On Sunday 11 November 2012, forty-two Kenyan
police officers, including 12 members of the Samburu tribes’ “home guard”, were
gunned down and killed by Turkana cattle rustlers –morans (warriors)- in Suguta Valley, situated in the Baragoi
District of Samburu County.
The police contingent, numbering more than
100, was attempting to recover some 450 heads of cattle that had been stolen by
the warriors 10 days prior. They were lured into
a valley and died in a hail of automatic rifle fire from the ridge above.
One of the injured commented: “They were not so many, but the way they had organised themselves was like they had received information earlier. Most of my colleagues, including our commanders were shot. Some of them survived”. After the massacre, the Turkana morans recovered the dead policemen’s automatic arms, including “the big ones”.
Police Commissioner Mathew Iteere had the sense to admit that it was a strategic fail on the part of the police. “There was an ambush and even the best trained and armed officers anywhere in the world would find it difficult”. Among the Turkana, only four were injured but they went “in the bush to avoid arrest”.
It was described as the biggest ‘massacre’ in Kenya’s post-independence history.
John Munyes, a Turkana MP, denied it was a massacre. He gave the Turkana
side of the story: they perceived the intrusion of the police as an act of
aggression. And felt compelled to protect their women and children. It was simple
self-defence in their opinion. Turkana leaders were later taken to court over
their stance but it was later accepted and their cases were dropped. It’s a
different world here.
In this part of Kenya, the pastoral lifestyle,
in very arid regions, leads to constant conflict over grazing land. Hustling
bits of cool moist grass is the way of life for herders on the Baragoi plain
and elsewhere. It has been for centuries. But the way of life among morans is different. For centuries,
their talk has turned to thievery. Cattle rustling is what morans often do; it’s one way that the tribe survives.
With this kind of age-old tradition, it’s
likely that nothing will change anytime soon. These are people who have lived
the same way for many centuries and for whom the regular laws of Kenya often
don’t apply. They are wont to say they’re “going to Kenya” when they leave
their tribal land.
With heavily armed morans, an encroaching force needs to
know what it’s doing if it wants to get back what the warriors have taken such
trouble to steal! In this case, the police were simply outwitted and
outmanoeuvred. Maybe they’d have done better staying out of it all.
I personally see no problem with the
way of life, only with the choice of weaponry. The knives are still there but
the spears and arrows are long gone, replaced by automatic weapons. In fact, the
effect of this firepower in some pastoral communities has been such that few
men are left. It’s the women who have become herders and they too have turned
to the AK for their protection.
The issue never once came up in news
reports nor TV discussions about the massacre, but the important one for me is
how the communities got so armed in the first place? Border security is a
matter for the armed forces of Kenya, not for Kenya’s communities to enforce.
For the rest, these are not war zones. These are Kenyans fighting Kenyans.
If only to protect the communities
involved, disarmament across the entire
north and northeast of Kenya should be looked at. It is probably the most
important way of reducing the much-hyped problem of ‘insecurity’ in Kenya. The
devastation that comes with the AK47 is so much more than what the long range
spears can do, or the damage from arrows off a bow. And the police should just
stay out and get to controlling the borders of this country.
