By NZAU MUSAU Photos by JEPTUM CHESIYNA
Ah, could my anguish be measured and my calamity laid with it in the scales, they would now outweigh the sands of the sea. Because of this, I speak without restraint- Job 6: 1-4.
CLUTCHING a waste kindling, Saharah Abdi stares into the patchy roof of her lonesome manyatta as her mind loads up the details of the painful event am seeking to unearth.
Looking me through sunken eyes, falling eye bags, wrinkled face and shriveled fingers, she cuts the image of a troubled soul, one that has for 26 years now wept over immense sorrows brought upon her by a state that forcefully incorporated her community into the nation.
As she begins to speak, it dawns to me that for her, Wagalla- the infamous massacre of February 1984 happened yesterday. The three aspects of time- past, present and future are bound up in one- the present:
“Wagalla found me right here,” she says as she taps the sandy floor of her manyatta where we are all seated cross-legged: “It found me right here, right inside this house,” she adds authoritatively.
On the eve of 10th February 1984, she recalls she slept pretty well with her family. Nothing had seemed unusual in the past few days until that early morning when she woke up to sound of heavy boots pounding her compound.
They were littered allover this place, she says, the military men. Before she could fully apprehend the going’s on, they had already stormed inside her compound and pounced on her husband, his two brothers and their old man.
“They hurled all the men in this yard inside their truck. As if that was not enough, they pounced back on me and started to rape me. I tried to resist but one of them stabbed my breast with his gun; I fell unconscious,” she narrates with a tinge of bitterness.
Bitterness knows no shame for if it did Saharah would have hesitated to show me the bayonet stab-scars in her thighs and boot imprints in her back.
Her husband had been a civil servant working for the ministry of water but that day, there was no regard for anyone as long as he was Degodia, the Somali clan that was the target of the government operation allegedly seeking illegal guns.
“He did not make it far as I later learnt when I woke up to a dead village. He’d tried to resist saving me but they bayoneted him fatally. They threw him on the way to Wagalla and he bled his way to death,” she says.
That was the last day she ever saw the four for they never came back. Those who survived the orgy of beatings were driven to Wagalla air strip twelve miles away and herded alongside hundreds of others collected from allover Wajir.
There, they were made to strip naked and to sleep belly-face in the graveled strip. The four day ordeal of torture, rescue attempts by the women and a fatal break-away began in earnest.
“We tried to go see them but we were repulsed on the way and many of us badly assaulted. They suffered a lot from what we have heard from survivors- burning, beatings, poison- name it all,” she says.
Her story is corroborated by Raha Garat, another victim neighbor of her and whose husband lived to tell the story. Raha had come visiting when she found us engaged in deep conversation and immediately started weeping.
According to Raha, God saved her husband Garat Sanae but left him with permanent injuries which have confined him to bed ever since.
“He was coming back from the mosque when they descended on our manyatta hounding everyone, beating everyone up, stabbing me as they attempted to rape me and burning up the manyatta,” she tearfully recounts.
She, like many others was collected unconscious by an Italian Catholic volunteer Annalena Tonelli who was then working in the area and taken to hospital.
For her, Wagalla is an everyday problem since 1984 as she tends to her husband ever since. We took a stroll to their manyatta a few metres away and found the old man lying on a spread mattress.
It was a morning like no other, he tells me, as he peeps directly at me through his thick glass lens. I later learned that one of his eyes turned blind from the beatings of that day.
“They raped my daughter right in my own eyes and dragged me along into the truck where I found all the men from my village. We were taken to Wagalla and made to lie upside down in the scorching February heat,” he recounts.
Then Wagalla air strip had just been constructed and had a fresh wire mesh around it. Heavily armed military men surrounded it and worked in shifts throughout the four days the men were held there, he says.
By the first day on Friday, some rebellious men were already dead- shot or beaten dead by the officers. By Sunday morning, others had started to die of heat and thirst. On Tuesday, the dead were collected to be thrown away in the bushes and that was the escape for Garat.
“I was collected alongside the corpses and cast away as a dead. We were about 80 ‘corpses’ in the truck and we were driven about 50 kilometers away into the bush and dumped; hyenas feasted on that day,” he says as he attempts a tear.
For him, his life is dedicated to the Catholic volunteer Annalena who went about trailing military trucks in search of the injured: “She took 15 of us alive but many of that number died in her hospital. Many more were eaten by hyenas by the time she found us.”
