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Kenya’s Internally Displaced: State-Sponsored Ethnic Violence37

In late 1991, concerted domestic and international pressure for political liberalization and respect for human rights forced the government of President Daniel arap Moi to legalize a multiparty system.  In August 1991, an internal democracy movement had demanded an end to the monopoly on power held by KANU, which had led Kenya since independence in 1963.  President Moi, however, claimed that the return to multiparty rule would threaten the stability of the state by polarizing the country along ethnic lines.  By the time multiparty elections were held at the end of 1992, it appeared that his claim was accurate: Kenya’s political parties had divided largely along ethnic lines, and “tribal clashes” in the rural areas of western Kenya had left hundreds dead and tens of thousands displaced.  The great majority of the victims came from the ethnic groups associated with the political opposition.  By 1993, Human Rights Watch/Africa estimated that 1,500 people had died in the clashes and that some 300,000 were displaced.  The clashes pitted Moi’s small Kalenjin tribe and the Maasai38  against the populous Kikuyu, Luhya, and Luo tribes.39   For a while, Kenya, previously an example of relative stability in the region, teetered on the brink of a low-level civil war.

The Moi government capitalized on unaddressed land ownership and tenure issues, dating back to the colonial period.  During colonial rule, pastoral ethnic groups on the land in the Rift Valley area were ousted to provide land to British settlers.  Following independence in 1963, much of this same land was used to settle squatter laborers who had been previously used as cheap agricultural labor on the settler farms.

After independence, Kenya became a de facto one-party state led by KANU, following the voluntary dissolution of the Kenya African Democratic Union (KADU)40 which had advocated ethnic regionalism and another party, the African People’s Party.  KANU rule under president Jomo Kenyatta was characterized by strong Kikuyu nationalist sentiments.  Moreover, the land issue was never fully addressed.  British settler interests were safeguarded, while no effort was made to deal with the competing claims of those pastoral ethnic groups who originally were ousted from the Rift Valley area by the British and the squatter laborers who subsequently settled on the land.  Consequently, large tracts of some of the best farmland in Kenya remain owned by British settlers.  For those settlers who wanted to sell their land, land settlement schemes were set up with the newly independent government to assist the former squatter labor to buy land either individually or through collective schemes.

Among the Kikuyu, unlike communal pastoral groups, such as the Maasai and Kalenjin, farming was an established practice.  Accordingly, many Kikuyus were eager to take advantage of the opportunity to purchase land.  Encouraged and assisted by President Kenyatta, a Kikuyu, large number of Kikuyus bought land in the Rift Valley in the 1960s and 1970s and moved from the overcrowded Central Province. These farms were at the center of the “ethnic” violence of the 1990s.  The instigators drew on the competing land claims in order to inflame violence among certain ethnic groups.

When Kenyatta died in 1978, Vice-President Moi succeeded him as president.  As Kenyatta had used political power to give disproportionate benefits to his own Kikuyu ethnic group, so Moi did for the minority Kalenjin.  Kalenjin and members of allied groups such as the Maasai were appointed to key positions within the local and national government administration.  In 1982, to forestall the registration of a new party by politicians discontented with the increasing severity of his rule, the constitution was amended to make Kenya a de jure one-party state.  An abortive coup attempt several months later was followed by a crackdown on all potential opponents.

By 1990, repression had provoked a vigorous movement in support of a multiparty system.  In August 1991, an opposition coalition calling itself the Forum for the Restoration of Democracy (FORD) was formed to demand multipartyism.  At least partly in response to these demands, the consultative group of bilateral donors to Kenya suspended more than U.S.$1 billion of balance of payments support and other aid in November 1991 on economic, governance, and human rights grounds.  One month later, in December 1991, article 2(a) of the Kenyan constitution, outlawing opposition parties, was repealed.

As the campaign for multiparty democracy gained strength and then developed into a full election campaign, violence broke out between different ethnic groups, particularly in the Rift Valley, Western and Nyanza provinces, the heart of the “white highlands” during colonial times.  The “tribal clashes,” as they became known, first broke out in October 1991 on the border of the three provinces, and rapidly spread to neighboring districts.  By December 1991, when parliament repealed the section of the constitution making Kenya a one-party state, large areas of western Kenya had been affected as tens of thousands were displaced from their land.

