A feature on police brutality in Kenya since the COVID-19 curfew.
For decades, Somalia regarded Kenya as a neutral arbiter, unlike Ethiopia, where long-standing resentments against Somalia have endured. Kenya’s military intervention in Somalia in 2011 and its meddling in the country’s internal affairs have ruined Kenya-Somalia relations and emboldened Al Shabaab.
A covert Kenyan paramilitary team armed and trained by the US and supported by UK intelligence is behind renditions and controversial killings of terror suspects in night-time raids, Declassified UK can reveal.
A former Indian diplomat recalls the terrifying moments after the terrorist attack on the US embassy in Kenya’s capital city.
If things continue as they are, 2020 will be one of the deadliest years on record for the police. By 1st June 2020, 95 people had been killed by them.
The United States’ military operations in Somalia are not well known because they are carried out secretly or via proxy armies. These operations have not been hampered by the coronavirus pandemic; on the contrary, they seem to have accelerated.
The imposition of a curfew in Kenya in response to COVID-19 has been accompanied by increasing levels of violence against civilians by the police. This has, once again, underscored how poorly trained Kenya’s police “service” is and why it is the most dreaded institution in the country.
The rigid distinction between “the tolerant secularist” versus the “barbaric religious fundamentalist” in today’s discourse on the global War on Terror has been employed to justify the extreme measures taken against so-called Islamic terrorist groups.
Seven years after an independent oversight body was formed to monitor and investigate police misconduct and abuse, Kenyans are still suffering under the hands of an incompetent and uncaring police force that gets away with excesses with impunity. Has IPOA lived up to its promise?
IBRAHIM MAGARA argues that instead of exploring opportunities to heal wounds, and mending ties in pursuit of the national interest, specifically national security, the Kenyan state has adopted counterterrorism approaches and strategies that are deeply divisive and historically and contextually insensitive.
As Kenya’s forgotten mothers get worn out by the load of a nation’s collective misdeeds in pursuit of political power, a day shall come when the Mama Victors will no longer be in a position to continue doing national duty as national trauma-bearers.
A podcast of Bulimu Chole's article "Red Earth: The Killing of Carilton David Maina" published on The Elephant