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Policing in East Africa
East
Africa's police make headlines for all the wrong reasons.
Kenyan police officers are reported raiding the press and
setting fire to piles of newspapers in the street, in response
to an article that criticised the government. Ugandan police
officers are photographed wearing black t-shirts and storming
the High Court to prevent the bail of an opposition Presidential
candidate during an election period. Tanzanian police officers
are described torturing suspects to get confessions. Each
incident is a concerning blow to the rights and freedoms of
the communities of Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, but more importantly
reveals the widespread illegitimate government interference,
brutality and lack of accountability that are hallmarks of
regime style policing - a style of policing that sits at odds
with East Africa's claims to democracy.
Regime
policing - a child of the colonies
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East
Africa's modern day police forces each find their roots
in the British colonies of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. It is this history that has led
to the regime style policing experienced today.
Kenya's
British story began with the East Africa Trading Company
in 1886, after formal external control was imposed on
East Africa by an agreement between the European colonial
powers. The East Africa Trading Company needed an armed
security force to protect its trading routes, trading
centres, stock and staff and so imported police from
another of Britain's colonies, India. The security force
worked under the Indian colonial police legislation
to protect the interests of the trading company. Today's
force was founded later, in 1920, after the end of World
War I. Britain was moving towards direct control over
the colony, while white settlers were increasingly moving
to Kenya and a police force was needed to suppress dissent
against colonial role and protect the colonists. This
force supported the British for decades, particularly
during the repressive state of emergency period in the
1950s.
Uganda
was placed under the control of the East Africa Trading
Company in 1888 and was named a British Protectorate
in 1894. As in Kenya, the Trading Company needed to
protect its interests, and a para-military force was
formed in 1899 to quell local resistance against the
governing regime. World War I changed the policing landscape
and border tension with German colonies led to the bolstering
of the Ugandan police, with increased numbers, imported
British officers in senior positions and locals filling
the junior ranks. This set the scene for the confused
combination of army and police roles today. After World
War I ended, the police scaled back to supporting the
colonial regime internally, but took up a border protection
role again during World War II.
Mainland
Tanzania was ruled by the Germans between 1886 and 1919.
Like the British, the Germans first imposed rule through
a trading company and later through direct rule. The
British took control in 1919 and set about putting in
place a police force staffed with senior European officers,
middle ranking Indian officers and local recruits for
the junior ranks. Policing was confined to urban areas,
unless a rural area had a high settler population. Zanzibar,
off the coast, had a British-influenced police force
from 1877, with a police put in place to prevent the
rebirth of the slave trade.
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Source:
Google /images |
Regime
policing - a tool of the new independence
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The
British left their police behind when they retreated
from East Africa. The police were trained in regime
protection and community repression. The new post-independence
regimes quickly learnt to make use of the police to
shore up their own power.
Kenya
held its first independence elections in 1961. The Kenya
African National Union (KANU) formed a government, headed
by resistance leader Jomo Kenyatta. An independence
constitution, based on the British Westminster model,
was adopted, but key democratic provisions quickly fell
victim to KANU amendments. By 1964, power was concentrated
in the hands of the President and by 1966 the government
had awarded itself sweeping emergency powers, in echoes
of the previous decade of emergency under colonial rule.
By 1982, Kenya had effectively become a one-party state.
The police continued to work as it had under colonial
rule and police repression of dissent and political
assassinations were commonplace.
In
1992, bowing to public pressure, Kenya nominally returned
to multi-party politics, with a general election that
returned KANU to power, amid claims of voter intimidation
and police violence. In the early years of multi-party
politics, elections were characterised by violence.
By 2002, the election process had become more democratic,
and results ushered in a new government, the National
Rainbow Coalition. Despite early hopes that the new
government would implement police reform and bring in
a new era of democratic policing, the government has
continued to use the police as a political tool, as
shown when the police stormed the offices of the East
African Standard newspaper.
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Source:
Google /images
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Uganda
held its first democratic elections in 1962. The Uganda People's
Congress, a group of small parties, formed a coalition with
a smaller Bugandan political party and won the election. However,
the relationship between the coalition parties quickly soured
and the police were used to suppress any Bugandan dissent
against the UPC (Bugandans are a minority group that descend
from the Bugandan Kingdom, which held parts of modern Uganda
prior to the arrival of the British). Further infighting lead
to the head of the UPC, Milton Obote, suspending the constitution,
dismissing the President and installing himself as a supreme
leader, supported by troops and the police. The police played
an integral role - regime aligned officers reported directly
to the President, bypassing the normal chain of command that
was in place. Decades of coups and counter coups followed,
marking prolonged periods of instability or dictatorship.
The police were marginalised during this period, as the army
was favoured by the regime, although a number of special police
units were set up by the government to consolidate their power.
The police units had a reputation as brutal, violent machines
of the state. In 2005, single party 'movement' rule was nominally
replaced by a multi-party system, but this has yet to bear
fruit. The police continue to act in military roles, while
the army takes on civilian policing jobs, and both act to
keep the government in power.
Mainland
Tanzania won independence in 1961, and in 1963 the newly independent
Zanzibar joined to form modern Tanzania. The government quickly
set about incorporating the police machinery into its own
ranks. Membership of the ruling party was a prerequisite for
a new police recruit, while police officers were appointed
to powerful positions within the government. Police independence
slipped from illusory to non-existent as single party rule
was firmly established. Police were actively involved in the
prevention of free speech and the detention and deportation
of opposition leaders. Repressive single party rule, with
the support of the police, continued until the introduction
of multi-party rule in 1992. However, the police have continued
to act as a partisan body supporting the ruling regime.
