Illegal killings not the answer in terror war

By Kethi D Kilonzo

Jane Roe was a single woman who lived in Texas. She was unmarried, pregnant and wished to terminate her pregnancy. However, she was unable to get a legal abortion in Texas because her life did not appear threatened by the pregnancy. She could not afford to travel to another state to secure a legal abortion, therefore, she filed a claim in court challenging the Texas laws, arguing that these laws were unconstitutional and breached her right to privacy.

In this case the Supreme Court of the United States decided that a “person” does not include “the unborn.”

After this decision, the courts in the United States have heard and determined other legal suits on the right to procure an abortion. There is unanimity of the courts that in the first trimester the mother has a right to choose whether or not to terminate the pregnancy.

In the second and third trimesters, this choice is limited by the question whether the physical, psychological and mental health of the mother is at risk.

It is argued that in the first trimester, the embryo is not yet a foetus and is therefore not viable because it cannot exist independently outside of the mother’s body.

Back home in Kenya, society frowns upon abortion. Under Article 26 (2) of the Constitution, life starts at conception, while Article 26 (4) prohibits abortion except for emergency treatment or if the life or health of the mother is in danger.

Under Article 26 (1) no one has the right to take the life of another except if it is authorised by the Constitution or the law.

Are we as protective of the living as we are of the unborn? We live in a country notorious for extra-judicial killings. As a society we have come to condone it.

We protect the unborn yet we turn our backs to the living when lives are taken outside the law.

It is reprehensible that Sheikh Abubakar Sharif ‘Makaburi’ glorified the killings at Westgate, but, that did not make him either a terrorist or a criminal as no court of law declared him such.

There is no difference, morally and legally, between those who slew innocents at Westgate and those who slayed Makaburi.

The State has failed and will continue to fail if it does not bring both sets of perpetrators to book by conducting effective investigations and prosecutions.

And the same standard should be applied for the Muslim clerics whose lives were felled by bullets. Terrorism is not and should never be justification for extra-judicial killings or breach of the law.

Those who take lives outside the law are as much terrorists as those terrorists they hunt. Where life is concerned, dawa ya moto si moto morally or legally.

We are a country living under a blanket of terror and fear. We are losing sleep and are afraid for our lives, and those of our loved ones.

However, we should not be conditioned to accept that the State can take lives outside the law to fight either criminals, those they consider political critics or terrorists.

By accepting such conditioning we become dehumanised. We become dehumanised like the Rwandese who were conditioned to calling their neighbours cockroaches and took machetes and other weapons to exterminate these pests. We become dehumanised like the Germans who were conditioned to believe that the Jews were an inferior and contaminating race and, therefore, slept soundly at night as their Jewish neighbours were burnt alive in prison camps.

They watched as Jewish foetuses were ripped from the bodies of pregnant women for scientific experiments.

It is the State’s duty to protect lives. In doing so, it must act by, with, in and under the law.