A LAW UNTO THEMSELVES

It was a striking image: black-and-white passport-style photos of 24 men said to have disappeared after they were arrested or taken by police in Kenya. The faces filled a page in Kenya's Daily Nation newspaper this week. I don't know the histories of these men -- some smiling, some serious, some staring at the camera with that opaque look that you sometimes see in pictures of recently deceased people that makes you wonder if somehow they knew -- but the montage seemed a damning indictment of a judicial system that this week was roundly denounced by a U.N. official.
Philip Alston, a U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary and arbitrary executions, released a report on Wednesday, saying that Kenya's police chief and attorney-general should be fired because of hundreds of alleged murders in recent years by security forces. Alston, who spent 10 days in Kenya, looked into killings during violence after the 2007 elections which opposition leaders said were rigged, as well as extra-judicial executions linked to a police crackdown on the illegal Mungiki sect -- a feared criminal gang -- and on suspected rebels in Mount Elgon.
Alston said the police were a law unto themselves: "Killings by police in Kenya are systematic, widespread, and carefully planned. They are committed at will and with utter impunity on a regular basis by the Kenyan police," he said in his report. The security forces have denied the allegations.
Alston also implicates the army in torture and disappearances in Mount Elgon -- including units trained by Britain. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/africa/article5805036.ece
The government has said it would study the report -- after dismissive early comments by spokesman Alfred Mutua who accused Alston of almost infringing the sovereignty of the country. But the coalition is clearly not happy about the rapporteur's conclusions, which come almost exactly one year after post-election violence that killed around 1,300 people, including around 400 allegedly murdered by police.
The Alston report obviously heaps extra pressure on a struggling coalition team, crippled by a steady drip-drip of corruption revelations, paralysed by party posturing for power in 2012 and rapidly losing the confidence of the Kenyan public. Some civic leaders have warned of demonstrations if the police chief and attorney-general are not sacked -- but so far, Kenya does not strike me as a place of fervent protest. And yet, there is a groundswell of discontent fuelled by corruption scandals, government inaction over calls for a local tribunal to try those suspected of fomenting the deadly close-quarter 2007/8 killings and a perception that life is getting harder as the world economy slumps.http://www.eastandard.net/InsidePage.php?id=1144007669&cid=4
As an outsider and newcomer, I have been shocked by how many times I read in newspapers about shootouts in which four, five or six armed bandits are gunned down by police -- it seems to indicate a "shoot-to-kill" policy that offers no reprieve and demands a high price in civilian casualties. And yet, there seems to be no outcry.
I know crime is a serious problem here -- and bizarrely it seems to target those least able to pay the price in the poorer suburbs of Nairobi. Police have released a 30-minute documentary detailing the alleged crimes of the Mungiki sect, including testimony from people who said their relatives were beheaded when they refused to join the sect. However, there is something wrong if the only way to do that is to descend to the very level of the criminals you are trying to combat. http://www.nation.co.ke/oped/Opinion/-/440808/535264/-/43hjh7/-/
Is Kenya -- east Africa's strongest economy -- only able to deal with crime with a hail of often indiscriminate bullets?
The Alston report must offer some relief to those who have seen family members disappear and who feel vindicated in their beliefs that the police -- or alleged death squads like the notorious but officially disbanded Kwekwe -- are responsible. But how do you start to correct a problem which has its roots in a culture of impunity that goes far beyond the police? Alston described Attorney-General Amos Wako as the "embodiment of the phenomenon of impunity" but his removal alone will not miraculously solve the problem. Surely, such a monumental change in perception among Kenyan security forces must come from the very top. And for now, the government seems to be in no mind -- and perhaps in no position -- to enforce the rule of law.