Eyewitness reports of the attacks were remarkably similar.  Bands of armed “Kalenjin warriors” attacked farms belonging to the Luo, Luhya, and Kikuyu, the groups from which FORD drew its main support, destroying homes and driving the occupants away or killing those who resisted.  The attackers were often dressed in an informal uniform of red or black t-shirts, their faces marked with clay in the manner of initiation candidates, and armed with traditional bows and arrows or pangas (machetes).  The attacks by the Kalenjin warriors had in almost all cases been carried out by organized groups.  Local Kalenjin often reported that outsiders had come to tell them that they had to fight and that the Kikuyu or others were planning to attack them.  They also reported that they were promised the land of those they attacked.  By contrast, where counter attacks had been mounted by Kikuyu, Luhya, or Luo, they were usually more disorganized in character, and by no means as effective in driving people away from their land.  The great majority of those displaced were members of the Kikuyu, Luhya, and Luo ethnic groups.

Although it seemed that the first outbreak of fighting was a simple land dispute between members of the Luo and Kalenjin groups, the violence rapidly took on the content and ethnic breakdown of the wider political debate.  FORD, the leader of the call for multipartyism, was dominated by Kikuyu, Luo and, to a lesser extent, Luhya, at both leadership and grassroots levels.  Although the coalition included members of other ethnic groups and based its political platform on the misuse of power by President Moi, it built much of its appeal on the resentment of its supporters to the domination of the government by Moi’s own ethnic group, the Kalenjin, and its allies, the Maasai.  Moi, for his part, portrayed the calls for multipartyism as an anti-Kalenjin movement and played on the fears of the minority ethnicities at the return to power of the economically dominant Kikuyu.  At the same time, he argued that Kenya’s multiethnic nature meant that multiparty politics would inevitably break down on ethnic lines leading to violence.

Kalenjin and Maasai politicians opportunistically revived the idea of majimboism, ethnic regionalism, championed by KADU at independence.  KANU politicians close to Moi revived the calls for majimboism as a way of countering the demand for multipartyism in Kenya.  Under the cover of a call for regional autonomy, prominent politicians demanded the forcible expulsion of all ethnic groups from the Rift Valley, except for those pastoral groups—Kalenjins, Maasai, Turkana and Samburu—that were on the land before colonialism.  A number of majimbo rallies were held calling for “outsiders” in the Rift Valley to return to their “motherland,”41 or for “true” Rift Valley residents to defend themselves from opposition plots to eliminate the indigenous peoples of the valley.  While many Kenyans have no quarrel with the concept of regionalism, per se, they viewed these calls as nothing less than ethnic expulsions. 

Although the rise of the violence was clearly linked to the emergence of multipartyism and drew on longstanding tensions between Kenya’s different ethnic groups, evidence rapidly emerged that the clashes of late 1991 and after, far from being the spontaneous reaction to competition among parties divided along ethnic lines, were deliberately provoked by elements within the government.  Soon after the clashes first erupted, rumors of the involvement of government ministers and officials began to circulate.  More systematic investigations followed.  In April 1992, the National Council of Churches of Kenya (NCCK), the coalition of Protestant churches that was heavily involved in providing relief to the victims, issued a report that linked high-ranking government officials.  It concluded: “These clashes were and are politically motivated...to achieve through violence what was not achieved in the political platform, i.e. forcing majimboism on the Kenyan people.”42  A further report issued by a coalition of groups in June 1992 stated that the attacks were organized under central command, often in the presence of local administration and security officers and that warriors who were arrested were often released unconditionally.43

Mounting pressure from opposition and church groups eventually forced President Moi to authorize an official investigation.  In September 1992, the parliamentary select committee appointed for this task delivered a sharply critical report confirming many of the earlier allegations, with all the more force because the committee, since it was formed before the elections, was made up only of KANU members.  The report concluded that the attacks had been orchestrated by Kalenjin and Maasai politicians close to the president, including the vice-president and some members of parliament.  The Kiliku report, as it came to be known after committee chair, cited evidence that the “Kalenjin warriors” carrying out the attacks had been paid by these officials for each person killed or house burnt down, and that government vehicles had transported the warriors to and from clash areas.  The report recommended that “appropriate action be taken against those administration officials who directly or indirectly participated or encouraged the clashes.”44  The report was not adopted by the full KANU parliament, and no effort was made by the government to implement its recommendations.

