Forced adult circumcision as a method of terror — and often, execution leading to death — in Kenya’s post-electoral violence is now entering the annals of horror stories almost too horrible to contemplate.
The lining up of people in Sierra Leone to wait to have their hand(s) or arm(s) amputated — the hand that they might have voted with, had they been adult, but many victims were children and babies — was a previous African horror story, in the context of ethnic violence and elections.
Democracy, it is clear, is not just having elections. And voting is not necessarily democracy.
In the Democratic Republic of the Congo a few years ago, women were buried alive, standing up. THey were told to raise their hands so they could be dug up right after the dirt was piled on them — they might have belived they would get out of the horror alive. But the intention never was to get them out. Reports indicate that the field of bones of arms and hands sticking out of the earth existed for a while after this awful atrocity.
In Rwandan violence in 1994, Hutus cut the achilles tendons of their intended victims — including a group of 11 Belgian UN peacekeepers — so they could not flee before slowly being finished off.
How is it possible to be so cruel? And, for what?
Now the AP is reporting from Kenya that “In the violence that has followed Kenya’s disputed presidential election, a notorious gang has been mutilating the genitals of both men and women in the name of circumcision — inflicting a brutal punishment on members of a rival tribe that does not traditionally circumcise. The attacks do not appear to be widespread, but they drive home how a fight touched off by opposition allegations that Kenya’s president stole the election has exploded into a broader conflict fueled by ethnic resentments in what had been one of Africa’s most stable nations. Many of the mutilation victims belong to the Luo tribe of opposition presidential candidate Raila Odinga, say witnesses and even a recruiter for the gang itself. The gang, called the Mungiki, draws mostly from President Mwai Kibaki’s Kikuyu tribe, which has long dominated politics and business in this East African country. Mungiki, which means ‘multitude’ in Kikuyu, originally promoted traditional Kikuyu practices, including female genital mutilation. But in recent years it has become involved in extortion and murder and it also provides hired muscle for politicians. The recruiter called forced ‘circumcisions’ simple revenge on Luos for attacks on Kikuyus since the Dec. 27 election. More than 600 people have been reported killed in the upheaval … the gang has been outlawed since 2002, after its members beheaded 21 people in a turf war with a rival gang. Circumcision is a rite of passage for male members of the Kikuyu and most other Kenyan tribes, but the Luos do not practice it … K., interviewed in the Nairobi slum of Kibera, reported seeing five men harmed in this way, including at least two whose penises were cut off and thrown into a fire. She said she believed those men died because she saw the attackers throw the bodies behind some kiosks … A surgeon at Kenyatta National Hospital, the main government hospital in the capital, said he had operated on two men with injuries to their penises, at least one of whom was a Luo. ‘There were cuts around the foreskin, probably an attempt at circumcision’, the doctor said, speaking on condition of anonymity. A mortuary assistant in Nairobi said out of 78 bodies brought to his facility since the fighting started, two adult males appeared to have been crudely circumcised before being hacked to death … John Holmes, the United Nations undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs, said he had received reports of genital mutilation. He said the United Nations calls on ‘all leaders to stop this kind of violence, to nip this kind of ethnic fighting and singling out people for attacks on the basis of ethnicity in the bud before it becomes any worse’. ” [!!!] This AP report is poste here.