The Independent Uganda: You get the Truth we Pay the Price
– ‘Slaughtered like goats’ –
They fled after an attack by the Pokot in mid-March in which nine of their people died — a revenge raid of extraordinary cruelty that terrorised the whole community into abandoning their homes.
Queen Siambui, 22, lost her younger sister, Janet, who was murdered as she sheltered with her daughters, five-year-old Nasinya and three-year-old Vicki. Siambui wept as she recounted the attack: Janet was shot in the chest and then she and her children had their throats slit.
“They slaughtered the women and children like goats,” said Benjamin Lecher, the 45-year-old chief of the Mukutani Ilchamus.
“We left Mukutani because of the attacks by the Pokot community,” he said, sipping tea outside his rough tent as the morning’s heat cranked up.
“We have been evicted and they have occupied our land.”
Tit-for-tat cattle raids are common between the Ilchamus and Pokot. Young men known as “morans” are regularly killed in skirmishes, but the deliberate murder of women and children, Lecher said, was different.
“It has become a tribal thing, it’s not banditry. This is not cattle rustling,” Lecher said. “Politics is fuelling this issue, these people are expanding their territory by evicting others.”
In an act of violent gerrymandering, the displacement means Lecher and his people may be unable to vote in August.
Yet the Pokot and their politicians — some of whom hold senior posts in Baringo county, dominated by the ruling party — are not exempt from violence, though widely blamed for it.
A belated government security operation has, they say, disproportionately targeted the Pokot, while at least three prominent Pokot politicians have been killed in recent months.
Their murders, like the crimes in Kamwenje and Mukutani, are unsolved.
