There is no doubt in my mind that Major General Mohammed H. Ali stands out as a more effective police commissioner than most of his predecessors. Not only was he been able to steer the police force towards greater effectiveness in clumping down on out-of-control crime, he partially reined in runaway police misconduct.
Nevertheless, is Ali a victim of his own meagre successes? After reducing crime by close to 7 per cent, revitalising and re-equipping the police force and rescuing it from a collapsing behemoth, he took to vigorous chest-thumping and untoward arrogance. He ranks as Kenya's perfect embodiment of Narcissus or Narkissos, he of Greek mythology who was too absorbed by his own beauty. In television interviews, Ali has perched himself at the top of Kenya's intelligence matters, dismissing everyone else as illiterate on matters of security.
On issues of law and order, Ali relished speaking of the folly of civil society activists. He accused them of thinking that everything could be corrected by activism. Not only did he dismiss them as lacking any knowledge on matters relating to law and order, he was derisive of their whole enterprise of activism. Activism, he believed, could not ensure peace, law and order for this country. His attitude towards civil society organisations (CSOs) has been intolerant and contemptuous.
Commissioner Ali also exhibited a masculinist inclination for toughness. He did not betray any element of emotion, perhaps seeking to avoid any appearance of weakness. He came through as a forceful policeman wont to use force. He was always straight-talking when threatening to invoke force. He also seemed aware of his unique status; that is, the rarity of an intelligent Kenyan police officer capable of intellectually defending himself and the force before any audience. He radiated the assured confidence of an officer capable of controlling the law and order sector in such a manner that the total good of all law abiding and peace loving Kenyans would be guaranteed.
Although he stood tall as Kenya's foremost police man and as the chief embodiment of knowledge and poise, the 2007 elections and their aftermath exposed the short sightedness of his arrogance and the inadequacy of his knowledge of peace issues in this country. It revealed the dangers of his professional macho demeanour especially in face of a society at war with itself. It is now obvious, after reading the Commission of Inquiry into Post-Election Violence (CIPEV) report, that the police force was as much at war against Kenyans as Kenyans were at war with each other. In many instances, the police killed as much as, if not more than, the marauding rioters.
The tragedy, of course, is that the police are supposed only to be enemies of those among us who threaten peace. It is supposed to be that arm of the state that executes the only reason that legitimates the existence of the state; that is, its monopoly over all forms of violence and the judicious exercise of legitimate force for the security of all citizens. The fact that the police were at war with Kenyans constitutes an abrogation of their responsibility in a manner worse than that of criminal gangs.
The fact that police often exceed their use of force and abuse on Kenyans is well known in society, even though the police repeatedly denied it before the post-election violence (PEV). When CSO pointed out numerous cases of extra-judicial killings targeted mostly at young men alleged to be Mungiki members, Ali not only denied this but also went to great lengths, using his spokesman Eric Kiraithe, to launch an attack against the Kenya National Human Rights Commission (KNHRC) for highlighting these incidences. Subsequently, Ali has turned everything into a referendum on whether these organizations have a right to speak on matters of security. He seems to have converted his own disdain for CSO into generalized police policy.
When claims of police brutality in Mt. Elgon emerged, the police commissioner did not just deny it, he went on to arrest Dr. Walter Wekesa Nalyanya who had assisted KNHRC to medically confirm these allegations. Furthermore, the police and military command went into a sprucing campaign. They sponsored an advert, aired one too many times on several television stations, in which the reality was massaged to give the impression that the forces were only up to the good of the dwellers.
We know that civil Society cannot afford to be careless in its work. As we have witnessed severally, any slight mistake on their part can opportunistically become the excuse for a state-backed or society-initiated backlash. We saw this when Justice Kriegler harassed the Kenyans for Peace, Truth and Justice. We know that the police would enjoy one incidence where civil society is guilty of spreading malicious rumours that can, as the police always say, ‘cause a breach of peace.' This is particularly so where issues of criminal harassment that leads to death are concerned.
Many of the CSOs working in Mt. Elgon had however done their homework and the police found no reason to institute the backlash. The Independent Medico-Legal Unit (IMLU), the NGO that investigated and reported on the Mt. Elgon situation in April 2008 had done its homework rather well and highlighted the culpability of the so-called disciplined forces. Its second report of August 2008, which was in response to the police and military denials of the first report, was appropriately titled ‘Double Tragedy.' It showed how dwellers who had been harassed by the Sabaot Land Defence Force (SLDF) were later on own also mistreated by the discplined forces.
No one doubts that the SLDF was a ragtag group of criminals and thugs driven by nothing that would benefit the Sabaot in general. They opportunistically used genuine grievances over land matters to unleash terror on innocent citizens and benefit directly through their extortionist ring. Not only did they murder innocent people, they often crudely cut off body parts, buried others alive and terrorised a whole community into dreadful silence. It took the government too long to act. When it acted, the response was (according to the Human Rights Watch report) ‘too much, too late.'
Government forces did not restore order by flushing out the SLDF. They borrowed a leaf from the 1970s CIA rollback strategies of terror; a mercenary type of response in which the whole pond is drained to catch one fish. In Mt. Elgon, the forces went for all the men in their sight. It did not matter whether one was disabled, old, or young; or if one had physical evidence of SDLF brutality.
