Activists Push for Recognition of Brutal Crime

Friday, 15 April, 2011

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Robbie Corey-Boulet

Zedekiah Onyango thought the violence had ended when, one afternoon in mid-January 2008, he walked with a friend from his predominantly Luo neighbourhood in Nairobi’s Kibera slum to an area inhabited by members of the Kikuyu tribe.

When a group of young Kikuyu men called out to the pair, “Hey, you Luos, there is something we want to do to you”, he thought they were just joking.

But he was wrong. Two weeks earlier, the election victory of president Mwai Kibaki, a Kikuyu, had sparked violence that lasted until late February and claimed more than 1,000 lives.

The young Kikuyu men by the side of the road were angry over demonstrators claiming the race had been stolen from Luo challenger Raila Odinga. They saw the opportunity to take out this anger on Onyango and his friend.

Onyango’s friend was hacked to death with a panga, a machete-like blade. The mob then surrounded Onyango and stripped him naked. While he was pinned to the ground, one of his assailants took a panga to his penis.

Luos don’t practice male circumcision – unlike Kikuyus, who consider it an important rite of passage into manhood – and the mob wanted to remove Onyango’s telltale foreskin right there in the open alleyway.

“He took a butcher’s panga, a big one they use to chop the meat,” Onyango, now 25, recalled. “It wasn’t a cut. It was more like they were slicing me. The panga was very blunt. I bled a lot. I went through pain that I have never felt before in my life.”

As the weeks went on, similar scenes played out elsewhere in Kibera and in the Rift Valley, although a total estimate of men and boys subjected to forced circumcision during the post-election violence is hard to come by.

A government inquiry into the violence reported, for instance, that there had been “many forced male circumcisions” in the town of Naivasha, but that individual victims had been “too traumatised” to share their stories.

In recent filings at the International Criminal Court, ICC, prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo and judges weighing charges against six alleged masterminds of the unrest have gone back and forth on whether forced circumcision – a crime observers say the court has never before examined – qualifies as “sexual violence”.

In his December request for summonses against the three suspects aligned with Kibaki, Ocampo provided evidence of at least nine instances of forced circumcision in Nakuru and Naivasha, and moved to classify the crime under “other forms of sexual violence”, a category of crimes against humanity that includes rape, sexual slavery, forced prostitution and forced sterilisation.

When it granted the summonses in March, however, the pre-trial chamber ruled that forced circumcision should fall under “other inhumane acts”, a separate category of crimes against humanity encompassing crimes that cause “great suffering” or “serious injury to body or to mental or physical health”.

The chamber blocked an appeal from going forward on April 1, but Ocampo can raise the issue again at hearings scheduled for September or before the trial chamber, provided the case goes to trial.

This debate is not just playing out at ICC level. Within Kenya, local campaigners are calling for the crime to be classified as a form of sexual violence, which would improve the treatment victims receive and also deter future attacks.

Judith Okal, a senior programme officer at the Federation of Women Lawyers in Kenya, FIDA, said that while perpetrators of forced circumcision do cause great suffering and injury – in line with the “other inhumane acts” category – they also intend to exert “power dominance” over their victims. She said the latter means that the crime should be classed as sexual violence.

“If it’s not classified as a sexual crime, then it’s not getting the weight it deserves,” she said.

Okal likened forced circumcision to the rape of men and boys, which, prior to the 2006 Sexual Offences Act, fell under rarely-enforced sections of the penal code addressing “unnatural offences”, in particular obtaining “carnal knowledge of any person against the order of nature”.

“Now that we have a law that specifically talks about sexual violence, it makes it easier for men to report,” she said, referring to the 2006 legislation.

There are currently no laws against forced male circumcision in Kenya, despite the fact that tribes whose menfolk are not circumcised have been vulnerable to the crime since long before the 2007 poll.

As a result, Okal said, there is no “proper mechanism” to assist male victims of forced circumcision, a claim borne out by the experience of Onyango, who stayed for just one night at a clinic – where he received an anti-tetanus injection, surgical stitches and medicine to alleviate his pain – before going home to recover on his own.

Onyango was fortunate in that his physical wounds healed after about a week. During the post-election violence, most of the attacks, invariably carried out by mobs wielding crude weapons, caused lasting damage. In many cases, Luo men and boys had their genitals chopped off entirely. FIDA, which prepared a report on sexual violence during the crisis, spoke to a Luo woman in Naivasha who, after fleeing an attack, returned to find her brother “alive but with his private parts mutilated and stuffed in his mouth”.

Okal said classifying forced circumcision as sexual violence could lead to the development of resources that would help Onyango and those who suffered even more cope with their ordeals.

Agnes Leina, programme manager at the Center on Violence Against Women in Kenya, COVAW, said a sexual violence classification would also raise awareness about the crime and thus do much to prevent its recurrence.

“It will be very beneficial because every election forced male circumcision occurs,” she said. “People are living in fear of it.”

Concerns about repeat attacks have increased as the country gears up for another round of balloting in 2012.

In 2007, according to Human Rights Watch, Kibaki’s Party of National Unity attempted to undermine Odinga’s candidacy by “claiming that an uncircumcised man could not rule Kenya”.

With Odinga seen as an early frontrunner in the upcoming race, Mary Njeri Gichuru, executive director of COVAW, said there is every reason to think these arguments will resurface.

“The only thing they have on Raila is circumcision,” she said. “They know the way to turn a Kikuyu crowd against him is to call him kihii (the Kikuyu word for uncircumcised boy).”

But some victims, such as Onyango, don’t want their case taken up by any court, let alone the ICC.

“We don’t have to follow up on every crime,” he said. “Sometimes, if we follow up too much, we find that some of the people who actually committed the crimes are our friends now.”

This view was not shared, however, by Kevin Omollo, a 23-year-old Luo who lives in the same section of Kibera as Onyango and who had his foreskin cut off with a knife when a mob attacked him in late December 2007.

Like Onyango, he recovered fairly quickly, but he said this was owing to the fact that friends ran back to save him from the mob before more serious damage could be inflicted.

He said what happened to him was “a violation of my human rights” that should definitely be charged as a crime against humanity.

He went on to say he believed the attack was expressly sexual in nature. “Maybe they wanted to chop off all of my genitals,” he said. “It could have [denied] me my manhood.”

Robbie Corey-Boulet is an IWPR contributor.