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

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the February 14 killings at the Wagalla airstrip, some six kilometers from Wajir
town.
But for failing to keep quiet about the issue, Tonelli was in 1985 ordered to leave
Kenya in the hope that the ghosts of the Wagalla massacre would be laid to rest.
She crossed the border and entered Somalia in yet another ‘forgotten part of the
world’ as she called it.
Back in Kenya, Tipis had maintained that only 57 people had died yet Tonelli,
who arrived here in 1969, talked of hundreds.
After she settled in Borama, aid workers say she escaped banditry attacks, death
threats, kidnappings and beatings until the day she was finally gunned down.
“I still don’t know why they killed her,” wrote David Brown of the Washington
Post, who had had an opportunity to interview her in Borama.
And like in Wajir, she had fought hard against tuberculosis, illiteracy, blindness,
malnutrition and female genital mutilation. In Borama, she set up a camp for
Aids, and was last year voted the
recipient of the Nansen Refugee Award, the top recognition by the UN High
Commissioner for Refugees.
Awarded
The award, named after Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen, is given to
individuals or organisations that have distinguished themselves in work on behalf
of refugees.
That Tonelli never spoke about Wagalla tells much about her: she was not an
activist.
Adecade earlier she had told the Washington Post that she didn’t believe that her
life was a sacrifice. “It is an idea that makes me laugh. I often felt that there was
nobody on earth who had such a privilege to be able to live like this,” she said.
Tonelli, the daughter of an economist and the second in a family of five children,
grew up near Bologna in Italy and wanted to spend her life in Africa.
“My family did not want it. So I took the first chance,” she once said.
Holding diplomas in tropical medicine, community medicine and TB control,
Tonelli had for years remained the one person who could help unravel the
Wagalla mystery. The crime had unfolded before her very eyes and among a
community in which she had set up outreach clinics.
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