came out in the open.

Scandinavian countries like Norway cut diplomatic ties with Kenya over Wagalla massacre and the United Nations is known to have voiced a strong disquiet about the actions of the Kenya Government. The Amnesty International report of 1984 highlighted the Wagalla massacre as the worst actions of genocide nature to ever take place in this country. But the survivors never sought justice and the families of victims and the international community did not make its initial promise of seeking redress for these crimes good.
Today something has changed. The orphans whose fathers were killed at Wagalla have matured and despite the harsh terrains of life they had to endure some have made it while others are holding on. The democratic space created by the multiparty system has also allowed for the agitation for justice to thrive. The demons that initiated the slaughter at Wagalla airstrip although at large and still enjoying the spoils are toothless and as at this moment cannot hurt their victims. This change is good but still justice has eluded those who deserve it.
The blame for this massacre squarely lies on the government of the republic of Kenya but individuals who initiated this bloody massacre must also be put to the dock to answer for their crimes. Those in the Kenya armed forces hierarchy starting with the commander in-chief who was the president, the chief of general staff, the air force commander, the commander at Wajir airbase, the provincial commissioner, the district commissioner, the provincial security committee, the district security committee, the minister in charge of internal security and any other individual who was in such a position as to influence the atrocities at Wagalla airstrip has questions to answer. Most of them are in fact guilty of genocide, which is a crime against humanity.
But was Wagalla an act of genocide? According the to UN Convention on the prevention of genocide, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Accordingly Wagalla falls into the definition of genocide because, the victims were one ethnic group and also one religious group. The intention of the security forces was to destroy at least in part one ethnic group and the resulting actions and the magnitude of the atrocities fit into the scope of genocide.
Kenyan leaders at the time of the massacre are therefore guilty of the crimes specified under the Convention on the prevention of genocide which include the following:(a) Genocide;(b) Conspiracy to commit genocide; (c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide; (d) Attempt to commit genocide;(e) Complicity in genocide.
Under international law Wagalla falls into crimes against humanity. Persons charged with genocide are tried by a competent tribunal of the State in the territory of which the act was committed, or by such international penal tribunal as may have jurisdiction which shall have accepted its jurisdiction. The perpetrators deserve to face the same process as the perpetrators of RwandaÂ’s genocide or that facing the initiators of the Bosnian genocide. The fact that the case has remained dead for two decades notwithstanding the victims deserve justice and the Kenya government must start listening to the plea being made for their case. The otherwise is to seek redress in international court or use the method used by the Jews to get justice for the holocaust and that is to hunt them down one after the other take them to a neutral country like Belgium and prosecute them for their heinous crimes.
The Kenya Government of Kenya must not allow the victims of this heinous crime to resort to other measures other than the stipulated law to get justice. It will be an embarrassment to the idea of reforming the Kenyan society and will create enmity between different individuals and tribes on either side of the divide and will be more of revenge oriented rather than healing process. To overcome this, the government must listen to those seeking justice for Wagalla massacre and must not impose itÂ’s own solution on the affected community.
An independent judicial commission of inquiry must be formed. The commission must be given unfettered access to records at the army, the office of the president and the president and the intelligence headquarters about Wagalla massacre. They must be given access to mass graves, families of victims, survivors and rescue teams. The known perpetrators must be apprehended and prosecuted and the others must be investigated to establish their involvement. The affected community must be compensated for wrongful deaths, torture and blunder of life and livelihood. An official apology from the president of Kenya should be in order. A memorial should be built at the airstrip in honour of the faceless men who were butchered in cold blood. The constitution should be changed to include an undertaking that the parliament cannot make any law that infringes upon the rights of any community, discriminates against any community, religion or regional or is designed to favour any section of the society above others. Finally, the Kenya government has to compensate the people of North Eastern as a whole for breach of trust, marginalization, harassment and colonization for over a 40-year period, only then can justice be seen to be done about Wagalla massacre. The next should be Malka Mari (1981), Garissa (1982) Bagalla (1998) and multitudes of massacres that took place in North Eastern Province since 1963.

The author is the coordinator of the Truth Be Told.

APPENDIX

What is the law on genocide?
Prior to the Nazi holocaust, no treaty made genocide an international crime. Despite that legal void, the Nuremberg tribunal convicted German leaders for genocide by reasoning that their crimes against humanity violated customary international law.
In 1948 the newly established United Nations promptly adopted The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The 112 parties to the convention include Yugoslavia and all of its successor republics.
In Article I the state parties agree that genocide "is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish."
Article II defines genocide as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; . . .";
Article IX provides that "disputes between the Contracting Parties relating to . . .the responsibility of a State for genocide . . . shall be submitted to the International Court of Justice at the request of any of the parties . . ." The Convention also envisions the possible creation of an international criminal tribunal to punish individuals, but until that time calls for their prosecution in national courts.

[pleasureseka]

excellent post, this was a terrorist act commited against somali people in kenya, all the political leaders who authorized this act should be prosecuted, i still beleive moi should be prosecuted for corruption and crimes committed against kenyans in general

[lullay]

What appears to have happened at the Wagalla Massacre is resoundingly familiar to events that occurred at the on set of the year 1952, the rounding up of the kikuyu men and ensuing mass massacre. No one will ever be held accountable on both occasion an unpeople were murdered, the disposable humanity of the African man and woman which bears no regard for the self.
Amazon.co.uk: Unpeople: Britain's Secret Human Rights Abuses: Books: Mark Curtis.
Unpeople: Britain's Secret Human Rights Abuses « Mark Curtis