Kenyan police defiant over city bloodbath

The killings in Kisumu fit an all-too-familiar pattern of Kenyan police brutality. Notorious for corruption, the police have often been tarnished as thieves and murderers. Last year they were accused of summarily executing several hundred members of a brutal criminal gang. No investigation followed.

Hundreds of people have now died since Kenya’s elections descended into farce. Many of them have been the victims of a brutal police force, which as this article vividly shows, is purely designed to protect the interests of the Kenyan elite, while viewing the poor as something less than human.

THE police chief was unapologetic about the number of people her force had shot dead in Kisumu, western Kenya, to quell looting in the violent aftermath of last month’s disputed presidential elections.

“They don’t know another language except the gun,” said Deputy Police Commissioner Grace Kaindi, glancing up from her desk with pursed lips. A Kenyan police motto, “Keepers of the peace, defenders of the innocent”, hung on her office wall.

In the darkness of the mortuary a few hundred yards away, her force’s handiwork lay on the floor of three sweltering rooms: some 50 bodies under strips of crimson cloth with their feet poking out, waiting for families to collect them.

But that was not happening. The families of the dead were poor and could not afford funeral expenses. Others had still not been identified. A cloth strip across their foreheads said: “Unknown African”.

Posted by Szamko
Just tries to tell the truth.

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