Kenya: US Government Fueling ‘War on Terror’ Disappearances And Killings

Family members of people disappeared and executed by police and paramilitary units in Kenya say the U.S. government is funding and fueling these abuses, and are demanding answers. Acting on their behalf, Mombasa-based Muslims for Human Rights (MUHURI) and its U.S. partners, the NYU School of Law’s Global Justice Clinic and the Center for Constitutional Rights, today filed Freedom of Information (FOIA) requests focusing on grave violations committed by Kenyan units “set up, equipped, trained, funded, and/or guided” by the U.S. government.

The request comes after press investigations revealed  that the U.S. government has close ties to a secretive Kenyan paramilitary team implicated in human rights abuses.

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Kenya Is Not A Dumping Ground For US Plastic

The new administration of US president-elect Joe Biden must resist pressure from US oil and chemical companies to use Kenya as a dumping ground for plastic waste.

In April, the American Chemistry Council (ACC), members of which include Shell, Exxon, Total, DuPont and Dow, proposed investments in recycling in Kenya, provided that the recipient country accepts US plastic waste. Kenya would get about 500 million tonnes of plastic waste exports from the US per year.

Until January 2018, most of the world’s plastic waste was sent to China. Beijing decided that the environmental risks were not worth it and refused to continue.

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The Struggle To Protect Kenya’s Ewaso Ngiro River

By Chris Williams in Truthout – The proposed mega-dam will undoubtedly worsen these grave threats. At a cost of 10 billion Kenyan shillings (US $103 million), the dam will submerge 13,000 hectares (more than 32,000 acres) of land under the resulting lake, as well as five nature conservancies. Assuming there is no drought, it will take more than 10 months to fill the lake once the dam has been completed, which will mean not only lots of people losing the land where they currently live (in addition to land that’s already been commandeered by the Kenyan and British military and into private land trusts as nature conservancies), but also people being subjected to even more severe water shortages from the river as the lake is filled. Not only have local people not been consulted, but the electricity produced by the dam isn’t even for them; it is for a proposed “Las Vegas of northern Kenya” resort city for tourists, to be built in the town of Isiolo.

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Fighting Industrial Pollution In Kenya As Dangerous As Lead Poisoning

By Sophie Morlin-Yron in Truthout – Whilst campaigning, Omido escaped a possible kidnapping and has been arrested and imprisoned for her work. “They sent armed people after me, to wait for me at my house in the evening. That is the night that I fled and went to where I live now.

She says that up until last month she received text messages from unknown international numbers threatening her and her son and telling her: “Stop talking about the Owino Uhuru case.”

She speaks about these threats very calmly and shows little sign of fear, as if she has grown used to it, but she tells me it wasn’t always like this. “At first it was really bad. Like in 2012. I could not sleep in my bed. I would hold my son and I would put a mattress under the bed so that if someone peeked through the window they wouldn’t have been able to see us. I was terrified.”

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Kenyan Pastoralists Protest Destruction Of Indigenous Forest

Armed with twigs and placards, enraged residents from a semi-pastoral community 360 km north of Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, protested this week against wanton destruction of indigenous forest – their alternative source of livelihood.

With climate change a new ordeal that has caused frequent droughts, leading to suffering and death in this part of Africa, the community from Lpartuk Ranch in Samburu County relies on livestock which is sometimes wiped out by severe drought leaving them with no other option other than the harvesting of wild products and honey.

“People here are ready to take up spears and machetes to guard the forest. They have been provoked by outsiders who are out to wipe out our indigenous forest to the last bit,” Mark Loloolki, Lpartuk Ranch chairman, who led the protesting community members told IPS.

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Police Tear Gas Kids Protesting Removal Of Their Playground

Police in Kenya on Monday tear gassed a group of schoolchildren who were demonstrating against the removal of their school’s playground by powerful politician.
The children eventually toppled the wall.

Moments later, however, police shot tear-gas canisters into the crowd, sending the children scrambling. Local TV footage showed children writhing in pain, screaming and choking because of the tear gas.
A group of students from Langata Road Primary School — between the ages of six and 14 and clad in their green and blue school uniforms — pushed down a wall erected around their playground. It was acquired by a private developer said to be a powerful politician, according to Boniface Mwangi, a Kenyan photojournalist at the scene.

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Police Tear Gas Kids Protesting Removal Of Playground

Police in Kenya on Monday tear gassed a group of schoolchildren who were demonstrating against the removal of their school’s playground by powerful politician.

A group of students from Langata Road Primary School — between the ages of six and 14 and clad in their green and blue school uniforms — pushed down a wall erected around their playground. It was acquired by a private developer said to be a powerful politician, according to Boniface Mwangi, a Kenyan photojournalist at the scene. The children eventually toppled the wall.

Moments later, however, police shot tear-gas canisters into the crowd, sending the children scrambling. Local TV footage showed children writhing in pain, screaming and choking because of the tear gas.

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Carbon Colonialism: Climate Change Fight Displacing Africans

Since the launch of a World Bank sponsored conservation programme in west Kenya eights years ago, the Bank-funded Kenya Forest Service (FKS) has conducted a relentless scorched earth campaign to evict the 15,000 strong indigenous Sengwer community from their ancestral homes in the Embobut forest and the Cherangany Hills. The pretext? The Sengwer are ‘squatters’ accelerating the degradation of the forest.

This October, with violence escalating, pressure from campaigners finally elicited a public response from World Bank president Jim Yon​g Kim, who promised to help facilitate “a lasting, peaceful resolution to this long, unfinished business of land rights in Kenya.”

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Occupy Kenya: Protesters March For End To Violence

Apathy and thuggery greeted an attempt to kickstart an Occupy movement in Kenya to protest against government inaction in the face of rising insecurity and terrorism.

The march and sit-in dubbed #Tumechoka, meaning “We are tired” in Swahili, was called on Tuesday after the execution of 28 people on a bus in Mandera in the far northeast of the country over the weekend.

That attack, claimed by Somalia’s Al Shabaab militants, left some Kenyans questioning their government’s capacity and willingness to prevent terrorism.

“The government does not recognize that this is a religious battle,” said Stephen Omodia, a 39-year-old businessman, who clutched a red-painted wooden cross in his hands to symbolize the lives lost in terrorist attacks in recent years.

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