Extortion a major motive in attacks on refugees

By STANDARD ON SATURDAY TEAM and AGENCIES

KENYA: Extortion is a major motive in attacks on refugees living in Nairobi, a report by advocacy group Human Rights Watch (HRW) concludes.

A Somali woman interviewed in February recalled having to buy her freedom from a lorry outside Pangani Police Station after a terrifying ordeal.

“Around 6pm on November 19, (a day after the Eastleigh matatu bombing) I went to the mosque, leaving my 12-year-old daughter at home,” the woman told HRW researchers. “When I got back, I saw many GSU (police) officers with batons.

I rushed up the stairs (to my flat) and saw the front door was open. My daughter later told me the police had kicked it down and asked her for our jewellery. There were five officers. My daughter rushed towards me, crying, but one of the officers grabbed her and threw her down the stairs.”

 Sh15,000 bribe

The woman narrated how two other police officers grabbed her, kicked her repeatedly and threw her down the flight of stairs after her daughter.

The officers dragged the pair out of the building and bundled them into a lorry.

“We drove through town and they picked up many more Somalis, near the mosque and in the streets, until the truck was full,” she says.

“They drove us to the Pangani police station and said anyone who wanted to leave should pay (a bribe). A man and his wife offered Sh15,000 to have all four of us released. The police agreed but said: ‘If we release you now, other police will arrest you again,” so they kept us in the truck for six hours then let us go.”

Almost every one of the 101 people interviewed for the explosive HRW report released on Wednesday said police demanded large sums of money and then let victims go.

The report, titled ‘You Are All Terrorists’, catalogues abuses in a ten-week long series of operations against refugees and terror suspects.

“Personal gain — not national security concerns — was the main reason police targeted and abused their victims,” the report says.

The officers were allegedly emboldened by a Government directive ordering an estimated 100,000 urban refugees to move to camps in Dadaab. The abuses allegedly continued until the High Court blocked the planned relocation in January. The abuses were allegedly part of a crackdown that began on November 19, last year, the day after an attack on a crowded matatu in Eastleigh. No one claimed responsibility for the blast, which killed seven people.

Series of attacks

Kenya has experienced a series of gun and grenade attacks since it sent its soldiers into Somalia in 2011 to drive out Islamic militants.

The report says the scale of the crackdown was “unprecedented”. Somali women described being gang-raped by policemen and people were allegedly beaten on the streets, in trucks or in their homes until they lost consciousness, spat blood or broke bones, it said. Refugees said they were detained for days in police cells without explanation until they paid bribes.

“Every person we interviewed said the police accused them of being terrorists and then extorted money from them,” Gerry Simpson, the report’s author, said at a press conference earlier this week.

Acting Police Spokesman Charles Owino has dismissed the HRW report as “pedestrian” and “populist”, denying any of such incidents took place. His AP counterpart Masoud Mwinyi has also termed the claims “unlikely”.

The United Nations High Commission for Refugees, which was involved in helping some of those detained in the crackdown, says many of the abuses they saw did not rise to the level of torture as claimed by HRW.