During 1992, the bloodshed escalated rapidly, as the opposition mobilized for the election.  The clashes decreased in intensity somewhat toward the end of the year, when international attention focused on the country during the lead-up to the elections which were finally held on December 29, 1992.  KANU was returned to power.45  The KANU victory was based on only 36 percent of the popular vote and owed much to the government’s manipulation of the electoral process and to the division—largely on ethnic lines —of FORD into two parties, FORD-Kenya and FORD-Asili, to which was added a breakaway group from KANU, the Democratic Party (D.P.).46

Many expected that the clashes would cease after Moi’s election victory.  Although some areas were restored to calm, periodic outbreaks of violence continued throughout 1993 and 1994.  In some areas, residents who returned to their farms after being driven off were attacked a second or even third time.  In April 1993, a further report was published by a group originally set up to monitor the elections, that confirmed previous conclusions of government instigation and complicity and documented attacks that took place following the election.47  Hopes that the attacks would end and that the displaced would be permitted to go home were raised yet again with the announcement of the joint Kenyan government/UNDP program in late 1993.  However, in 1994, violent clashes broke out again in the Burnt Forest and Molo areas respectively.  In 1994, the victims of the violence were increasingly Kikuyu.

Those whose lives were shattered by the killing and destruction fled to relatives, church compounds, nearby abandoned buildings, makeshift camps, and market centers.  Often, the shelters where the displaced have congregated for years at a time have been overcrowded, unsanitary, and inadequate.  Many were forced to create open makeshift structures of cardboard and plastic sheeting and to sleep outdoors.  Food was often cooked under filthy conditions and many of the displaced routinely suffered health problems, such as malaria, diarrhoea and pneumonia.  These conditions worsened during the rainy season.  Frequently, local government officials would downplay the magnitude of insecurity in their area and disperse victims without providing adequate assistance or security to permit them to return to their land, putting them at risk.

Children, who constituted an estimated 75 percent of the displaced, were deeply affected.  Many children had witnessed the death of close family members, and in some cases, had suffered injuries themselves.  As a result, reports of children displaying aggressive behavior or suffering nightmares were common.  The education of children was disrupted, in many cases permanently.  Where parents and volunteers attempted to create makeshift schools at camps, local government authorities were known to close down the schools, depriving the children of any formal educational opportunity whatsoever.48

A study of the situation of displaced women in one camp in Kenya found that women had suffered rape and other forms of sexual assault during the clashes.  After becoming displaced, the study found that gender inequalities were exacerbated.  Displaced women were victims of “rape; wife-beating by their husbands; sexually-transmitted diseases; poverty; manipulation; hunger, fear, anger, anxiety; trauma, despondency, dehumanization; heavy workload and physical fatigue.”49  The report also noted that the women shouldered a bigger burden: they often risked returning to farm on their land because the men feared death if they returned; they frequently ate less in order to feed their husbands and children first; and they often suffered miscarriages or complications in childbirth due to the lack of an adequate diet and the harsh living conditions.

Although there are those who assert that this ugly chapter in Kenya’s history is over and that the government has abandoned its policies of ethnic persecution, they forget the thousands of victims who still remain displaced and dispossessed.  If the Moi government has retreated from the use of large-scale ethnic attacks, it is because this tactic is no longer politically expedient or necessary.  The government’s policies of ethnic persecution and violence have served it well:  The government conceded to an international presence and was forced to retreat from a full-scale expulsion of select ethnic groups from the Rift Valley Province.  But, on the whole, it did not divert much from its intentions, and in large part succeeded in doing what it set out to do when it instigated the violence in 1991.




37Much of the information in this section was published previously in Human Rights Watch/Africa, Divide and Rule: State Sponsored Ethnic Violence in Kenya (New York: Human Rights Watch, November 1993); Human Rights Watch/Africa,”Multipartyism Betrayed in Kenya: Continuing Rural Violence and Restrictions on Freedom of Speech and Assembly,” A Human Rights Watch Short Report, vol. 6, no. 5, July 1994; Human Rights Watch, Playing the”Communal Card:” Communal Violence and Human Rights (New York: Human Rights Watch, April 1995), pp.97-112; and Human Rights Watch/Africa,”Kenya: Old Habits Die Hard: Rights Abuses Follow Renewed Foreign Aid Commitments,” A Human Rights Watch Short Report, vol. 7 no. 6, July 1995.

