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From: wolda002@umn.edu
Date: Sat Apr 17 2010 - 22:00:39 EDT
Justice is hard to come by in Kenya
The Met police has reopened the murder case of Julie Ward. In Kenya our
police lack the tenacity for such crime-solving
A couple of years ago, it was not uncommon for a victim of burglary,
assault or theft in Kenya to report the case to a police station and be
told: "Go and arrest the thief and bring him to the station. We will do the
rest." Needless to say, nothing ever got done. The good citizen would not
arrest the thief and the police would not follow it up.
The situation has slightly changed today but Kenyans still do not have much
faith in the ability of law enforcement agencies to execute justice,
especially in cases involving murder. This is why, even as the case of
Julie Ward, the British tourist who was killed in Kenya more than two
decades ago while on a trip to the Masai Mara game reserve, gets reopened
by the Metropolitan police, Kenyans wonder at, and admire, the tenacity of
British authorities to get to the bottom of a case that took place way
before some of them were born.
Many are likely to dismiss this pursuit of justice as the mere chasing of
the will o' the wisp. Others believe that the British authorities really do
not know Kenya, or at least do not know that this is a place where the
mills of justice grind exceedingly slow and sometimes conk out in the
middle of the task. Thus they think this is one of those cold-case episodes
where a killer gets nailed three decades after the act.
But who can blame them? Our justice system is such that only those who have
money get things done. When a poor villager is murdered in a remote
backwater of the countryside, the police come, ask a few questions, collect
the body and take it to the morgue. From there? A deathly silence. The
family can only grieve and bury their dead while hoping against hope that
one day the killers would be known. That day never arrives. And no word
from the police is ever heard.
If there is one thing that Kenya lacks, as indeed do many other developing
countries, it is the tenacity to investigate crime in the fashion exhibited
by the Julie Ward case. And neither do they have the capacity to do it. One
might argue that Julie's father, John Ward, has the money, and therefore
will stop at nothing to have the murder of his daughter resolved.
But really, justice is not about who has the money or who does not. An
investigative unit that works and bares results is a boon to the confidence
of the citizenry. True, a murdered person will never come back to life just
because his killer has been nailed. But the family and friends of such a
person would rest in the faith and hope that justice has at last been done.
Though Kenya has been carrying out police reforms lately, many Kenyans are
yet to be convinced that justice could be speedily executed in cases that
deafeningly cry out for it. There are numerous murders that have gone
unresolved. In fact, most of those who are arraigned in court on charges of
manslaughter or murder are those who, invariably, have been caught in the
act. But successful investigation based on forensic evidence is something
yet to catch on in this country. It is not that Kenyan police lack training
to deal with these cases. It is that they are ill-equipped. Even when they
dust the scene for fingerprints, it is not clear what they do with them
because they lack the technical capacity to deal with them. At any rate,
before they arrive at the scene, which in most cases is never cordoned off
anyway, scores of people would have interfered with it.
That is why Julie Ward's case is not likely to make the headlines in Kenya.
That is probably why it does so in the UK. If Julie lived in Kenya and her
father had the same kind of money, there would probably still not have been
any hope that two decades after her murder the police would reopen her
file. Hers would be a really cold case. In Kenya, cold cases get really
cold after only a few months, and in many cases, soon after the body has
been interred.
* guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010