Kenya Air Force ex-servicemen display their discharge certificates on June 22, 2017. The 72 who were dismissed from the Air Force on accounts of the attempted 1982 coup, were calling on the state to implement the Truth Justice and Reconciliation Commission report recommendations that they be compensated for inhumane torture and wrong dismissal. PHOTO | ONDARI OGEGA | NMG
In 2005, a peace agreement brought an end to hostilities between the Indonesian government and a secessionist insurgency in Aceh Province. In the course of that war, the army committed gross human rights violations.
Recently, Indonesian President Joko Widodo acknowledged gross rights abuses by the state and announced plans to compensate victims.
The acknowledgement and compensation will go a long way in healing the wounds and strengthening national cohesion.
But the Indonesian government should go a step further and prosecute those responsible for the violations. A sense that justice has been done plus acknowledgement and compensation are the balm that will heal the trauma.
In 2008, after the post-election violence of 2007, Kenya established the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission. The extreme brutality of the 2007 violence had left the country traumatised. In that brief period of madness, 1,500 people were killed, 3,000 women raped and 300,000 people displaced from their homes.
In one incident, which captures the brutality of that conflict, women and children who had sought refuge in a church were burnt to death. We realised just how tenuous our nationhood was. We came face-to-face with the dark possibility of a Rwanda-style implosion if underlying hatred stemming from our past was not addressed.
The mandate of the TJRC was to investigate rights abuses under the despotic Kanu regime, land grabbing and ethnic conflict between 1963 and 2008. The commission did not have prosecutorial power.
Its work was to investigate and document abuses and make recommendations as to compensation for victims of abuse, restorative justice for land grievances, and prosecution for perpetrators of egregious rights abuses and economic crimes.
The TJRC report, completed in 2013, gave a raft of recommendations, including compensation for victims of abuse, investigation of powerful individuals in the Kanu autocracy to determine their culpability in abuses or theft.
In 2015, President Uhuru Kenyatta, in his State of the Nation Address, apologised for abuses by current and past governments.
Although this was groundbreaking, victims of the infamous torture chambers of Nyayo and Nyati houses, and those who were detained without trial, have never been compensated.
Families of individuals assassinated by the state, too, have never been compensated.
Criminals who masterminded heists such as Goldenberg and Anglo-Leasing, both which almost brought the county’s economy to its knees and from which we have never fully recovered, still hold powerful positions in society and government.
Several individuals have sued the state for their detention and torture, but though the courts awarded them compensation, the state has never honoured the judgments.
Past grievances over time boil into resentment and then erupt into violence.
The Kenya government should once again apologise for past abuses and, this time, follow through with recommendations of the TJRC.
For obvious reasons, I will not be holding my breath.
Tee Ngugi is a Nairobi-based political commentator.
