Pressure for amnesty and demands for compensation bog down resettlement
(IDPs at Turbo camp in Lugari District rejoice as a police lorry ferries some back home in Sango and Kongoni. Photo/JARED NYATAYA

Story by KEN OPALA

No amnesty, no resettlement, is the phrase greeting some returnees in parts of Rift Valley Province, the epicentre of the violence that followed the disputed presidential election results.

This new spin to the resettlement plan threatens to complicate an exercise already bogged by claims of compensation.

Thus, authorities are toying with two ideas: erection of transitional – satellite camps – or forceful closure of them altogether.

On Thursday, youths at Sugoi, Uasin Gishu, forced back 46 displaced people who had left Eldoret ASK Showground to the area – what was their home before the post-election violence uprooted them.

However, unwelcoming residents told them to return until the Government released post-election violence suspects, said officials who had escorted them.

In Nandi, youths forced more to return to the Eldoret ASK Camp after threatening them with abduction. Police were helpless, the returnees claimed.

Go back

“They (youths) told us to go back to Eldoret until the issue of amnesty is resolved,” says Elizabeth Wanjiku Ngunyi, who was a trader in Musombori in Nandi Hills. The youths threatened to abduct the returnees and use them as ransom against the Government.

The Government through its spokesperson Alfred Mutua says only 103 youths are being held over the post-election violence. But on the ground, Rift Valley residents say hundreds are languishing in cells.

“A number of people have returned (to camps) after being chased from Nandi, Kisumu and Maili Nne,” in the outskirts of Eldoret Town, according to John Nderitu Wachira, the chairperson of Camp E, Eldoret ASK Showground.

“In Huruma, landlords don’t want us to go back to business premises and rented houses,” he said.

Nixon Oira, the coordinator, Eldoret Catholic Peace and Justice Commission, says, “the issue of amnesty has been of contention in the resettlement exercise”.

By Sunday, only 41,000 displaced people remained in camps spread in the Rift Valley, Nyanza and parts of Western provinces. “As we talk now, 200,021 have gone back since Operation Rudi Nyumbani started,” said Wilfred Ndolo, the director of resettlement in the ministry of Special Projects.

In Uasin Gishu District, 8,033 are still in camps. The Eldoret ASK Showground, which is the largest of the camps in the area, has 6,000 displaced people that “will be moved in the next” fortnight, according to the District Commissioner Leonard Ngaluma.

At the height of the election violence in February, there were 350,000 displaced people in 176 camps countrywide.

Yet the figures hide a disturbing scenario. Most of the returnees are hardly on their farms but are accommodated in satellite camps set up near their homes.

For instance in Uasin Gishu, about five camps have been established (one in Huruma, within Eldoret municipality, less than two kilometres from the main camp) to accommodate those removed from the ASK Showground.

Thus, IDPs spent their day on the farms and later return to the satellite camps.

However, some of the satellite camps, like Huruma Grounds in Eldoret Town, are taking in those unwelcome in their former homes, say relief agencies.

Although the Eldoret Catholic Church says the issue of amnesty – to suspected perpetrators of the violence that tore Kenya immediately upon announcement of the presidential results – is a “bone of contention”, Mr Ngaluma says those resisting resettlement may not be genuine after all.

Kenya Red Cross officials said although the exercise was stuttering, it had recorded success in a number of places, including Matharu Location, Timboroa, where all the 3,550 people initially displaced by violence, had moved out of their camp, taken back their land and already planted crops.

Uasin Gishu was the epicentre of the violence that rocked Kenya between January 30, 2007 and February 28, 2008 – the day President Kibaki and his then rival, Raila Odinga (now Prime Minister) exchanged a peace handshake following mediation by Kofi Annan, the UN former secretary general.

By the time, the election-related tribal-fanned violence had killed 1,200 Kenyans and displaced a further 350,000 into squalid camps spread in the Rift Valley, Nairobi , Nyanza and Central provinces.

The Eldoret ASK Showground was among the largest, in sheer numbers. At its peak, 17,000 women, men and children lived there, directly depending on relief agencies such as Red Cross, the Catholic Church and the Muli Family.

In an attempt to audit the resettlement, this writer toured a number of camps in Uasin Ngishu District and talked to people at the centre of the exercise – IDPs, returnees, security personnel, administrators, representatives of relief agencies, community elders and political leaders.

The emerging story is that of an exercise weighed down by demands for compensation. A number of shrewd individuals, some who have lost nothing in the destruction that followed in the wake of the violence, are now demanding compensation and resettlement dues.

Not genuine

Any talk about compensation sets administrators and IDPs on a collision course. “They are making noise. These are not genuine people. The majority have left (and gone back to their farms),” says DC Ngaluma.

Wilfred Ndolo, the director of resettlement,, says the issue of amnesty should not arise in the resettlement. “That is an issue for the big guys (the Coalition Government). They will deal with it. It is above me.”

His job is to persuade those intent on returning to their homes to do so, he adds.

Yet the exercise appears so uncoordinated that IDPs are being disenfranchised. For instance, a group was moved from Subukia and dumped in Eldoret the following day without any arrangement on their accommodation.

The Kenya Red Cross took up the case – but for the meantime. “We don’t know what to do with the people,” said an official of the humanitarian organisation.

Courtesy of:http://www.nationmedia.com/dailynation/nmgcontententry.asp?category_id=1&newsid=125908