Word: mungiki
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...shown the will or ability to rise above their power squabble. Nor have they called to account the killers in their ranks. Crippled by biased police investigations and prosecutors, Kenya's courts have convicted no one for their part in the violence. A mystical and criminal cult called the Mungiki has replaced the government in many slums, providing water, housing and dispute-settlement along with drugs, prostitutes and protection. The police, endemically corrupt, fight the Mungiki for turf, and have executed nearly 500 in the last few years, according to a February report by Philip Alston, U.N. rapporteur on extrajudicial...
...sprawling townships on the edge of the capital, Nairobi. On the ground, the city is gripped by fear. Police officers man roadblocks across its main arteries and sirens wail on its outer edges. Violence is sporadic, and sudden. In the slum of Karobongi, witnesses said the feared Mungiki sect - a group that weaves Kikuyu tribal mythology with gang rule in the slums - hacked to death several people from rival tribes in reprisal killings, leaving the roads strewn with limbs. Clashes between tribes also erupted in the tin-shack slum of Mathare, preventing aid workers from delivering daily drops of food...
Human rights campaigners in Kenya have accused police of carrying out hundreds of extrajudicial executions during an operation against the Mungiki criminal sect. A shadowy and fractured quasi-religious movement, the Mungiki were blamed for a string of grisly murders earlier this year...
...report said the deaths were clinical killings. "Almost all the cadavers bear classic execution signs of a bullet behind the head exiting through the forehead," it said. The Mungiki (meaning multitude in the Kikuyu language) draw their inspiration from the Mau Mau guerrillas who rose against British colonial rule in the 1950s. They began in the 1980s as a quasi-religious movement to rid Kenya of cultural imperialism and return the country to its African traditions. Followers were believed to face Mount Kenya to pray and many grew their hair into dreadlocks...
...recent years, the Mungiki have retreated into their slum strongholds of Nairobi. But they hit the headlines in April with a string of beheadings as they tussled for control of lucrative bus routes by executing drivers and conductors who refused to pay protection money. Analysts speculated that the Mungiki were also flexing their muscles ahead of elections due next month. Brutal police crackdowns began in June after officers were shot dead in a slum as they investigated Mungiki violence. Young men shaved off their dreadlocks or fled the city for fear of being caught up in the arrests...
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