Kenya fights to bring back its ‘Missing Voices’ snatched by police violence
Extrajudicial killings and forced disappearances are still a non-spoken problem in Kenya, where families fear reprisals if they go to court. Between November and December 2018, I could speak with several families who had lost someone due to police brutality, including the activist Caroline ‘Carole’ Mwatha, which was found dead last February
After the death of his two sons during the violence spree in last Kenyan general elections in 2017, Mama Vic, 45 years old, has become an activist against extrajudicial killings and forced disappearances. Her real name is Benna Buluma, but in Mathare’s slum, one of Nairobi’s poorest areas, everyone knows her as Mama Vic.
Like many other mothers in this area, Buluma carries with her the name of one of her dead sons, Victor, who was killed during the police repression over Mathare on August 9th of 2017, along with his brother Bernard. That happened the same day that the Kenyan Electoral Commission released the provisional results of the elections, pointing the actual president, Uhuru Kenyatta, as the winner and filling the streets with thousands of angry demonstrators.
“They came to kill. There were no clashes: their target was just the youth”, says Buluma, who receives me in a Community Justice Center, wearing the traditional African head-wrap (turban) and a t-shirt from Kenya Tuitakayo movement (‘The Kenya we want’), a collective formed to fight against impunity.
Considered one of Kenya’s opposition hotspots, the Eastern slum of Mathare is the home of approximately 500,000 people and was also one of the most punished neighborhoods during the elections, with a death toll of 19 people only within the slum. That includes Stephanie Moraa, a nine-year-old girl that was struck in the chest by a lost bullet shot by an officer while she was playing in the balcony of her house.
“As mothers, we still have fear when we see police officers, even the children have fear and run away from them. We think that the next victims could be our grandsons”, continues Buluma, which now survives doing casual work, such as cleaning houses or doing laundry, in order to maintain economically her two, now orphan, grandchildren, all the time playing around her while this interview is conducted.
To fight against this situation, several citizen initiatives have come out in recent years to bring support to the families, both economically and psychologically, as well as legal orientation and “a way to keep hope alive and find justice”, as the activist and volunteer of Mathare’s Justice Centre Kennedy Chindy explains.
These centers collaborate closely with the initiative ‘Missing Voices Kenya’, a project launched by the Police Reforms Working Group Kenya (PRWG-K), which documents the cases, publishes the stories on its website and offers a wider portray on extrajudicial killings and forced disappearances in Kenya.
After having spent several years in prison, Chindy started working in this center in order to help people that went through the same situation as him and that suffered police brutality in their own skin. The Justice Centers are the first steps for the victims, while the PRWG-K tries to fill the gap in data left by the government and its refusal to acknowledge this problem.
“We launched ‘Missing Voices Kenya’ in August 2018. It was created as a response to data gaps in enforced disappearances which is rampant, and police have always denied the reports because every organization had its own data”, points out Joseph Kariuki, Editor of the project.
As Kariuki denounces, when confronted with human rights reports or media accounts, authorities continue to either deny or dismiss the existence of government policy on enforced disappearances and extrajudicial executions. However, for this legal professional “you cannot argue with numbers”.
Since its creation, ‘Missing Voices’ has documented 2,170 cases of enforced disappearance or extrajudicial killings. Out of these cases, 153 enforced disappearances and 285 extrajudicial killings have been verified, while other 1,732 cases are still to be investigated.
“If you can track the killings well, you end up having a clearer picture of the state of extrajudicial killings in the country. ‘Missing Voices’ also writes victims stories and provides a platform for the families to agitate justice”, states Kariuki.
This organization publishes each confirmed story on its platform, giving the name and surname of the victims, as well as providing a photograph and data that can help resolve their case or discover the whereabouts of a missing person if he or she is still alive.
“Coming up with verified data is in itself a big success, however, we’ve also achieved other advances. For example, a family in Migori (western Kenya), which relatives disappeared in 2017, saw how the case was reopened just after it was published in our platform”, said Kariuki.
Susan Muthoni, 17 years-old, and mother of one, Isaac, was not so lucky. Since the death of her husband after a dispute with a police officer, she survives doing informal work, but for this young widow, it’s almost impossible to make ends meet just with a sporadic income.
According to the Federation of Kenya Employers (FKE), this African country is creating more casual jobs than formal ones. In 2016, the Kenyan Government accounted for 833,000 the number of jobs created, however, 90 % of them were informal, as the FKE stated.
The United Nations’ Economic Commission for Africa also named Kenya as one of the countries with a higher informal sector in Sub-Saharan Africa. Both in Kenya and Rwanda, three out of four workers are employed in the informal sector, a proportion that increases to over 80 % among women. With such an insecure work environment, losing one of the pillars of the family economy can be catastrophic for the future of these women and their children.
“You have to think as well about the women that are left behind with the kids. They are women and victims, which makes everything even more complicated. They are also worried because their children are brought up in a violent environment and that can make them take that direction”, continues Chindy.
There are more than a hundred Community Justice Centers distributed across Kenyan slums, however, achieving justice is usually an impossible task for these people, which most of the times, have almost no economic resources to take legal actions or don’t even have papers.
Not even Human Rights defendants are safe. Caroline Mwatha, ‘Carole’, an activist and manager in Dandora’s Community Justice Center went missing on February 6 this year after dropping her daughter off at school and running errands. Her body was found one week later after what police defined as a “botched abortion”.
Family members and colleagues of Mwatha said that they do not believe the police version of what happened to her. “We don’t buy the story that the police is telling us: it’s a made-up narrative to discredit Caroline and all human rights defendants in the country, explained Chindy soon after the death in a phone conversation.
When I talked to her back in December for this story, Mwatha explained that the center received systematic threats from the authorities aimed at forcing its closure. “Most of the times, we get threats in the crime scenes. Because of the passion we have, we don’t give up. We need to support our community”, she said.
As she explained, she started volunteering out of despair. After suffering police brutality for not accepting to have sex with an officer, she felt “confused and cried” and found out that there was no one to help her. Since then and until her death, she started to bring support to the families, collect money for the burials and, most importantly, pushing the investigations on these cases.
Now her family and friends are looking for justice, as well as women like Mama Vic or Susan. When asked if she still keeps hope alive, Mama Vic does not doubt: “We will achieve justice. At least now someone is listening to us”.
