MEMORIALIZATION AND TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE IN KENYA

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] 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.

Transitional Justice Programme

Transitional Justice Programme: Interventions on TJRC, IDPs and Land Policy Reforms and Public Interest Litigations for Accountable and Human Rights-Centred Governance in Kenya

Transitional justice refers to a range of approaches that are applied in order to heal and reform the states emerging from conflicts and bad governance to peace and democracy. Thus transitional justice is not realized during mere regime changes but political situations which occasion a normative departure from autocracy to democracy, from opacity to transparency, from open shameless graft to fiscal and economic accountability.  But that change must be structural, ideological, and fundamental, it cannot be a continuation of the same.  The change must signal real and genuine regime transformation.