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Time for the Govt to contain bloody clan, ethnic clashes
By Ndung’u Wainaina
KENYA TIMES
26. April 2007
IT is painful to watch in disbelief as citizens carry their belongings heading to unknown destination without basic human needs like water and food.
Mt Elgon and Tana River residents are our latest casualties. When citizens are forced out of their homes, dispossessed and lose virtually all their belongings including loved ones is a human tragedy of an immense proportion.
This is worse when a country like Kenya does not have laws or national policy that protects such vulnerable group of citizens.
It is not out of their own volition they are leaving their homes but are forced by intra-ethnic violent conflicts or politically motivated violence.
The brutality associated and meted out on this group of citizens is life threatening, affront to their dignity and outright discrimination. They are deprived of their livelihood, citizenship rights and condemned to calamities of nature.
State is obliged to take the primary responsibility of protecting and ensuring IDPs get basic minimum standards of living.
It is the responsibility of Government to prevent arbitrary displacement, protection in case of displacement and ensure safe return, resettlement and reintegration. International community has moral responsibility to intervene in case of state failure.
United Nations definition of IDP states that “IDPs are persons or group of persons who have been forced or obliged to flee or to leave their homes of habitual residence, in particular as a result of or in order t
o avoid the effects of armed conflict, situation of generalized violence, violations of human rights or natural or human-made disasters, and who have not crossed an internationally recognized State border. Internal displacement can be as a result of conflict or political violence, development induced and /or disaster.”
The exact number of internally displaced persons in Kenya mainly due to ethnic or political violence since 1991 is estimated at 431,153.
However, this figure is conservative and at times controversial due to the fact that internal displacement can be consequent of many factors and Kenya does not have laws or national policies that directly address internal displacement.
Further, the government does not have official database or information regarding internal displacement.
This can be attributed to the long held denial of existence of internally displaced persons in Kenya by the government.
There is also limitation of definition and categorizing the type of internally displaced persons.
While Kenya has not implemented any laws or a national policy on the internally displaced persons, it is signatory to a number of international laws, conventions and protocols that are of great importance to the rights of IDPs.
The international human rights and humanitarian laws do oblige states to ensure IDPs’ human rights are respected, protected and fulfilled considering they remain citizens of their respective countries.
Significantly, the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights has defined minimum core obligations to ensure states meet certain basic standards of living and rights of internally displaced persons.
To emphasise the seriousness that African and Untied Nations respective charters attach to this requirement to the state, the respective charters have articles thus: Article 4 of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR) - Human beings are inviolable. Every human being shall be entitled to respect for his life and the integrity of his person.
No one may be arbitrarily deprived of this right while Article 6.1. of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) states, “Every human being has the inherent right to life. This right shall be protected by law.
No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his life”.
It is therefore the duty and responsibility of State to prevent conflicts and other acts of violence since derogation to right of life is not permitted.
In Kenya, however, the state has failed to address this obligation and perpetrators of impunity and violence are still at large.
Art 11.1 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) states that “ The States Parties to the present Covenant recognise the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living for himself and his family and to the continuous improvement of living conditions.
The Kenyan Government does not just fail to ensure the responsibility of protecting its citizens but has failed to guarantee internally displaced persons their economic and social rights as set out in the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights and in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.
United Nations Guiding Principles on Internally Displacement and the Great Lakes Protocol on the Protection and Assistance to Internally Displaced have stressed that regardless of where they live, the Government has to guarantee and ensure access to essential minimum living standards.
Since 1992 beginning with a parliamentary committee headed by Hon Kennedy Kiliku,the state has produced different official reports containing recommendations and proposals on IDPs but the Government has acted on none of them despite the enormous public resources spent while producing them.
Implementation of these reports find resistance because key figures both political and state bureaucracy are implicated or hold high positions that their influence block any attempt to implement recommendations.
It is evident that the Government is reluctant to address the IDPs’ concerns including initially not recognising their existence as no national policy, legal or administrative framework to effectively deal with the crisis that has ever been instituted despite the fact that the Government later came to acknowledge their existence.
The furthest the Government has gone is formation of a task force to map and assess the status of internally displaced whose report still remain controversial and later allocated about Sh400 million in the 2006-2007 financial year which is a drop in the ocean to buy land and settle IDPs.
The challenge at hand is to institute progressive and proactive national policies that prevent conflicts and displacement occurrence as well as enact laws and polices that ensure citizens who are displaced are properly protected and their rights secured within the framework of the 1998 United Nations Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement and the Great Lakes Protocol on the Protection and Assistance to Internally Displaced which Kenya is signatory.
Writer is a programme Officer, NCEC and Director, International Centre for Policy and
Conflict.
email: wainainan@icpcafrica.org
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