At this point, Garat pulled down his shirt to reveal a huge scar between his chests: “These are effects of being gritted against hot murram by soldier’s boots.”
But it was the huge protruding growth beneath in his loins which shocked me: “It expands and contracts a time; now it has contracted. This is a result of the beatings and stabbing I went through in the hands of my own government.” He says.
Bitter and lost for more words, the old man struggled to wake up and staggered his way to lunchtime prayers as his sons and grandchildren took over detailing to me the pain of growing up as Wagalla victims.
They took me round the village showing me the vacant plots of Wagalla victims. Here, they told me, women are more than men because most of the men were killed in the massacre.
For Abdi Bellow my guide, the many drug addicts, mad-people walking round Wajir town and troubled orphans abound in the village are living testimonies to the injustice suffered.
“My father died in the massacre. My mum is now insane probably due to what she went through. Her mother was burned alive as she watched. It’s not only my mom who is insane but also her two sisters… my aunties,” he recounts to me.
In one of the manyatta’s, we found a lonesome badly-thatched hut where one mentally disturbed young man spends his entire day in. “He used to ask about Wagalla everyday before he went quiet. He does not talk much any more ever since,” he sister Halima Hussein said.
For Mohammed Khamis, an ex-police officer in his thirties, only the victims of Wagalla can appreciate their sorry states and no much telling it out will help.
“It was a complete disruption and destruction of a society in terms of wealth, lives, social structure and organization. We feel it everyday, we see it, we live it and no justice has been forthcoming so far,” he speaks in his refined English.
For Sahara, Wagalla is a walking shame: “Up to this moment, I cannot hold my urine and the stench around me tells it all. Only God knows about us… only God,” she says as she breaks into tearful and infectious soliloquy:
“Look at us, what is left of us? only God my son, only God… its not even good to be left alone when all our people have died, not any good…”
For a mother who has been jailed five times for speaking about Wagalla massacre, life cannot get any more painful and that is why she is vowing to die fighting for justice of the victims.
She however throws a caution my way: “I fear for you. Anybody who talks about Wagalla is endangered by the very act of speaking… every person who tries. That is why most people are quiet about it.”
As she leads me out through the village, she points out at a spot where some of the dead where thrown and poses the immortal question: “Did a government which exists for the people have to kill them sue gruesomely?”
What Wagalla entailed: The story of the massacre.
According to a sworn affidavit filed in the High Court on 24th February 2005 by Salah Abdi Sheikh, about 5000 men of Degodia clan of Somali community were rounded in the security operation.
The operation sanctioned by the provincial security committee was directed, controlled and commanded by the then North Eastern Provincial Commissioner Benson Kaaria who also served as chair of the provincial security committee, the affidavit says.
It says the men were surrounded by officers from the military, regular police and the administration police on the ground and Kenya Aiforce personnel in military helicopters from above.
“In this horrific, cruel, inhuman and most degrading operation women member of the clan were humiliated through beatings, assaults, torture and rape in presence of their children, relatives,” Salah says in his sworn affidavit.
At the airport, the men stripped naked and made to lie on their bellies in the hot murram under the scorching sun. “Soldiers whipped men until they were a mess of blood,” the affidavit reads,
For days, they underwent torture until about 3000 attempted to break off and scale the high razor fence that enmeshed them: “Only a few made it to the nearby bushes. Bullets felled the rest.”
A massive cover up was then ordered with the dead and the injured being ferried and scattered in the bushes of north eastern districts. Some bodies are said to have been collected as far away as the Ethiopian border.
Others were found in Habaswen and Ewaso Nyiro riverbed. Mass graves have since been discovered in Wagalla, Elnoor, Samatar, Griftu and even in Wajir town at the Wajir TB Manyatta.
Over the years, Salah and Truth Be Told Network comprising of orphans, survivors and victims of the massacre have collected names and identified at least 400 men who died in the operation.
Justus ole Tipis, a minister in the Kanu government in the 80’s told parliament only 57 people died in the massacre when the matter was brought up by area MP Ahmed Khalif. Fifty two of these were civil servants.
No one has ever been charged in court or reprimanded in any way for even these 57 deaths. Informal apologies have however been made to Degodia clan elders by some of those who ordered the operation.
