In response to the abuse of Samburu people by Kenyan police that was documented by Cultural Survival, a Kenyan organization has initiated trainings for police who are sent to Samburu East district. Michael Tiampati, national coordinator of the Pastoralists Development Network of Kenya, reports that many of the police officers “ are ignorant because of stereotypes…They are transferred to this area and they want to convert pastoralists to suit their imagined ‘civilised’ society.
According to a report issued by the Samburu Women for Education & Environment Development Organization (SWEEDO), Kenya’s new constitution “is a clean break with the past and provides several avenues for the pursuit and strengthening of Indigenous peoples’ personal and collective rights.”
In a historic constitutional referendum on 4th August, 2010, sixty-eight percent of Kenyans who turned out to vote supported the proposed new constitution.
In the last two weeks, there have been further incidents of police brutality against the Samburu people of northern Kenya. Following Cultural Survival’s investigation and publication of our report, police have not inflicted more military-style assaults on entire Samburu villages like those of 2009 and January of this year. But we are receiving reports of apparently random beatings meted out on Samburu men.
Michael Lolwerikoi, representing the Samburu people of Kenya, and Ellen Lutz, executive director of Cultural Survival, presented Cultural Survival’s report, “When the Police are the Perpetrators,” to the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights and fundamental freedoms of indigenous people during the meeting of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in New York, April 18-30. The 32-page report, written by Cultural Survival’s Global Response program director Paula Palmer and human rights expert Chris Allan, documents violent attacks by Kenyan police forc
Land Acknowledgement
We acknowledge that we are headquartered on Massachusett land, in Cambridge, MA, and we thank the past, current, and future Indigenous stewards of this territory.
