Africa|Kenya Investigates Use of Tear Gas on Schoolchildren
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Kenya Investigates Use of Tear Gas on Schoolchildren
Students from the Langata Road Primary School in Nairobi during their lunch break on Tuesday.Credit...Simon Maina/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
By Jeffrey Gettleman
NAIROBI, Kenya — Kenyan officials said Tuesday that they had opened a major internal investigation into the conduct of police officers who tear-gassed elementary schoolchildren during a protest over a playground, an episode that drew widespread condemnation.
The children were upset that a private developer had walled off a grassy field next to their school in Nairobi, the capital, and turned it into a construction site. Community leaders said that the grassy field had been used as a playground for years and that the developer had illegally "grabbed" it to become a parking lot.
On Monday, scores of children, along with community leaders, faced off against a line of riot police officers who had been sent to guard the contested field. Some of the children held up signs that said "Shame! Shame! Shame!"
After the children began to bang on a metal gate, threatening to tear it down, police officers shooed them away with sticks and then unleashed a cloud of tear gas.
Within minutes, images of terrified Kenyan children, some as young as 8, dressed in green gingham uniforms and choking on tear gas, began to spread around the world. The front pages of Kenya's leading newspapers on Tuesday featured pictures of a young girl who had fainted, with tears streaming down her face.
"This kind of excessive use of force against children will not be tolerated," said an editorial in The Daily Nation. "It is a throwback to the era when Kenya was a police state."
Kenya's Independent Policing Oversight Authority, a civilian body empowered to investigate police misconduct, has assigned 11 investigators to the case, its biggest investigation to date.
"Considering the public interest in this matter, we have to move quickly," said the authority's chairman, Macharia Njeru.
Mr. Njeru said the police should have never been involved in a dispute over a piece of land. If anything, he said, "they should have been there to protect the children, not beating them up and tear-gassing them."
Kenyan security officials were unusually open in acknowledging that excessive force may have been used, though Joseph Ole Nkaissery, Kenya's new internal security chief, also criticized community organizers for enlisting young children in the protest, saying they had been used as "human shields."
Shortly after the clouds of tear gas wafted away on Monday, scores of children regrouped around the construction site and then tore down the wall.
This time, the police just watched.