"I wish my life ended that day, I wish I had died
there and then," 75-year-old Mohammed Osman Gosar tells me as he wipes
tears from his eyes. We are in the town of Wajir in Kenya's arid North
Eastern Province filming Not Yet Kenyan, a documentary for the Al Jazeera Correspondent series on the volatile history of Kenya's ethnic Somali population.
Mohammed is referring to February 10, 1984, the day of the Wagalla
Massacre - one of the worst atrocities in Kenya's history. On that day
his wife and daughter were raped in front of him by soldiers who then
took him to the Wagalla airstrip outside Wajir town. At the airstrip,
where hundreds of men were interned, he witnessed soldiers behead his
four brothers.
Thirty years later Mohammed cannot narrate the events of that day without crying.
The Wagalla massacre, as the mass murder at the airstrip came to be
known, was the result of an effort to disarm Kenyan-Somali clans that
were engaged in a conflict over grazing land in Wajir.
Survivors narrate how they were forced to strip naked and lie on
scalding pebbles on the ground and held for five days without food or
water. Some, they say, were burnt to death when clothes doused in petrol
were put on them, while those who tried to escape were shot. The bodies
were not buried but instead dumped in nearby bushes where they were
eaten by hyenas.
The government maintains that only 57 people were killed but survivors say the figure was in the thousands.
A hushed history
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| The outskirts of Wajir saw the brutal Wagalla massacre as Kenyan-Somali clans battled over grazing land [EPA] |
The events of February 1984 remain an extremely controversial and
hushed-up chapter of Kenya's history. It was not, however, the only
massacre committed by Kenyan forces against my people, the
Kenyan-Somalis.
In fact, just four years before Wagalla, my family and I survived
another massacre. This one occurred in my hometown of Garissa, 360km
northeast of Nairobi, when, in reaction to the killing of four civil
servants by armed bandits, the same security forces that should have
protected the lives and property of innocent civilians slaughtered them.
As often happened then and continues to happen today, the government
fell back on its policy of collectively punishing an entire community
for the crimes of a few.
On the evening of November 11, 1980,
gunshots could be heard across town and flames filled the air as the
security forces began torching homes and shooting almost everyone they
encountered. What started in the centre of town soon reached its
furthest corners as police and military officers, some atop lorries and
others on foot, embarked on their macabre mission.
Along with my
mother, sister and brother, I managed to flee our home just moments
before it was set alight. My father had been picked up earlier that
evening at his place of work and put in jail.
A scene of horror
and pandemonium unfolded as all of the town's residents attempted to
escape; some succeeded, others were shot dead.
Witnesses recount
how bodies were piled onto lorries until they could take no more and
dumped into the nearby Tana River. Those that were not dumped, were
taken elsewhere and burnt.
The following morning the entire surviving population of the town
was interned at the local football field. But any hope the town's
residents had that those who had killed their loved ones would be
punished was quickly dashed when GG Kariuki, Kenya's then interior
minister who had been sent in to manage the aftermath of the massacre,
delivered his speech.
"Although some houses were burnt down last
night, some people and property destroyed, our forces must be commended
for their restraint and the way they conducted themselves at a time
[when] they were hunting for the armed bandits who killed the four civil
servants," he said.
"As I was on the plane, I saw many houses were burnt, but that was
because our security men were chasing people armed with sophisticated
weapons. On an occasion like that a gun does not choose a target."
The
history of brutality meted out to residents of north eastern Kenya can
be traced back to the time of the country's independence. In around
1963, a secessionist movement broke out with the covert and overt
support of the Republic of Somalia. It led not only to the Shifta War,
but to hostility by the post-independence Kenyan government and further
complicated the relationship between the authorities in Nairobi and the
Northern Frontier Districts, as the region was then known.
Thus
70 years of hostile colonial neglect was further exacerbated by a
secessionist war, the end of which, in the late 1960s, did nothing to
improve the plight of locals. Today, the region remains the least
developed part of the country.
A tumultuous past
Many years later I found
myself - as the first independent journalist from the province - tasked
with not only reporting its current affairs but also its tumultuous
past. As a reporter for Kenya's biggest daily newspaper, The Nation,
I spent much of my spare time in the library looking for documentation
of the major events that had scarred my region. I was shocked by the
dearth of material on them.
When I put this to my editor, he
decided that both the Wagalla and Garissa massacres warranted being
revisited, but that we needed a news peg to do so. We did not have to
wait long.
In August 1998, a few days after the bombing of the US embassy in
Nairobi, a plane carrying khat, the leafy narcotic Somalis love to chew,
landed at the Wagalla airstrip - the scene of the 1984 massacre. It was
the first landing there since the killings and happened because, in the
atmosphere of heightened security in the wake of the bombing, the pilot
had been refused permission to land at the Wajir military airport.
The
residents of Wajir responded angrily, and their ensuing protests gave
me a reason to revisit a pogrom the Kenyan authorities would have rather
forgotten.
It is a privilege to once again be able to tell the
world about the violence inflicted upon my people by those charged with
protecting them. Throughout the filming of Not Yet Kenyan, I
have asked the different people I have encountered in the province
whether they consider themselves to be Kenyan citizens. Almost all
answered in the affirmative. And yet, 50 years after independence,
through no fault of our own, Kenyan identity continues to elude
Kenyan-Somalis. |
Scores of people are trapped in their homes, Kenya's Red Cross has tweeted
