The Wagalla Massacre Monument at Korahey grounds, Wajir County. The monument is a national heritage site as recognised by The National Museums of Kenya
The Wagalla massacre is possibly one of the worst human rights violation in Kenya’s history. It happened between February 10th and 14th 1984, heavily armed security officers descended on the quiet Wajir area ostensibly to mop up guns illegally held by locals. They rounded up Somali men of the Degodia clan from their homes in the wee hours of the morning of 10th February and held them up at the local airstrip for four days without water and food. On the third day, the pangs of hunger and dehydration had started taking toll on the naked men lined up heads down along the Wagalla airstrip. Those who still could muster some strength decided enough was enough. They took to their heels towards the barbed fence with the last hope of saving their souls. The security men opened fire at them. Twenty four hours later, men in their hundreds lay dead. Their bullet-ridden bodies scattered across the airstrip and in its bushy environs (Source: KNHCR). There were also incidents of rape, killing of livestock and burning of homes in the villages.
It is estimated that about 482 people died. For years, the Kenyan government denied that a massacre had taken place and insisted that only 57 people were killed. In October 2000 the government finally publicly acknowledged that its security forces acted wrongly in the security operation.
A Kenyan minister in the office of the President, William Ruto, told parliament that three-hundred-and-eighty people had died in what’s been called the Wagalla massacre, which took place during a drive by the security forces against shifta bandits. Previously, the government had said that only fifty-seven people had died.
The parliamentarian who raised the issue, Ellias Barre Shill, said the minister was trying to avoid crucial questions — he charged that more than one-thousand ethnic Somalis were victims of the killings of 1984, and he said the Kenyan government should apologise and pay compensation.
In memory of those who lost their lives in the Wagalla massacre, Kenya National Commission on Human Rights (KNCHR) in conjunction with other partners supported the construction of a monument in Wajir Town. The Monument, which was unveiled on 14th of February 2014, has the names of 482 victims engraved on marble and pasted on a wall. These names were taken from the Truth Justice and Reconciliation Commission report and subjected to a thorough validation exercise for purposes of ensuring that they were indeed names of the people who lost their lives as a result of the massacre. KNHCR noted that the list of 482 names can never be said to be conclusive but it was satisfied that this was the closest anyone had ever come to doing an actual audit of lives lost during this massacre.
This is what the Truth Justice and Reconciliation Commission report had to say about the Wagalla massacre (Download full report HERE).
75. The Commission finds that the security operation conducted in Wagalla, Wajir, in February 1984 resulted in the massacre of hundreds of civilians. Numerous other atrocities were committed by state security agents including torture, brutal beatings, rape and sexual violence, burning of houses and looting of property.
76. The Commission finds that the Wagalla Massacre, including the detention, torture and killing of the male members of the Degodia tribe at the airstrip, and the rapes, killing of livestock and burning of homes in the villages, was a systematic attack against a civilian population and thus qualifies as a crime against humanity.
77. The Commission was unable to determine the precise number of persons murdered in this massacre but accepts that a large number died, possibly close to a thousand. The official figure of 57 given by the state therefore grossly underestimates the number of people who were killed at Wagalla and is an example of the generally thoughtless manner in which the state has traditionally treated massacres committed by its own agents.
78. The District Security Committee (DSC) at Wajir authorized the security operation that resulted in the massacre. The plan involved confining people at the airstrip, a place not officially gazetted as a detention center.
79. The Provincial Security Committee (PSC) at Garissa had a role to play in the authorizing of the operation as is evidenced from the signal that was sent from the Garissa PSC to the Wajir DSC that called for the rounding up of persons and livestock and for them to be “treated mercilesslyâ€. The Commission finds such language in official communications to be highly inappropriate and reckless. Such words stood as an effective license for subordinates to take the law into their own hands. The Commission finds the PSC and in particular, the author of the signal, Provincial Police Officer Aswani, to be responsible for encouraging the recipients of the instruction to act in a lawless manner.
80. The Kenya Army is held to be responsible for the actual execution of the massacre. The military as a matter of necessity must also have played a role in the planning of the operation.
81. The Commission is satisfied that the DSC, the PSC and the Kenya Intelligence Committee (KIC) knew or should have known that the security approach adopted would lead to gross violations of human rights, including the deaths of innocent individuals. None of the members of these bodies learnt any of the lessons from earlier massacres, such as the 1980 massacre in Garissa (Bulla Karatasi). Alternatively these persons chose to ignore such lessons.
82. There was a deliberate effort by the government to cover up the details and extent of the massacre. The cover-up involved most if not all of those in positions of authority in Wajir, Garissa and Nairobi.
83. The Commission notes that members of the KIC visited Wajir the day preceding the Wagalla Massacre, during which visit they held a meeting with the District Security Committee. The Commission finds that members of the KIC deliberately mischaracterized to the Commission the nature of the KIC trip and withheld or concealed information concerning their knowledge and/ or involvement in the security operation. The Commission finds that while development may have been on the KIC’s agenda as alleged by such members, its primary mission was in fact to assess the state of security in the region. This much is apparent from the documents concerning the planning of the trip, as well as the documents prepared shortly after the trip. This conclusion is also confirmed by some of the witnesses who testified.
84. The Commission notes with deep concern that notwithstanding their positions and seniority, their specific brief in the area, the security briefings received, and their knowledge of ongoing incidents and the declining security situation in Wajir, that all of the KIC members interviewed or who appeared in the hearings denied any knowledge of the plans to follow up or deal with the security situation. The Commission finds that, in the circumstances described above, such denials are not credible.
85. The Commission accordingly finds that the KIC must have been apprised of the plans for the pending security operation. In fact the Commission was told that the security operation was planned by the National Security Council in Nairobi in January 1984 which, if true, makes it extremely difficult to believe that the KIC would not have been made aware of such plans in connection with their tour of the area. One of the questions the Commission was unable to answer is why the KIC members have chosen to feign total ignorance as to what measures were to be taken, even close to thirty years after the event.
86. The KIC members were likely to have received news of the massacre before most people. However they deny this. Some of them went so far as to claim that they only heard of the Wagalla Massacre through newspaper reports that surfaced weeks afterwards. The Commission finds these claims implausible.
87. The conduct of the KIC members is consistent with the official wall of silence that descended over the facts and details of the Wagalla Massacre. In feigning ignorance, the KIC members have invited deep suspicion about answers to the most serious questions as to their specific roles in the days preceding and just after the Wagalla Massacre. The Commission finds the conduct of the KIC members unbecoming of their high offices. Indeed the Commission finds that particularly because of their continued cover up of the circumstances surrounding the massacre that none of the individuals who were members of the KIC are fit to occupy any position of responsibility in the new Kenyan constitutional order.
88. The Government refused to make available to the Commission specific documents related to its investigation of this and other massacres in clear violation of the TJR Act. Specifically the Commission did not receive the full set of minutes of meetings of the relevant PSC, DSC, and KIC meetings, and did not receive any minutes of the NSC, despite repeated requests. This violation of the TJR Act has severely hindered the ability of the Commission to discover the entire truth and context of these and other violations.
Wajir residents mark 30 years since the Wagalla massacre