ISIOLO, KENYA – “Iman Tari,” a voice calls forward. Tari, a stout woman wearing a black burqa and white headscarf, rises from her seat.
A young man in his late 20s stands up beside her and supports her as she walks. Her feet step slowly and steadily across the cement floor to a table laden with microphones and earpieces.
"What we have done to each other has to be exposed."
The room falls silent as she sits down, adjusts her seat and puts on the headphones. The crowd waits with bated breath. Tari inches closer to the microphone and begins her testimony to the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission, TJRC, established by Parliament in 2008 to investigate the gross human rights violations and other historical injustices committed in Kenya between Dec. 12, 1963, and Feb. 28, 2008.
The TJRC spent 32 days in April and May holding hearings in the Eastern and North Eastern provinces. The hearings aim to offer transitional justice and recommendations on a legal course of action to ensure justice to people like Tari, a survivor of government-created concentration camps in post-independence Kenya.
Tari says she was held in a concentration camp better known as “Manyatta Prison” in Garbatulla, a small town in northern Kenya. The facilities lacked even the most basic amenities.
“There was no water or food,” she says. “We used to smell. Because of the cold, we used to light the pieces of boxes that lay around to keep warm. For toilets, we used to dig a hole in the ground.”
She says women were rounded up and beaten daily, regardless of whether they were pregnant. She says she miscarried at five months.
“At night we would be beaten with the stock of their rifles,” she says. “Our husbands’ hands were tied and wives raped by military personnel.”
Tari is one of 30 individuals and groups who testified at the hearings in Isiolo, a town in Kenya’s Eastern province. Tari’s testimony is a tale common to the people in the room – but foreign to many Kenyans living outside of this region.
Secessionist sentiments by Somalis in Kenya’s Eastern and North Eastern provinces at the time of independence in 1963 led to a war between rebels and the government, which created “protected villages” across the region. Victims of these villages, which were essentially concentration camps, recently testified at the TJRC hearings about widespread violence, rape, murder and human rights abuses. Military officials admit the government used the rebels or “Shiftas” as an excuse to persecute Somalis across the region. The TJRC will make recommendations in the fall to the Kenyan government on how to ensure justice is served.
Kenya gained its independence in 1963, but not everyone wanted to be a part of the new nation. Somalis living in the country’s north and northeast wanted to join Somalia, leading to the Shifta War, which lasted from 1963 to 1967. The government declared a state of emergency, which lasted close to three decades.
Regional Struggle Dates Back to Colonial Times
Adam Hussein Adam of the Center for Minority Rights Development, a nongovernmental organization, says the word “Shifta” comes from the language of the Oromo people, an ethnic group in northern Kenya.
“The word Shifta is an Oromo word meaning ‘bandits,’” Adam says. “It was first used by Kenya’s first president, the late Mzee Jomo Kenyatta. He called Kenya Somalis ‘Shiftas,’ primarily those who were in favor of secession.”
