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It’s dog’s life for villagers after raid
Daily Nation
Story by PETER KIMANI and LUCAS BARASA
Publication Date: 4/7/2007
"Hakuna namna” (there is no way), a middle aged woman wails, pulling her hair while writhing on the debris of what was left of her house and business
premises.
Mrs Judith Cherop recounts her troubles after she lost her husband during an attack by militiamen at Chebyuk settlement in Mt Elgon District. Photo/JARED NYATAYA |
“The shop stood here, the clinic was there, the chicken coop was there, this was my room,” 66-year-old Loice Chepnchor, says rapidly, pointing with equal haste at the space where the premises stood 48 hours earlier.
Scorched to ash
When the militiamen struck mid this week, she says, she ran for dear life when she heard gunshots. She returned to find everything up in smoke, after the raiders had taken off with what they could carry.
Now all that is left is a charred Vono bed, its springs scorched to ash grey, a flowered China cup and a bunch of deformed soda bottles.
“Why didn’t they leave the bed, at least for me and my grandchildren to sleep on,” she asks rhetorically. “My son was killed last September and I took in six of his children. What shall we do now?”
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Chepnchor’s pain mirrors the incomprehension of the conflict that has ravaged Mt Elgon region in the past few weeks, and what has recurred for six months.
The idle fields in Kopsiro division, two hours away from Eldoret, point to the uncertainty that has hit the region and adjoining ridges.
Chopnchor, who hails from the Soy clan of the larger Sabaot community, claims the raiders were from the Ndorobo who live on the other side of the ridge, beyond the impenetrable forest yonder.
The journey to Ndorobo land takes about an hour and a half, part of which is spent covering a mere 14 kilometres through some of the roughest terrains in Kenya.
Burst of clean air
Suddenly, a burst of clean air fills the lungs, Mt Elgon comes into view, with two domes on the apex accentuating its majesty.
One is tempted to temporarily forget all the troubles in the world and absorb its spell-binding beauty.
The spell is broken by Stephen Taboy, 55, a slight man with a greying beard in a tattered beige jacket, his trousers a patchwork of colours – testament to the man’s determined effort to hide his nakedness against all odds.
“This is where my forefathers lived; I returned here five years ago, when there was fighting in Chepkital, where we had lived peacefully since 1971.
“That was before the Soy decided to chase us out. They attacked my house and shot dead my nephew.”
This blame-game between the Soy and the Ndorobo has cost 144 lives in six months, and no one demonstrates the pointlessness of the conflict than Judith Cherop.
Widowed at the young age of 22, she rocks her three-month-old baby and fights back tears.
Her husband, Matui Mapengo was killed by members of a group calling itself the Sabaot Land Defence Force in November last year. The group’s membership is largely drawn fro the Soy clan.
Three months later, last December, Ndorobo raiders shot dead her father, Eliud Webusa. Raiders came this week and plundered her shop before razing it.
“I think I will poison my children and myself,” she says. “There is no point in struggling with this life. There is nothing left for me.”
The ethnic labels appended to different groups involved in the conflict are simplistic interpretations to a contestation that is underpinned by politics—the politics of land.
The police appear even more helpless.
Last weekend, about 100 youth from the defence forces threw a cordon round the district commissioner’s residence and police station, stormed three houses, flushed out five people and killed them.
It has emerged that the sixth person, whom the police claim to gunned down in retaliation, was actually felled by the SLDF in their flight, mistaking their own for the enemy.
“We are on top of things,” said Mt Elgon acting district commissioner Julius Otieno. “It is impossible for the Government to deploy a policeman in every household.”
The administrator denies that there are bands of criminals operating in the forest, but notes that 300 men are in custody on suspicion of participating in the clashes.
“Security measures have been put in place to ensure the safety of all Kenyans,” says Otieno.
But Taboy is not confident. In his house on the foot of Mt Elgon, he is hosting 20 families with a total of 160 people.
“Children sleep inside; we sleep outside,” he says, pulling the collar of his torn jacket. “We eat when there is food and sleep hungry when there is none,” he says.
The relief agency, Red Cross, estimate that 60,000 people from the region have been displaced in recent fighting, which residents say started in 1989, then flared up again last year.
The uprooted groups include at least 1,500 families who were living in settlements allocated to them by Government in 1971. More than 5,000 others are said to be landless, the residue of a group identified in the 1970s as needy.
However, remaining parcels of land for redistribution are not enough.
Cherop rocks her baby and walks around the debris trance-like, as if unable to comprehend her immeasurable loss.
She will soon be heading to the police station where scores of families arrive every night, fearing attack by militia in their homes.
Cherop’s pain is even more acute because she has no place to call
home.
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