The
community experience of policing today
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Regime
style policing has a negative impact on the community.
The police should be in place to serve the community,
not support the government, and to protect rights, not
infringe them. For a community, regime policing means
being exposed to excessive use of force, corruption,
abuse of due process and illegal arrest or detention
- and this has played out in East Africa.
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Source:
Google /images |
Excessive
use of force
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Excessive
use of force - and torture - is one of the most concerning
aspects of policing in East Africa today. Torture is
prohibited by international and domestic law, but still
takes place. In Kenya, use of torture by police was
described in 2000 as "widespread and systematic"
by the then United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture,
Sir Nigel Rodley. In 2003, a local organisation, the
Independent-Medico Legal Unit, documented 358 cases
of alleged torture. In 2004, three suspects being held
at a scene for attempted robbery were shot dead by a
senior officer who continued to claim his behaviour
was justified after the event, on the basis that the
victims were suspects. In 2004, capital remandees at
the Nairobi Remand Prison claimed that torture by police
was commonplace; police used force to obtain evidence
or offered themselves as violence for hire - they were
paid by prisoners and outsiders to settle scores. In
Uganda, excessive use of force and torture is particularly
associated with special police units. The Uganda Human
Rights Commission reported 264 claims of torture against
the police in 2003. Tanzanian newspapers carry reports
of suspects claiming they were beaten, had their legs
broken, had their genitals tied with a bicycle tube
or were whipped by police in an attempt to extract confessions.
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Source:
Google /images |
Corruption
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Corruption
pervades all the police forces of East Africa. According
to the 2004 Kenya Bribery Index, the police are the
most corrupt agency in the Kenyan government - 80% of
respondents thought that the police were corrupt, 49%
felt they were partial and 52% believed they colluded
with criminals. A 2002 Transparency International survey
reported that the average Kenyan paid 1,270 Kenyan shillings
(about US$15) in bribes to police officers each month.
In Uganda, a 2003 government survey found that the police
were seen as the most corrupt government institution
- over 43% of respondents rated it extremely or largely
corrupt. Anecdotal evidence suggests that innocent people
are often framed with fake charges in order to elicit
payment. In Tanzania, common local phrases, such as
kuingia bure kutoka kwa pesa, or 'entry to a
police station is free, but you must pay to exit', and
concepts such as the Friday collection, where people
are rounded up and detained on a Friday to induce the
payment of a bribe - or risk spending the entire weekend
in jail ahead of the court reopening on Monday morning
- point to the pervasive nature of police corruption.
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Source:
Google /images |
Abuse
of due process
Abuse
of due process occurs when a police officer subverts a system
for personal gain. Common abuses are tampering with evidence,
intimidating witnesses or manipulating the outcome of a case.
In 2003, the Kenyan Standing Committee on Human Rights reported
that there was a tendency by errant police officers to abuse
the court process by laying false or overstated charges to
cover up police malpractice and that this was systematic and
widespread. Examples of malpractice included arbitrary arrest,
illegal detention and bribery and extortion, to legitimise
misconduct and absolve officers and the police department
of blame. In Tanzania, Commissioner Makaramba, with the Commission
for Human Rights and Good Governance, has told stories of
case files involving the sons of influential politicians disappearing
and the police failing to take any further action. Meanwhile,
detainees are denied access to their families or lawyers,
while being subjected to physical assault. Detainees have
also complained that they are held on fabricated charges that
are 'dumped' on them by police so that long standing unsolved
files can be closed.
Illegal
arrest and detention
East
African police also engage in illegal arrest and detention.
In Uganda, the Constitution enshrines the rights of arrested
people. However, the law is not followed. In its 2002 annual
report, the Uganda Human Rights Commission visited 23 police
stations and 3 police posts in central, western and eastern
Uganda and found suspects that had been detained beyond constitutional
limits in each one. Safe houses are also notoriously used
to hold illegally arrested or detained suspects. The situation
is the same in Tanzania. Court transcripts tell the story
of a woman who was unlawfully arrested, detained, confined
and prosecuted without reasonable or probable cause. She was
not produced before a court for three days, and was only set
free after two months, after legal intervention. The Legal
and Human Rights Centre has also raised concerns about illegal
arrest and detention in unauthorised places in a number of
its annual reports.
Cultural
shifts
The
problems associated with the police in East Africa are a result
of the style of policing employed - regime policing. This
kind of policing is violent and brutal policing, encouraging
corruption and abuse of process. It is in place to keep the
ruling party in power, and stems from the days of colonial
rule, where the police were pawns of the British and in place
to keep the British settlers safe, British trade interests
protected and British administrations in power. However, they
were taken on by the new independence governments and used
to suppress dissent through years of political upheaval, single
party rule and dramatic history. Today's East Africa is a
very different place to the East Africa left behind by the
British, and it is also a very different East Africa to the
virtual dictatorships of twenty and thirty years ago. It is
a vibrant region, developing politically and economically,
with claims to true democracy. The current style of policing
does not have a place in the new East Africa. Democracies
need democratic policing and free communities need transparent
and accountable police that serve them, not their governments.
Daniel
Woods
Access to Justice Programme
CHRI
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