why ambassador bethuel kiplagat should quit for kenya to attain ...

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4. Torture, Detention, Exile, Disappearances, Rape, and Persecution of Opponents
Over the last forty years, the state used its enormous power and resources to
vanquish all those deemed its opponents. The torture of government critics
became state policy. Hundreds, if not thousands, have been tortured and
mistreated by the previous governments. Many were killed in the process, while
others were maimed for life. Some were castrated. Women and girls were raped.
The Nyayo House Torture Chambers, which the Task Force visited, and which the
Minister for Justice and Constitutional Affairs has termed a national monument of
shame, stands as the living testimony of the brutality of the state. It was a
dungeon where political opponents were stripped of their humanity and subjected
to the cruelest of torture tactics. Many other state opponents were detained
without trial or jailed on trumped up politically motivated charges. Some, like Mr.
Kenneth Matiba, were ruined beyond repair by detention. Some were disappeared,
while others, like the celebrated writer Professor Ngugi wa Thiong’o, were forced
into exile. The list goes on. A truth commission must investigate these abuses.
5. Politically Instigated Ethnic Clashes
Throughout the 1990s, the Moi government instigated and at times directed the
ignition and execution of ethnic clashes against communities that were deemed to
be in opposition to it. Directed at so-called opposition communities and zones,
these clashes exploited the volatile question of land as their pretext. Communities
that had lived peaceably together for decades were suddenly turned against each
other as the KANU state sought to stamp out opposition to its rule.
Various investigations and reports by the Law Society of Kenya, the churches, the
Kiliku Report, the Akiwumi Report, and many others established beyond the
shadow of a doubt that KANU, its senior officials, their allies, many of its
members of parliament and local politicians, the police and security forces, and
the provincial and district administrations either instigated or carried out attacks
against individuals and communities deemed opponents of the regimes.
In both the Rift Valley and Coast Provinces, in particular, Kenyans from certain
communities were termed “foreigners” and either killed outright, their lands
forcibly taken, their property and livestock confiscated or destroyed, women and
girls from their communities raped and beaten, and their lives irreparably ruined.
Many of these “foreigners” were forcibly exiled from the provinces and dared to
return. Thousands were killed and hundreds of thousands internally displaced in
the so-called land clashes. Deep wounds have been left on the Kenyan psyche by
these clashes. The epicenters of the clashes, such as Molo, Enoosopukia, Likoni,
and many other places must form a central component of the terms of reference of
a truth commission, and must be fully investigated.
The truth commission ought to establish culpability and make recommendations
for redressing these most abominable of violations.
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