38The Kalenjin, which make up about 11 percent of the Kenyan population, consist of a number of smaller groups speaking Nilotic languages and sharing similar cultural traditions.  In precolonial times, the Kalenjin were largely pastoralist and the various subgroups had few political links; the sense of common”Kalenjin” identity was born as a result of British colonial policies and has strengthened since independence.  President Moi is a Kalenjin.  The Maasai are Nilotic-speaking pastoralists who originally grazed their animals over a wide area and were later restricted to a reserve along the border with Tanganyika (Tanzania).  The division between”pastoralist” and”cultivator” is, however, a generalization: most groups practiced a mixed agriculture.

39The Kikuyu, one of the largest ethnic groups in Kenya, make up about 21 percent of the population.  The Kikuyu are of a Bantu-language group, and were the group most immediately and drastically impacted by colonization, both by the alienation of their land and also in gaining the most rapid access to education and thus political influence.  The Luo, which make up approximately 13 percent of the population, speak a Nilotic language closer to the languages of the Kalenjin than that of the Kikuyu and live mostly in the region abutting Lake Victoria.  The Luhya, who generally live in the west of Kenya, make up approximately 14 percent of the population and also consist of a number of smaller groups that were grouped together during the colonial period.

40The Kenya African Democratic Union (KADU), of which future President Moi was a leader, was a party of ethnic minorities, such as the Kalenjin and Maasai, who claimed original use of the British settler land.  KADU pursued a political philosophy of regionalism, majimboism in Kiswahili, which would allow semi-autonomous regions, based on ethnicity, to have substantial decision-making power.  The central government, in turn, would have a limited and defined federal role.  Majimboism was seen as the only political option to safeguard the rights of the minority groups.  Believing that its interests would be better served by supporting KADU, the British settler population was quick to provide KADU with financial support to counter KANU.  Eventually KANU won a pre-independence election with a decisive majority resulting in a compromise to protect British settler interests.

41Republic of Kenya, Report of the Parliamentary Select Committee to Investigate the Ethnic Clashes in Western and other parts of Kenya, (Nairobi: Government Printer, September 1992), pp.8-9.

42The Cursed Arrow: Organized Violence Against Democracy in Kenya (Nairobi: NCCK, April 1992), p.1.

43Interparties Symposium I Task Force Report, Nairobi, June 11, 1992.

44Report of the Parliamentary Select Committee to Investigate Ethnic Clashes in Western and Other Parts of Kenya (Republic of Kenya: Government Printer, September 1992), p.82.

45Although there were widespread allegations of irregularities in the conduct of the poll, international observers concluded that”[d]espite the fact that the whole electoral process cannot be given an unqualified rating as free and fair...we believe that the results in many instances directly reflect, however imperfectly, the will of the people.”  The Presidential, Parliamentary and Civic Elections in Kenya: The Report of the Commonwealth Observer Group (London: Commonwealth Secretariat, 1993), p.40.

46FORD-K remained relatively multiethnic, but was dominated by Luos, Luhyas, and members of some smaller groups.  Later in 1993, further fault lines developed within the party between the Luo and other leaders.  FORD-Asili and DP were both seen as Kikuyu parties, divided along regional lines.

47Courting Disaster: A Report on the Continuing Terror, Violence and Destruction in the Rift Valley, Nyanza and Western Provinces of Kenya (Nairobi: National Election Monitoring Unit (NEMU), April 29, 1993).

48Human Rights Watch/Africa, Divide and Rule, pp.80-83.

49Naomi W. Gathirwa and Christine Mpaka,”Reproductive and Psycho-Social Needs of Displaced Women in Kenya,” the U.N. Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) and UNICEF, Reproductive and Mental Health Issues of Women and Girls Under Situations of War and Conflict in Africa: Proceedings of an Expert Group Consultation, (Nairobi: Regal Press, November 1994), p.49.  See also, Dr. Naomi Gathirwa,”Report on the Psycho-social Needs of the Displaced Women in Maella and Thessalia Camps: Field Visit by the FIDA Team from July 25-30, 1994,” Nairobi, August 1994; and Human Rights Watch/Women’s Rights Project, The Human Rights Watch Global Report on Women’s Human Rights, (New York: Human Rights Watch, August 1995), pp.100-140.