From Horror to Hopelessness

"I fled Mogadishu in July [2008] because men wearing ski-masks were raping so many women near our home. Our family gave me money and when I reached Dadaab I paid a smuggler $500 to take us to Nairobi. A minibus drove me and 30 other refugees by night through the bush from Ifo camp towards Garissa town [100 kilometers south of Dadaab]. Near Garissa the smugglers told us to get out because they had seen a vehicle's lights. One of the smugglers walked through the bush with us. Suddenly seven people with machetes and sticks approached us, beat us on our heads and backs and stole all our money. Then the minibus came back, the men ran away and we continued our journey. The driver paid bribes to the police in Garissa to allow us to leave town.

We stayed for two nights under the open sky in the bush just beyond Garissa and then continued. At the first police checkpoint we saw the driver pay police bribes. We continued to Mwingi town where police told the driver to collect $10 from everyone because "this checkpoint has not been paid for yet." After the robbery in the bush we had no money so the police arrested all of us. We were split up. One group, including me, was taken to Mwingi police station and the other to Garissa police station.

In the Mwingi police station, I was held in a cell for 12 days with other women from the bus. Every morning, lunch and evening the police beat the older women on their heads and backs with plastic rods. The police shouted things like "why are you leaving Somalia and coming to Kenya?" Every day the police said they would release us if we paid KSh 20,000 each ($25o). The police said we should get our relatives in Kenya or Somalia to pay for us. In the end they said they had to deport us because Kenyan newspapers had written about us and the government did not want to appear to be soft on Somalis.

The police then transferred me and others to Garissa police station for one night. When we arrived, the police made us line up facing a wall and said we should "think about never coming back to Kenya." Then police officers hit all of us three or four times on the back and head with a stick. That night the Kenyan men in a cell next to ours, which was separated only by bars, urinated in plastic bags and threw them at us and cursed at us in Swahili all night long. We complained to the police but they did nothing to stop them.

In the end the police drove me and other refugees in trucks from Garissa police station to the border and told us to walk back to Doble in Somalia. Three weeks later I tried again and managed to reach Nairobi in the back of a truck with no windows.

Human Rights Watch interview with 15-year-old Somali girl in Nairobi, October 23, 2008