Women living in Nairobi's slums recall being gang raped during the 2007-08 post-election violence and call on the government to protect them and investigate past crimes
By Katy Migiro
NAIROBI (TrustLaw) – Five years after they were raped in Kenya’s 2007-08 post-election violence, women living in Nairobi's slums are scared it will happen again.
Kenya goes to the polls on March 4 for the first time since its disputed 2007 vote, in which 1,200 people were killed and over 600,000 displaced.
Thousands of women were sexually abused during the violence. The majority of victims in Nairobi's slums were gang raped, sometimes by up to 20 men, in their homes, in front of their children and husbands. Nobody has been convicted.
“If I had money, I would go away,” said Alice, a 32-year-old mother who was raped by four men when she was walking to buy supper in Nairobi’s sprawling Kibera slum. “I hear both sides have bought machetes and guns and hid them in Kibera.”
THEY WILL UNLEASH VIOLENCE
The two leading presidential candidates are Uhuru Kenyatta, son of Kenya’s founding father Jomo Kenyatta, and Prime Minister Raila Odinga. They are neck and neck in the polls.
Kenyatta is a Kikuyu - Kenya’s largest ethnic group, which has produced two of the country’s three presidents since independence in 1963. Odinga is a Luo - a community in western Kenya. He believes rigging robbed him of the presidency last time around.
“The Kikuyus say if the Luos win, they will unleash violence. The Luos say if the Kikuyus win, they will unleash violence,” Alice said.
Rumour mongering is a common feature of Kenyan elections and there is no way to verify these claims. But on Wednesday, a coalition of 30 Kenyan civic groups said there has been a massive acquisition of machetes in parts of the country.
"An impunity gap exists and the chances that the same perpetrators will carry out the very same illegal acts as were witnessed in the last elections are very high,” the rights groups said.
Alice is one of six women and two men hoping to end this impunity.
They filed a constitutional case against the government in the Kenyan High Court on February 20 along with four civil society organisations including the Coalition on Violence Against Women and Physicians for Human Rights. They claim that the government failed to protect their rights or to investigate the crimes committed against them.
While women were the main victims of sexual violence, men were also sodomised, forcibly circumcised and had their penises amputated.
The petitioners want the government to apologise to the victims; provide compensation, including medical assistance; to investigate the crimes and prosecute those responsible and to establish a special division within the High Court to deal with sexual violence cases.
DRAGGED OUTSIDE
Another petitioner, Jane, a 43-year-old widow, was attacked in her Kibera home the night after the vote.
“At 1am, I heard banging on my house. They broke the door down, dragged me outside. I was raped by three men,” she said.
One man pulled her by the legs while a second grabbed her shoulders and a third tried to shield her eyes so she couldn’t see them.
“They removed all my clothes. They said: ‘This time, we are going to hurt women and not with our hands’.”
After crawling back into her house, she tried calling her neighbours for help. But the violence was so intense they couldn’t leave their own homes.
She stayed in the house for seven days. The rapists had looted it so she had no food, just a saucepan of water. “I lay on the bed and dipped my head into the pan to drink water,” she said.
Eventually, relatives took her to hospital. She was admitted for three weeks because she was too weak to eat or go to the bathroom. She is scared of being attacked again. “I won’t sleep,” she said.
Jane is appealing for non-governmental organisations to give her money to move out of town for the election period.
Neither Jane nor Alice plans to vote on March 4.
“Since I was raped, I haven’t seen anybody from government,” said Jane. “None of those leaders has been to see us and yet they want our votes.”
Names have been changed on the request of the interviewees to preserve their anonymity
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