“Bullets were coming across us from both sides”

We finished dinner around ten o’clock and the shooting started perhaps ten minutes later. It may be a cliché but the air really did feel electrified as I hugged the ground to myself in the pitch black night. Bullets were soon coming across us from both sides of our camp but two minutes later, twelve minutes after dinner was finished, the shooting stopped. Battles are inevitably short when a bullet cost as much as a day’s food.

We were in a village turned refugee camp in Northern Kenya where perhaps 500 of the Turkana people were taking shelter from a tribal dispute with neighbouring Ethiopians. The Ethiopian tribe was known to attack even this concentrated group of Turkana – two members of my adult literacy class had been shot dead while fishing nearby just two months earlier. But it soon transpired that this attack, breaking weeks of unprecedented ceasefire, was evidence that the Turkana had a new enemy to contend with – their own police. Drunk and heavily armed, a group of Kenyan police (dispatched to the area to cool tribal tensions) entered the refugee camp to take a group of women away on invented claims of petty theft. When the men of the village, some of them husbands to these women, refused them permission the police eventually drove away, firing drunkenly at the camp as they left. When the refugees returned fire, police camped beside us started to shoot across our camp and into the village. Kenyans were firing on Kenyans.

The only way that a whole village of people can accept the threat of rape and the knowledge that loved ones were inches from death is if they have no hope. Nothing will change, so just get on with things

Only alcohol and low visibility prevented anyone from dying that night and by morning, though feeling uneasy, most of the Turkana had shaken off the events of the night before. Men were tending to their goats, women salted fish for market and the children (those not out working) went to school. But this return to normality wasn’t because no one cared. The only way that a whole village of people can accept the threat of rape and the knowledge that loved ones were inches from death is if they have no hope. Nothing will change, so just get on with things. Injustice was robbing them of the little they had.

The Turkana aren’t the only Kenyans to suffer at the hands of their own law enforcers; reports of extra judicial killings by the police are all too common. In 2008, a report by Kenya’s own National Commission on Human Rights found that an estimated 500 young men were killed or disappeared in a single campaign by the police against the criminal Mugiki group. According to the report, the killings took place with the apparent support of political leaders, including the internal security minister. Since its publication, one of the report’s key witnesses has been killed and several of the authors have had to flee abroad. Yet its findings were dismissed by police commissioner Major-General Hussein Ali as being “rather infantile”.

Worryingly, killings such as these often enjoy public approval; they are seen as preferable to a slow and often corrupt legal system. Just last month, photographs emerged in The Daily Nation newspaper showing a plain clothed police officer execute three unarmed men at point blank by the side of a busy road. The papers and radio stations were full the next day with ordinary Kenyans backing the use of lethal force by the police as an acceptable alternative to due legal process.

But the tide of public opinion is starting to turn. Revelations that at least 400 of the 1,500 who died during 2008’s post election violence were killed by Kenyan police have made clearer to the public that not all victims of this ‘rough justice’ need be hardened criminals. The burst of civic education in the build up to the ratification of the country’s new constitution last August has educated a new generation of Kenyans about the importance of rights and accountability. The immense popularity of the mobile phone means that more and more Kenyans can make anonymous complaints about the police. These developments can only be a good thing and must be encouraged.

But it remains to be seen how long it will take for change to trickle through to the Turkana people. Mobile phone masts don’t reach that far into the country side and very few adults have the minimum education necessary to file a complaint. The Kenyan police alone wrote the report on that night’s shooting – it was all started, of course, by the refugees. Changes in the public’s attitude towards police impunity as well as tools to fight it are to be welcomed and can receive support from the international community but it is hard to see change on the horizon for the people of Turkana. Ill fortune may have robbed them of the health, education and prosperity given to so many others but to see them robbed too of hope is heartbreaking.