September 6, 2012 (Sam - writing about events from August 22, 2012)
Raiders struck Riketa Village in Tana River County at around 5am. Estimates place over 100 raiders armed with pangas (two-foot long machetes), bows and arrows, and guns at the scene of the massacre early this morning. After taking up strategic positions outside each manyatta (a group of huts forming a unit within a common fence), they began firing shots into the air to arouse the sleeping villagers. Panicked villagers started fleeing from their huts; the raiders were waiting for them. Most never got further than their front doors before they were cut down. Those who decided not to run fared even worse; the raiders set the huts on fire and let the families burn alive inside. While the village men fought off the invaders outside, women and children crumpled inside their homes as they burned to the ground.
Those who did make it out of their huts were slaughtered as they attempted to escape out the main exit of the village. All escape routes had been blocked off.
Godana Bodole watched his wife and several of his 13 children perish as his hut collapsed in a smoldering wreck. All but two of his children that didn’t die in the fire were hacked to death by raiders or shot with arrows as they tried to escape. He still can’t find one of his daughters; she is believed to have been murdered or drowned in the Tana River.
Of the completely intact, 15-member family that he slept next to the previous night, he has been left with one daughter.
Why the raid in the first place? A retaliatory attack stemming from a tribal conflict over grazing land, pasture, and water. The death toll: 31 women, 11 children, and 6 men.
But these incidents, on the rise as elections draw closer, are believed to be more than just age-old tribal quarrels. It seems that behind all the violence, are political agendas. Local politicians are believed to provoke such tribal clashes in the hopes that displacing people in certain areas will help them achieve a certain voting pattern that will favor their campaigns.
God help this country.
(photo credit: http://peacesymbol.org/)
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