MEMORIALIZATION AND TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE IN KENYA
A Cursory Review
MEMORIALIZATION AND TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE IN KENYA: A CURSORY REVIEW[1]
INTRODUCTION
This brief provides a critical review of the memorialization programmes in Kenya. It begins with the contextual and conceptual issues. Here the paper provides the political context of Kenya which is critical in understanding how impunity reins supreme and violations continues unabated within a state expected to be democratizing. Then transitional justice is defined, and its core functions and mechanisms captured. Here, reparations and prosecutions are isolated as one of the core mechanisms and then linked with memorialization (which is viewed by many scholars of transitional justice as both an independent mechanism and component of symbolic reparations and restorative justice). Then 10 key memorial initiatives in Kenya are discussed; then the main challenges and finally, conclusion.
1. CONTEXTUAL AND CONCEPTUAL ISSUES
Kenya like most of the transitional societies is characterized by governance systems which have failed to foster democracy. Instead these regimes are associated with political repression and conflicts as evidenced in massive violations of human rights and gender based injustices. Such violations and injustices include inter alia political assassinations and killings; torture, inhuman and degrading treatments; arbitrary arrests and detentions; disappearances and abductions; conflicts, insecurity and civil strife; internal displacements and landlessness; poverty and economic marginalization; sodomy, rape and sexual assault; sexual harassments; female genital mutilation and forced circumcision; gender and domestic violence; women disinheritance and dispossession of property; wife inheritance, forced marriages, forced prostitution and forced pregnancies; systemic marginalization of women and disadvantaged groups from decision making processes among others.
[1] By Davis M. Malombe and Tabitha Kilatya, the Programme Officers at the Kenya Human Rights Commission and Peace and Development Network(Peacenet) respectively during the Workshop on Memorialization and Transitional Justice in Free Town Sierra Leone, on June 15-17, 2010.
