Wagalla massacre: The sore that refuses to heal
By John Kamau

On February 16, 1984, local daily newspapers carried a story about an open letter to a minister of State in the Office of the President, Hussein Maalim Mohammed, about the "persecution" and "rounding up" of people of the Degodia clan.
It was the first time what was happening, or had happened, at a Wajir airstrip was being mentioned. Signed by two local MPs Ahmed M. Khalif (Wajir West) and A. M. Sheikh (Wajir East), and local leaders D M Amin, Abdi Billow and A H Hassan, the letter told the minister what he already knew; after all he was, along with fellow State minister Justus ole Tipis, privy to the operation.

The letter claimed that "more than 5,000 men were gathered together, beaten up, denied water and food and some among them have either been shot dead or burnt alive".

The leaders also told Mohammed that "the atrocities perpetrated by the authorities have no parallels in the history of independent and democratic Kenya, and it is difficult to imagine that (such a) holocaust could take place in the country."

The operation against the Degodia had started on February 5 when the North Eastern PC, Benson Kaaria, ordered all those whose houses had been burnt down by security forces to leave Wajir Town. The rounding up however started on February 10 and at the end of the day 5,000 had been arrested.

Others had been tricked to go to the airport, ostensibly to welcome dignitaries.

Intelligence sources say that the Degodia were suspected to be behind violent skirmishes with and ambushes against the soldiers deployed to stamp out the Shifta menace in the district and that they had links with other Somalis in Ethiopia’s Ogaden region.

But when the ‘final solution’ was decided upon after a security meeting in Wajir town, chaired by Kaaria and attended by police and military personnel, the end result shocked the outside world.

Ghastly

"The gruesome atrocities being perpetrated against these people are nothing short of genocide. There can be no justification whatsoever for this ghastly situation," said NEP leaders in a Press statement that was downplayed. After all it was overshadowed by the ongoing Njonjo Inquiry. The story petered out and eventually died.

A senior official with the Voice of Kenya (now Kenya Broadcasting Corporation) says they were instructed by the Ministry of Information to drop "the Wajir story".

"The word Wagalla was never mentioned anywhere for a very long time," says the now retired executive.

To downplay the story emerging from the international media, most of it leaked by Barbara Lefkow, the wife of a US diplomat, the Minister of State Justus ole Tipis released a statement in which he blamed the loss of lives to "repeated tribal feuds between the Degodia and Ajuran people".

Tipis explained that the "exercise" – which covered Elben, Damba, Butehelu, Eldas, Griftu and Bura Jogoo – was "necessary to restore peace and order" and that during the operation a "number of firearms were recovered" and "as a result it was necessary to question several suspects".

It was the ‘questioning’ that went wrong.

With temperatures soaring above 40 degrees centigrade those arrested and taken to, or were tricked into Wagalla airstrip were ordered to strip and lie on the murram.

Those who refused were shot dead and their bodies loaded onto a lorry, witnesses say.

To make them confess, the soldiers kicked and slashed some of the victims and watched as exhaustion, thirst and hunger took their toll on them.

Outside the Wagalla perimeter fence there was great concern about the people herded there. It is claimed that on February 15, Kaaria visited the airstrip to "review the progress".

As he addressed the crowd he was heckled and some of them started moving toward him. Others, like in the Jewish Escape from Sorbibor movie, decided to make one final dash. The soldiers opened fire and the number of those who died is still not known. The Kaaria convoy left for Wajir town and official silence on Wagalla massacre started.

Speaking to the Sunday Standard this week, the former PC denied ever being party to the killings. He claimed he visited the airstrip after the deaths in the company of the former Chief of General Staff, General Jackson Mulinge.

Meanwhile as the convoy left, Annalena Tonelli, a nun at the Wajir Rehabilitation Centre, painted her vehicle with the Red Cross sign and followed the army convoys that were dumping the dead and the injured in the bush (see separate story).

She made a list of the dead and gave it to Ms Lefkov. By that time all the bodies had been cleared from the airstrip and its environs and dumped in an area that stretched to the Kenya/Ethiopia border. Tonelli managed to collect hundreds of them and buried them in a mass grave at her Wajir Rehabilitation Centre.

As the story leaked out and pressure from human rights activists mounted on President Moi over the killings, Foreign Affairs minister Elijah Mwangale, who was abroad, was faced with the task of explaining the issue.

He quickly flew back to Kenya and told the world that there was "no massacre" describing the clashes as a "spillover" from hostilities between Somalia and Ethiopia.

That was the official government line.

However, the government was in a quandary as to what to do with the Italian nun who had collected the bodies from the bushes and talked to survivors. She had also lived among the Degodia, Ogaden and Ajuran clans since 1969.

At that time, Parliament was on August recess and legislators Khalif and Sheikh could not raise the matter in the House.

Back in Wajir, the two MPs were being sought for questioning. But Khalif, together with Sheikh Ahmed, then a teacher at Sabunley Secondary School, escaped and, to the chagrin of the provincial administration, held a Press conference in Nairobi where they put the number of the dead at "more than 80."

As that was happening, Moi flew to the province and praised government officers and security forces in the region "for efficiency" and asked those with guns to surrender them.

Wagalla was being downplayed and the airstrip had been closed to all. Local chief Bishar Ismael Ibrahim, who had witnessed the deaths, was arrested and locked up for 57 days before he was dismissed.

In Parliament, Khalif attempted to raise the issue, but was challenged to substantiate by then Vice-President Mwai Kibaki. He only produced two pictures of dead people as Tipis maintained that only 57 people had died during the entire operation.

Kaaria, who along with the Provincial Police Officer was quietly relieved of his duties, has a different recollection of events. The report from Garissa, he says, only mentioned 16 dead. "It was obviously a lie," he says.

That number given by Tipis has remained the official figure and when the Government finally decided to talk about it, William Ruto, an assistant minister in the Office of the President, said that only 13 people were shot dead and that 381 had been detained for screening. He explained that after the killings "no action was taken since there was no criminal activity."

The only thing Ruto admitted on behalf of the Moi administration was that "security standards were flouted" during the operation.

The testimony of a witness who survived a massacre

But within government circles, the Wagalla has been hushed and there is little official information on what really happened.

Victims and government officials are afraid to share what they know, hiding behind the veil of secrecy that surrounded the massacre.

Twenty years later, it remains Kenya’s worst kept secret.


"I was hurled into the back of a lorry and taken to Wagalla," Eyewitness Haji Warerra recalls.

"Throughout the day, military lorries drove in from all parts of the district bringing in more people. By the end of the day, hundreds of men had been detained behind the chicken-wire fence.

Sometime late in the afternoon, we were ordered to strip naked and lie on the hot murram in the scorching sun. We spent the night in the cold. By Saturday afternoon, people realised they would not be released soon. Some of the people were beaten badly by soldiers to extract information. We were now very hungry and thirsty. I saw people drink their own urine. Some weak ones collapsed and died.

Those who resisted the order to strip naked were shot outright. That Saturday, the security men poured petrol on four people and set them ablaze. By the fourth day there was a pile of dead bodies.
On February 14, out of desperation, the "prisoners" attempted to escape. They ran helter-skelter making for the fence. A few managed to climb over but the security men opened fire, killing most of them. Later in the afternoon, about six lorries drove in to collect the dead bodies and the half dead. They were piled onto the vehicles and taken to the bush where they were left for the hyenas. I was among those whom security men mistook for the dead. I found myself in Tarbaj. I was rescued by an Italian missionary who was scouring the bushes for survivors."