Ends……………/.
Ah, could my anguish be measured and my calamity laid with it in the scales, they would now outweigh the sands of the sea. Because of this, I speak without restraint- Job 6: 1-4.
CLUTCHING a waste kindling, Saharah Abdi stares into the patchy roof of her lonesome manyatta as her mind loads up the details of the painful event am seeking to unearth.
Looking me through sunken eyes, falling eye bags, wrinkled face and shriveled fingers, she cuts the image of a troubled soul, one that has for 26 years now wept over immense sorrows brought upon her by a state that forcefully incorporated her community into the nation.
As she begins to speak, it dawns to me that for her, Wagalla- the infamous massacre of February 1984 happened yesterday. The three aspects of time- past, present and future are bound up in one- the present:
“Wagalla found me right here,” she says as she taps the sandy floor of her manyatta where we are all seated cross-legged: “It found me right here, right inside this house,” she adds authoritatively.
On the eve of 10th February 1984, she recalls she slept pretty well with her family. Nothing had seemed unusual in the past few days until that early morning when she woke up to sound of heavy boots pounding her compound.
They were littered allover this place, she says, the military men. Before she could fully apprehend the going’s on, they had already stormed inside her compound and pounced on her husband, his two brothers and their old man.
“They hurled all the men in this yard inside their truck. As if that was not enough, they pounced back on me and started to rape me. I tried to resist but one of them stabbed my breast with his gun; I fell unconscious,” she narrates with a tinge of bitterness.
Bitterness knows no shame for if it did Saharah would have hesitated to show me the bayonet stab-scars in her thighs and boot imprints in her back.
Her husband had been a civil servant working for the ministry of water but that day, there was no regard for anyone as long as he was Degodia, the Somali clan that was the target of the government operation allegedly seeking illegal guns.
“He did not make it far as I later learnt when I woke up to a dead village. He’d tried to resist saving me but they bayoneted him fatally. They threw him on the way to Wagalla and he bled his way to death,” she says.
That was the last day she ever saw the four for they never came back. Those who survived the orgy of beatings were driven to Wagalla air strip twelve miles away and herded alongside hundreds of others collected from allover Wajir.
There, they were made to strip naked and to sleep belly-face in the graveled strip. The four day ordeal of torture, rescue attempts by the women and a fatal break-away began in earnest.
“We tried to go see them but we were repulsed on the way and many of us badly assaulted. They suffered a lot from what we have heard from survivors- burning, beatings, poison- name it all,” she says.
Her story is corroborated by Raha Garat, another victim neighbor of her and whose husband lived to tell the story. Raha had come visiting when she found us engaged in deep conversation and immediately started weeping.
According to Raha, God saved her husband Garat Sanae but left him with permanent injuries which have confined him to bed ever since.
“He was coming back from the mosque when they descended on our manyatta hounding everyone, beating everyone up, stabbing me as they attempted to rape me and burning up the manyatta,” she tearfully recounts.
She, like many others was collected unconscious by an Italian Catholic volunteer Annalena Tonelli who was then working in the area and taken to hospital.
For her, Wagalla is an everyday problem since 1984 as she tends to her husband ever since. We took a stroll to their manyatta a few metres away and found the old man lying on a spread mattress.
It was a morning like no other, he tells me, as he peeps directly at me through his thick glass lens. I later learned that one of his eyes turned blind from the beatings of that day.
“They raped my daughter right in my own eyes and dragged me along into the truck where I found all the men from my village. We were taken to Wagalla and made to lie upside down in the scorching February heat,” he recounts.
Then Wagalla air strip had just been constructed and had a fresh wire mesh around it. Heavily armed military men surrounded it and worked in shifts throughout the four days the men were held there, he says.
By the first day on Friday, some rebellious men were already dead- shot or beaten dead by the officers. By Sunday morning, others had started to die of heat and thirst. On Tuesday, the dead were collected to be thrown away in the bushes and that was the escape for Garat.
“I was collected alongside the corpses and cast away as a dead. We were about 80 ‘corpses’ in the truck and we were driven about 50 kilometers away into the bush and dumped; hyenas feasted on that day,” he says as he attempts a tear.
For him, his life is dedicated to the Catholic volunteer Annalena who went about trailing military trucks in search of the injured: “She took 15 of us alive but many of that number died in her hospital. Many more were eaten by hyenas by the time she found us.”
