Human Rights Watch publicou onte un informe de oitenta páxinas sobre a recente onda de violencia en Kenya, que tivo como causa inmediata a fraude nas eleccións de decembro, pero que responde a décadas de violacións dos Direitos Humanos e impunidade.
O informe leva por título “Ballots to Bullets: Organized Political Violence and Kenya’s Crisis of Governance”. Copio un extracto da introducción:
The scale and speed of the violence that engulfed Kenya following the controversial presidential election of December 27, 2007 shocked both Kenyans and the world at large. Two months of bloodshed left over 1,000 dead and up to 500,000 internally displaced persons in a country viewed as a bastion of economic and political stability in a volatile region.
The ethnic divisions laid bare in the aftermath of the elections have roots that run much deeper than the presidential poll. No Kenyan government has yet made a good-faith effort to address long simmering grievances over land that have persisted since independence. High-ranking politicians who have been consistently implicated in organizing political violence since the 1990s have never been brought to book and continue to operate with impunity. Widespread failures of governance are at the core of the explosive anger exposed in the wake of the election fraud.
The Kenya National Dialogue and Reconciliation between the political parties provides Kenya’s leaders with a historic opportunity to step back from the brink and to reform and establish institutions that can help build long-term stability. The establishment of a Commission of Inquiry on political violence; an Independent Review Committee on the elections; a Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission; and the agreement on the general parameters for a constitutional review process – all agreed in such a short time frame – represent a serious and positive response to the crisis.
However, challenges remain in ensuring that the institutions created actually deliver accountability for recent and previous violence, correct injustices ignored by previous administrations, and tackle the systemic failure of governance that gave rise to the recent crisis. A particular challenge will arise because some of those individuals implicated in recent and previous episodes of politically motivated violence currently hold public office.
This report describes the main patterns of violence that have unfolded since Kenya’s December 2007 general election, namely police use of excessive force against protestors as well as ethnic-based killings and reprisals by supporters aligned to both the ruling and opposition parties. It also outlines the ways in which this violence is the outcome of decades of political manipulation of ethnic tensions, and of impunity intertwined with longstanding grievances over land, corruption, inequality, and other issues. [...]
