From Responsibility to Response: Assessing National - Brookings

Kenya National Response to Internal Displacement: Achievements, Challenges and Lessons from Kenya
National Response to Internal Displacement:
Achievements, Challenges and Lessons from Kenya
Overview of Internal Displacement
in Kenya
The political crisis that engulfed Kenya after the
2007 disputed election results led to the displacement
of 663,921 people across the country.
However, this was not the first time the country had
experienced violence-induced displacement; Kenya
has had a long history of forced displacement linked to
conflicts over space among different identity groups in
multiethnic regions. In Kenya, as in most agriculturebased
economies, those who control land also control
economic and political power. The competition for control
of land, particularly in the Rift Valley, has been protracted,
resulting from mutually exclusive claims based
on property rights by migrant groups and assertion of
cultural heritage rights by indigenous groups. This has
made the Rift Valley the theatre of the most vicious episodes
of violence and displacement, particularly since
the transition to democracy in the early 1990s.
Identity-based politics and contested land rights are
the cause and consequence of cycles of displacement in
multiethnic regions. The relationship between political
affiliation, ethnic identity and land ownership form
the basis for contestation, whereby members of ethnic
groups associated with rival political opinion are labelled
‘outsiders’ and violently ejected from their farms.
In this regard, contested claims about ‘who owns the
land’ and therefore who has the right to vote or be voted
for on that land becomes a mobilising slogan in the
competition for political power. Political strategies to
disenfranchise perceived hostile voters and the culture
of impunity for political elites cause displacement to
become protracted. Conflicts over land make it difficult
for IDPs to return to their farms and for the landless to
purchase land elsewhere.
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The government’s apparent failure to effectively address
impunity and “historical injustices” over land access
in the Rift Valley and Coast provinces attenuates the
realization of durable solutions for conflict-induced
IDPs. This has resulted in increased migration to urban
areas and the establishment of transit sites from which
returnees commute to their farms during the day. Other
IDPs have decided to sell or exchange their land and
migrate permanently from ethnically heterogeneous
regions to safer areas, a coping mechanism that inadvertently
seems to support ethnic cleansing. Similarly,
the government’s intervention to buy land for landless
IDPs far from where they were displaced also seems to
result in that unintended outcome.
Apart from political violence and “ethnic clashes,”
internal displacement in Kenya is caused by conflict
over natural resources, particularly among pastoralist
groups; natural disasters such as floods, landslides,
drought and famine; incursions into Kenyan territory
by armed militia from Sudan, Ethiopia and Somalia;
infrastructure development projects such as the construction
of roads; and environmental conservation
projects. Seven and a half thousand households have
been evicted from forests across Kenya] to conserve
the environment. 1 The number of IDPs in Kenya is
contested as different sources provide unreliable estimates.
The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre
(IDMC) suggests there are about 200,000 IDPs while
1 These evictions were to restore forested areas and protect
water catchments. The need to remove those encroaching
on forests was widely supported by Kenyans but the
manner of eviction raised public outcry because it was
done without notice and very violently, in disregard of
international eviction laws and Kenya’s own Eviction
Guidelines.