Kenyans 'safer in gangs' hands'

2008-02-01 08:10

Katharine Houreld

Nairobi - As Kenya splits along ethnic lines and the body count spirals, desperate residents say they are turning to once-hated gangs for protection.

And some say politicians are using gang members as militias.

One gang recruiter in Nairobi said she received about 30 calls daily from people seeking membership, and politicians - including a government minister - were offering money for weapons to fuel the furor over the presidential election.

At a camp for displaced families in Nairobi's Mathare slum, she led the crowd in a Kikuyu song before asking those whose homes were burned or looted whether they would consider joining the Mungiki gang. Much of the post-election violence had pitted President Mwai Kibaki's Kikuyu against other ethnic groups.

"If we are many, we can go and chase those people," she explained, the ragged crowd staring at her designer sunglasses and gold high heels delicately poised above the mud. "This is the time to join us."

Circumstantial evidence

Hands shot up around the circle.

Elsewhere in the slums, recruitment was underway by gangs associated with other tribes. The Taliban, for example, was made up of members of opposition leader Raila Odinga's Luo people.

The origins of its name were unclear, but appeared more inspired by the Afghan group's fearsome reputation than its extremist Islamic ideology.

The Mungiki began as a quasi-religious group dedicated to promoting Kikuyu culture in the 1980s and flourished during Kikuyu leader Uhuru Kenyatta's failed presidential bid in 2002. The Taliban and other ethnic militias, like the Sungu-Sungu and the Chinkororo, emerged in response, members said.

The state-funded Kenya National Commission on Human Rights said strong "circumstantial evidence" linked the police to more than 450 execution-style murders of young men last year during a crackdown on the Mungiki. The police denied it.

Unofficial arm of the government

The crackdown ended two months before the December 27 election. The violence that followed had claimed more than 850 lives. Odinga said: "Why are we seeing Mungiki still harassing people here?"

He added: "Mungiki is the unofficial arm of the government. They are the ones who are being brought here because the government wants it to appear as if it was a civilian thing. So the police provide the cover."

But police chief Ali Hussein said he was not aware of any gang mobilisation within Nairobi.

Slum residents accused police of firing at random, killing innocent civilians, or simply refusing to come into the slums when the gangs prowl the alleyways at night.

"The head officer said, 'Let them fight each other. We will come in the morning to pick up the bodies'," said a member of the Taliban gang.

He said he called police to report the murder of a Luo friend in the Mathare slum by a group of Kikuyus. "When they didn't come, we had to go out to protect ourselves," he said.

- AP