NAOMI CIDI
October 10, 2015
The Senate wants a Select Committee to investigate the use of Sh15 billion for the resettlement of IDPs of the 2007-08 post-election violence.
Part of the reason they are investigating this arises from the perception that different categories of IDPs were treated differently, mostly for political reasons.
I personally think the Senate is looking at this matter too narrowly by focusing only on the survivors of the PEV.
There are many other examples and cases of people who have been violently dispossessed of homes, property and livelihoods in a context that did not involve election violence of any kind.
A tragic example of this is the ongoing Dunga Unuse slum evictions in Mombasa that have attracted the attention and loud and detailed condemnation of Amnesty International.
Amnesty has demanded an end to the forcible evictions and demolitions and accused the international financial institutions, which have funded the roads expansion programme that is the pretext for the brutal displacements of failing to carry out adequate human rights due diligence.
By their charters, the international multilateral lending institutions are required to ensure none of their projects funded through their resources or partnerships with host governments contribute to human rights violations.
This is part of what Amnesty had to say: “International human rights standards are unequivocal; forced evictions are illegal; they are never justified, even where people do not have a legally recognised right to the land or house they occupy.”
And yet, as regular readers of this column or anyone else who knows anything at all about the Coast, will already be aware, this sort of mass eviction has been standard operating procedure in the coastal region for decades.
Defining ‘internally displaced persons’
The latest evictions of roughly 100 people are in fact not at all spectacular by Coast’s standards. We have seen much worse. The use of bulldozers to flatten the modest houses in which villagers had lived for decades. The clearing of slums, with armed youths and policemen ready to smash the heads of any who resist. The destruction of rudimentary schools and churches. All these have at some point been witnessed in one corner or another of the coast. The end result is always the same – the uprooted lives of people who just a few days earlier had been quietly going about their business in a country which they believed was their own, and where they would be protected.
So, here is my question: Whether in an urban slum or in a rural village, if a gang of youths armed with crude weapons and supported by armed police turn up to evict you from the only home you have ever known, you face a dire future indeed. When the earthmovers come in to ensure there are no structures left standing in that place you call home, you are truly down and out.
When this happens to you, are you or are you not an internally displaced person?
Is there really any fundamental difference between the violent campaigns of dispossession which took place in the Rift Valley over the past few decades, and the illegal and violent evictions of the Coast? Is it not true that in both cases, the violence produced a large group of displaced persons, who were desperately in need of resettlement?
I would insist the Senate Select Committee, if it is serious about a real probe of how IDPs are treated in this country, should also travel to the Coast and investigate the consequences of the dozens of large-scale evictions and the hundreds of smaller evictions that have taken place over the past 30-40 years.
‘Dunga Unuse’ stinks to high heaven
Dunga Unuse is a disgusting place name and activity. These two Kiswahili words in fact comprise a complete sentence, all you have to do is insert a full point. They mean “just pierce and smell it”. What “it” is the hearer’s imagination is left to sort out using its own devices. It cannot be anything but unpleasant.
The Dunge Unuse forcible evictions in Chaani, Changamwe, stink to high heaven of injustice. These people are also Kenyans. They have also been illegally thrown out of their homes. They have been subjected to extreme violence and they have seen their homes and livelihoods destroyed.
Amnesty went on: “Forced evictions are illegal and we hope this incident will set an important precedent. Kenyan authorities must learn from this and ensure that forced evictions, so common in Kenya, become a thing of the past. This case demonstrates how communities that organise and act collectively can challenge injustices and claim their rights.”
The Senate Select Committee should recommend compensation mechanisms as well as resettlement options.
The sheer lack of imagination and awareness of the big picture and inhumanity of the land-grabbers who target the Coast are mind-boggling. Here they are attracting negative international publicity to Kenya and at the same time tripping up both the donor and corporate investors on the question of human rights. They are giving us a lesson in historical injustices perpetrated in real time.
Kenya does not need the spectacle of the land-grabber who scrambles for every available inch of land, and also for a lot that is not necessarily available. Imagine the levels of greed involved in making IDPs out of tens of thousands of Coast people just so some 'investor' can get to sell deliberately depopulated land to the big transformational infrastructure project stakeholders.
Tarnishing both Kenya and the Coast’s international brand
The Coast is Kenya’s most iconic tourism region. The wretched-of-the-earth kind of mass suffering that is occasioned by the land-grabbers tarnishes both Kenya’s and the Coast’s brand, and it adds one big zero to an incumbent government’s pursuit of support from the region.
We must fight this mindless cruelty from all directions, including as a matter of rescuing Kenya’s external brand name and reputation.
In early August, I looked at this phenomenon in the column headlined “What do we really mean by coastal historical injustices?” Under the subheading ‘They make entire villages disappear at the Coast’, I observed as follows:
“It is only at the Coast where villagers quietly going about their rustic business, tending to their farms and livestock, will suddenly find their agrarian idyll rudely interrupted by the roar of unannounced and unbidden earthmovers. These machines will be part of a larger brigade, the head of which is a security team often including National Police Service officers and hired goons brandishing metal rods.
And in the eye of this storm will be the official representatives of a ‘mystery’ tycoon or ‘investor’, waving copies of ‘title deeds’, ‘eviction’ and ‘court’ orders that no one ever gets to read, in fact they could be blank sheets of paper or torn from a comic book!
“In short, the life of that village comes to an abrupt end as the supposed ‘registered’ owner of all that land sends a small private army to lay claim on the only hope the villagers have known for 100 years.”
That was just eight weeks before the evictions that have attracted Amnesty International and are now making bad press headlines for Kenya around the world.
The injustice relating to illegal evictions has been a perennial plague at the Coast for far too long, and the time has come for all the leaders of the Coast to speak with one voice and vow NEVER AGAIN.
- See more at: http://www.the-star.co.ke/news/case-you-doubted-here-historical-injustice-real-time#sthash.beQNLkZQ.dpuf
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