At this point, Garat pulled down his shirt to reveal a huge scar between his chests: “These are effects of being gritted against hot murram by soldier’s boots.”
But it was the huge protruding growth beneath in his loins which shocked me: “It expands and contracts a time; now it has contracted. This is a result of the beatings and stabbing I went through in the hands of my own government.” He says.
Bitter and lost for more words, the old man struggled to wake up and staggered his way to lunchtime prayers as his sons and grandchildren took over detailing to me the pain of growing up as Wagalla victims.
They took me round the village showing me the vacant plots of Wagalla victims. Here, they told me, women are more than men because most of the men were killed in the massacre.
For Abdi Bellow my guide, the many drug addicts, mad-people walking round Wajir town and troubled orphans abound in the village are living testimonies to the injustice suffered.
“My father died in the massacre. My mum is now insane probably due to what she went through. Her mother was burned alive as she watched. It’s not only my mom who is insane but also her two sisters… my aunties,” he recounts to me.
In one of the manyatta’s, we found a lonesome badly-thatched hut where one mentally disturbed young man spends his entire day in. “He used to ask about Wagalla everyday before he went quiet. He does not talk much any more ever since,” he sister Halima Hussein said.
For Mohammed Khamis, an ex-police officer in his thirties, only the victims of Wagalla can appreciate their sorry states and no much telling it out will help.
“It was a complete disruption and destruction of a society in terms of wealth, lives, social structure and organization. We feel it everyday, we see it, we live it and no justice has been forthcoming so far,” he speaks in his refined English.
For Sahara, Wagalla is a walking shame: “Up to this moment, I cannot hold my urine and the stench around me tells it all. Only God knows about us… only God,” she says as she breaks into tearful and infectious soliloquy:
“Look at us, what is left of us? only God my son, only God… its not even good to be left alone when all our people have died, not any good…”
For a mother who has been jailed five times for speaking about Wagalla massacre, life cannot get any more painful and that is why she is vowing to die fighting for justice of the victims.
She however throws a caution my way: “I fear for you. Anybody who talks about Wagalla is endangered by the very act of speaking… every person who tries. That is why most people are quiet about it.”
As she leads me out through the village, she points out at a spot where some of the dead where thrown and poses the immortal question: “Did a government which exists for the people have to kill them sue gruesomely?”
What Wagalla entailed: The story of the massacre.
According to a sworn affidavit filed in the High Court on 24th February 2005 by Salah Abdi Sheikh, about 5000 men of Degodia clan of Somali community were rounded in the security operation.
The operation sanctioned by the provincial security committee was directed, controlled and commanded by the then North Eastern Provincial Commissioner Benson Kaaria who also served as chair of the provincial security committee, the affidavit says.
It says the men were surrounded by officers from the military, regular police and the administration police on the ground and Kenya Aiforce personnel in military helicopters from above.
“In this horrific, cruel, inhuman and most degrading operation women member of the clan were humiliated through beatings, assaults, torture and rape in presence of their children, relatives,” Salah says in his sworn affidavit.
At the airport, the men stripped naked and made to lie on their bellies in the hot murram under the scorching sun. “Soldiers whipped men until they were a mess of blood,” the affidavit reads,
For days, they underwent torture until about 3000 attempted to break off and scale the high razor fence that enmeshed them: “Only a few made it to the nearby bushes. Bullets felled the rest.”
A massive cover up was then ordered with the dead and the injured being ferried and scattered in the bushes of north eastern districts. Some bodies are said to have been collected as far away as the Ethiopian border.
Others were found in Habaswen and Ewaso Nyiro riverbed. Mass graves have since been discovered in Wagalla, Elnoor, Samatar, Griftu and even in Wajir town at the Wajir TB Manyatta.
Over the years, Salah and Truth Be Told Network comprising of orphans, survivors and victims of the massacre have collected names and identified at least 400 men who died in the operation.
Justus ole Tipis, a minister in the Kanu government in the 80’s told parliament only 57 people died in the massacre when the matter was brought up by area MP Ahmed Khalif. Fifty two of these were civil servants.
No one has ever been charged in court or reprimanded in any way for even these 57 deaths. Informal apologies have however been made to Degodia clan elders by some of those who ordered the operation.
Ends……………/.
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