L. Muthoni Wanyeki
14 July 2008
column
The commission of inquiry into the post-elections violence began its public hearings last week.
The first person to take the stand was Police Commissioner Maj-Gen Hussein Ali, whose report was remarkable more for what it did not comment on than what it did.
It basically blandly laid out the laws it operates under, gave its own statistics on the impact of the violence and concluded that the Force had done well in containing the violence.
Nothing was said about extraordinary use of force, nor about extrajudicial killings, what lay behind one of the first set of agreements by the mediation process - those relating to an immediate end to the violence.
Like all Kenyans who lived through the beginning of the year, I have a new appreciation of the value of law and order, of basic security.
I now understand, far better than before, that there is a problem not just with the capacities of our security-related agencies but with the linkages between them.
It is also more evident that militia organisations pose a grave security risk to the country and the risk is far from being permanently addressed.
I also know that the starting point for beginning to resolve these challenges is admission. Admission of failures. Admission of manipulation by the Executive (or those associated with it), of miscalculations, of partiality, of weaknesses, and, most important, of actual wrongdoing.
Freedoms of assembly, association and expression continue to be severely compromised several months into the political settlement.
Not a single public demonstration has occurred without interference by the police since the signing of the political settlement.
A protesting against the size of the Grand Coalition Cabinet was broken up as the protesters tried to march from Freedom Corner to parliament.
Bunge la Wananchi, the so-called people's parliament, was prevented from demonstrating against food prices and some of their members arrested and charged in court.
Last week, colleagues intending to protest against former finance minister Amos Kimunya were not only arrested and charged, they were beaten and assaulted while in the custody of the police.
The beatings were entirely gratuitous humiliation and punishment for daring to protest even as the said minister was tendering his public resignation.
It is appalling. Surely, the police has the capacity to distinguish between citizens and organised civil society on the one hand and militia organisations on the other.
The police has the capacity to understand that protest, if expressed peacefully, is entirely legitimate; that our rights to the freedoms of assembly, association and expression are not only constitutionally-protected, but protected by a host of regional and international human-rights treaties that Kenya is party to.
But these incidents now form a pattern indicative of a deliberate decision to suppress dissent, without distinction between non-violent and violent dissent.
Hopefully, the Judiciary will do its duty and uphold our Constitution as well as our regional and international obligations when considering cases related to these incidents. In the more immediate term, Parliament also needs to come to the defence of our Constitution.
Parliament needs to insist that planning for security does not mitigate against the ordinary citizens and organised civil society being able to say, through peaceful protest, that we are not happy.
Kenyans fought hard and long for our so-called second-liberation and the IPPG agreements were reached over the bodies of no less than 14 Kenyans that were murdered in the second Saba Saba - the day of national protests for a new Constitution.
We cannot have the small democratic gains recorded through those agreements taken back because of failures to admit where the real problems with security lie. We cannot and we will not.
L. Muthoni Wanyeki is the Executive Director of the Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC)
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