Rape Horrors by Police
27 Oct 2008
This brings to the centre the extreme urgency of implementation of the Sexual Crimes Act that first made its appearance in the last parliament but unfortunately its implementation was apparently sabotaged by the infamous 9th parliament.
According to the Waki Commission Report there was a massive conspiracy by the police across the country right from the very top officers to their juniors to cover up sex crimes committed by the police and others at the height of the post 2007 general elections violence that rocked the country and nearly tore it apart.
Over the years the media in the country has consistently reported accusations leveled at police officers who have raped women while on duty, some of them alleged suspects to have committed one crime or another but became victims while in police custody. The cases in most instances are never fully prosecuted and the officer suspects brought to book, most are simply swept under police carpets before reaching any court.
Unlike the Kriegler report, Waki explicitly documents how the police instead of giving protection to the helpless and terrorized women fleeing from the perpetrators of violence, turned into brutal animals of horror raping these women before their husbands and children.
The terrible aspect of this horror is the fact that they were doing so at gun point. Guns that were bought maintained and paid for by monies from the raped women taxpayers as well as their husbands who watched helplessly as their wives were criminally assaulted and humiliated by police whose salaries are also paid by the victims so that they and their property can be protected by the police officers.
Says a section of the report: "The police and General Service Unit (GSU) officers were rapists. In some cases collaborating, with marauding violent gangs pursuing the fleeing women. The women victims of the violence were happy to see the police officers as they fled their tormentors to save their lives only for the officers to turn against them and rape them."
The Waki Commission whose report was presented to President Mwai Kibaki and Prime Minister, Raila Odinga on October 15, 2008 says that it had received harrowing evidence during its investigations detailing how the police officers brutally raped the women in their houses in front of their children and husbands, while others on the way as their fled and even those in refugee camps.
It reports: "The commission was deeply troubled by the apparent lack of police interest in preventing and investigating sexual violence in general. The failure by the police to police itself and take action against officers suspected to be involved in sexual crimes during this period. Considering the number of allegations leveled at police officers by witnesses as well as victims of sexual violence, we were deeply troubled."
Ironically senior police officers including the commissioner of police who appeared before the commission, though submitted statistics on crimes committed during the deadly post election violence, they did not include sexual crimes. The multi-billion dollar question here is why when even government hospitals did?
At the height of the violence itself, media reports were replete with horror reports of sexual crimes against women virtually in all provinces which were rocked by the violence, failure by the police to make arrests of suspects involved in this crime and even failure to record any statements can only point to one conclusion - massive conspiracy to cover up.
When the commissioner of police, Hussein Ali appeared before the commission and was being cross examined by one of the commission lawyers on reports/allegations of police involvement in killings during the mayhem, he vehemently defended the police officers - can he now defend the force's bullets that were used in killing 405 people including innocent children? How many officers have been arrested and prosecuted for killing alone? What about the nearly 100 women felled by police bullets?
The report documents that according to the commissioner of police there were no cases of rapes reported during and after the post 2007 general elections mayhem. "But evidence on the ground suggests the contrary. The police deliberately refused to record statements from women who had been raped," says the Waki report.
Why did they deliberately refuse to record statements from the rape victims? What are the implications of such attitude to any ordinary observer? However, the biggest question that may go down un-answered for an eternity is how many victims were threatened and intimidated against reporting? How many female children were rape victims of these same officers but remain silent in abject fear unable to report even before the Waki Commission?
The report documents: "Most of the victims were poor women raped in their households where they were trapped before their children and spouses in the slums like Kibera, Mathare as well as other places by youthful gangs numbering up to twenty, police and GSU officers and even their own husbands."
Most of the women who were gang raped by their spouses, according to the Waki Commission involved mostly marriages where women were from communities that appeared to support political parties that the husbands were against, for instance if the husband was sympathetic or supported the Party of National Unity (PNU) and the wife from a community perceived to be sympathetic or supportive of the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) she was victimised.
The commission reports that it had heard "harrowing reports from victims and witnesses where husbands were abandoning their wives and children after witnessing them brutally raped before them and their children.
The report says that most of the rapes committed by the GSU and the police officers were motivated by ethnic hatred from the officers against the victims they were raping, yet they are supposed to be disciplined and above ethnic hatred or sympathies with duty epitomized in their motto ‘service to all' as the overriding factor.
"Sixty-eight per cent of the women who were raped were married, divorced or widowed aged between seventeen to sixty eight years. 900 victims of sexual crime were treated at the Nairobi hospital in Nairobi alone, which was just a mere tip of the iceberg considering similar cases in other violence hit provinces," says the report.
It goes on: "Despite the police denials and failure to document any sexual crimes, it was known to anyone living in Kenya at the time that there were many allegations of sexual violence through out the country." The provinces worst hit by the violence included Rift Valley, Nyanza, Central, Western, Nairobi and Coast.
The commission castigates the police that to merely blackout the sexual crimes offences or claim that there were no formal reports seems akin to burying ones head in the sand and does not speak of one's strong will to uphold the law as it relates to sexual offending since even the limited figures the police dared to report were a far cry from those reported by the medical institutions both public and private.
Ironically in some cases where the commission held its sittings and hearings, police reported to the commission that they had not received any cases relating to sexual offences when local hospitals and Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) were busy attending to victims of sexual assaults and rapes.
The report also documents that other women victims were raped in the Internally Displaced Persons' (IDP) camps not only by the police officers but also by service providers and marauding criminal gangs spreading terror, violence and mayhem.
The Waki Commission strongly recommends that the Sexual Offences Act should be implemented as well as development of new policies and guidelines in the enforcement process, compensation of the sexual crimes victims and psychological; support none of which those affected has been a beneficiary to ten months after the deadly episodes.
