Kenyan anti-riot police patrol a slum during anti-government protests in 2023 -- image via People's Dispatch
By Global News Service
“We will fight in the streets of Nairobi for our brothers and sisters in Haiti,” if Kenya’s government proceeds to deploy its police to the Caribbean nation, Booker Ngesa Omole, National Organizing Secretary of the Communist Party of Kenya, told Peoples Dispatch.
Despite the prohibition by Kenya’s High Court, Kenyan policemen “can be deployed to Haiti as soon as next week,” President Willian Ruto said on January 30. He spoke from Rome, where he was wooing European investors at the Italy-Africa summit.
“Any decision by any state organ or state officer to deploy police officers to Haiti… contravenes the constitution and the law, and is therefore unconstitutional, illegal and invalid,” Kenya’s High Court had ruled only days ago on January 26.
The ruling dealt a setback to the planned U.S.-sponsored intervention in Haiti, to which Kenya is to give an African face by deploying a thousand police personnel to lead the mission. The latter’s purported objective is to restore security by ridding Haiti of the menace of criminal gangs.
Omole alleged that the “biggest killer of young people in Kenya today is not malaria or any other disease, but the police.”
“Every day, we continue to register the murder of several young, poor people by the Kenyan police in the informal settlements of Nairobi,” he said. “This is the kind of police the U.S. has chosen to lead its intervention in Haiti.”
from the Peoples Dispatch / Globetrotter News Service