In other words, they gendered their response and unleashed terror that hit the men particularly hard and left the women very extremely vulnerable. Medecins Sans Frontieres report of May 2008 tells heart-wrenching accounts of men who had their testicles pulled and who witnessed their wives repeatedly raped by soldiers. For the women, there is a particularly disturbing report. A woman in her late 20s recounts how soldiers walked into her house at night when her husband was away. They demanded to know why she was not pregnant and ‘generously' offered, in her own words, to ‘make me pregnant.' One soldier proceeded to forcibly pull down her pants and ‘forced himself inside me' as the ‘other soldier sat next to the bed watching the scene of action and next he took his turn and they went on and on.'
These tales of deranged masculine sexual conquest and brutality, long known to be in the arsenal of war, were repeatedly denied by the men at the head of disciplined forces. Yet, they cannot be from Karaithe's [the police spokesman who claimed that one news footage had been computer-generated by newsmen] imaginative Rambo-type computer-generated collage. It would take a thoroughly unstable woman to sit before a professional investigator and recreate lurid scenes of perverse sexual horror like the ones exposed by IMLU, Medecins Sans Frontieres, KNHRC and Human Rights Watch. If both men and women were raped by the SLDF, this situation was compounded by reports of rape by soldiers, which are too many and widespread to be dismissed as cheap rumours.
Does Commissioner Ali care?
Well, he did not seem to care until the CIPEV report forced him out of his somnambulism. On page 249 of the report, the commission notes: ‘Notwithstanding the abundance of information the Commission received about the nature, numbers, and manifestations of post election sexual violence from the above organizations and from other witnesses, the Commissioner of police, Major General Hassan Ali ... told the Commission the police had not collected any information or statistics on crime such as rapes.' The report then loudly wonders ‘over the apparent lack of interest of the police in sexual violence in general and particularly in not taking action against their own officers who perpetrated the crimes.'
The answer can be found on page 370 of the same report, which correctly accuses the police of ‘a misplaced arrogance' that they would ‘always be able to control what came up.' Ali's responses to the Commission aptly illustrate this arrogance. Yet, it is CIPEV's verdict on page 369 that ‘the Police were simply too far off the mark' in terms of preparedness for dealing with PEV which begs the question if Ali still maintains that only his police know about security.
The CIPEV reports verifies many of the complaints Kenyans have made about the police for ages now. Ali has an attitude which the Commission confirmed. After all, unlike most government agencies, it is the police that refused to submit necessary documents to the Commission citing ‘state secrets' as their reason. Earlier, Ali had boldly stated to the Commission that PEV ‘could not have been foreseen;' this in spite of the fact that the National Security Intelligence Service provided, in CIPEV's words on page 362, evidence that was ‘uncannily accurate in its forecasting of just what scenarios were likely to eventuate should either Odinga or Kibaki win.'
By far the greatest callousness of the Police was in the area of Gender Based Election Violence (GBEV). We have a force that refuses to be pro-active on an issue as important and sensitive as GBEV. Their cavalier attitude begins at the top. The Police Commissioner, CIPEV shows on page 257, not only ‘testified that he could not determine whether sexual violence was fit to be reported' but also claimed to be ‘unaware that anyone had been arrested and charged for commission of such crimes.' Other than failing to collect data from known sources within civil society, CIPEV rightly accuses the police of refusing to receive reports from victims, of being divided in their responses along ethnic lines and of asking victims to choose which one issue between ‘a house being burned or being raped' should be admitted as reported.
Should such callousness be admitted in modern society? Does this mean that the crimes that can and ought to be reported should be masculine? Why is it that where feminine issues come up, our police are averse to thinking about them and taking action?
According to CIPEV on page 257, ‘the involvement of state security agents in the perpetration [sic] of sexual violence and the fear of incriminating themselves may partly explain why the police omitted data on sexual violence in the reports they presented to the Commission.' The police, the report notes, exhibited ‘a callous indifference if not outright hostility to victims who often experienced multiple tragedies....'
The women who volunteered this information are silent heroes in our midst, abandoned by the police and a live memory of our sick society. They recounted gang rapes by the police and rape of mothers before their daughters who were, in turn, also raped. In one case, the daughter became pregnant and had a miscarriage. In another instance that fits the profile of our police force, a named police officer at Pangani Police Station actually demanded a bribe before taking up a case. Reports that perpetrators of rape were arrested and released are a sobering reminder that, as a society, we have fully lost our innocence.
GBEV will rank as the worst police misdemeanour ever. Unless it is meant to allow Ali to atone for his callous remarks to the Commission, the task force Ali has set up is a little too late. That GBEV has been going on for far too long is the worst indictment of the police and the patriarchal complicity of all of us. Women organizations have highlighted the issue of GBEV as many times as we have had elections and violence. It is time men woke up to the reality that if you have or belong to a family, whether that family is dominated by men or women, sexual violence affects you as much as any woman. The CIPEV report has done its part to awaken us. Will we rise up?
Godwin R. Murunga