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Wagalla Massacre
Wagalla Massacre
Location	Wagalla Airstrip, North Eastern Province, Kenya
Coordinates	01°46′55.92″N 39°56′2.08″E / 1.7822000°N 39.9339111°E
Date	February 10, 1984
Attack type	Massacre
Deaths	5,000+

The Wagalla massacre was a massacre of ethnic Somalis by the Kenyan Army on 10 February 1984 in Wajir County, Kenya.^[1] Government troops were ordered to stop clan violence in the area, and did so by first detaining some 5,000 locals at an airstrip, denying them food and water for a week, and then shooting them.^[2] The massacre was not investigated by Kenya's government until 2011.^[3]

Overview

The massacre took place on 10 February 1984 at the Wagalla Airstrip against the Degoodi clan.^[4] It was facilitated by other Somali clans who spied and helped Kenyan troops. The facility is situated approximately 15 km (9 mi) west of the county capital of Wajir in the former North Eastern Province, a region primarily inhabited by the Somalis. Kenyan troops had descended on the area to reportedly help defuse clan-related conflict.

However, according to eye-witness testimony, about 5,000 Somali men of the Degoodi clan were then taken to an airstrip and prevented from accessing water and food for five days before being executed by Kenyan soldiers.^[3]

According to a commissioner with The Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission of Kenya, a government oversight body that had been formed in response to the 2008 Kenyan post-election violence, the Wagalla massacre represents the worst human rights violation in Kenya's history.^[3]

Death toll

The exact number of people killed in the massacre is unknown.^[5] However, eyewitnesses place the figure at around 5,000 deaths.^[3]^[6]

Aftermath

For years the Kenyan government insisted that only 57 people had been killed during "a drive by the security forces against shifta bandits"; it was not until October 2000 that the government publicly acknowledged wrongdoing on the part of its security forces, and increased the number of victims to 380.^[7]

After the 2007 elections in Kenya and the associated negotiations between rival factions, a Truth, Justice, and Reconciliation Commission was set up to investigate political violence in Kenya. In 2010, however, Ronald Slye, a law professor from the US, resigned amid concerns that the commission's chairman, Bethual Kiplagat, was biased in favor of the government; those concerns led to international donors withdrawing funding, causing the commission's $16 million budget for 2010 to fall short by $14 million. Moreover, Kiplagat had been connected to the Wagalla massacre both inside and outside Kenya, a connection that Kiplagat, according to Slye, refused to clarify.^[8]

In April 2012, Kiplagat was reinstated as TJRC chairman after the Justice Minister Eugene Wamalwa brokered a truce between him and the other commissioners.^[9]

The same year, the former Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga ordered an official probe into the atrocities and indicated that the national attorney general should bring to justice those responsible for the killings. Odinga also ordered a museum to be constructed in honour of the victims.^[3]

In February 2015, the Wajir County governor Ahmed Abdullahi said his government would partner with local and international human rights organisations in seeking justice for the victims of the massacre, saying that the Truth Commission report offered such an opportunity which remained squandered. "Those mentioned by the TJRC report and witnesses must be prosecuted. The people who afflicted the pain to our people remain unpunished and are still with us," Abdullahi said.^[10]

Film

The film/documentary Scarred: The Anatomy of a Massacre, directed by Judy Kibinge, founder of the East African Documentary Film Fund, is the first independent visual attempt to chronicle the history of the massacre as experienced by both the victims and survivors, some of whom were government officials. The documentary was launched at the National Museum in Nairobi in February 2015.^[11]^[12]