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Nairobi: Kenyan security forces have tortured more than 4,000 people in an indiscriminate offensive against rebels in the remote Mount Elgon area, local rights groups said on Sunday.
Activists said the systematic abuses - including crawling on barbed wire, pouring water into mouths and forcing victims to whip each other - was the worst wave of torture in Kenya under the government of President Mwai Kibaki, in power since 2002.
"The last time we encountered such systematic torture was again back in Mount Elgon in 1995," Samwel Mohochi, executive director of the Independent Medico-Legal Unit (IMLU), said of the long-troubled area on Kenya's western border with Uganda.
Mount Elgon
The report, by IMLU and two other non-governmental organisations, added to a growing chorus of accusations by individuals and rights groups of gross abuses in an army offensive against the illegal Sabaot Defence Land Force (SDLF).
Since early March, hundreds of soldiers have hunted SDLF militiamen in caves, forests and villages round Mount Elgon.
Since the group took up arms in mid-2006 to fight for land it says was illegally taken from the local Soy community, about 600 people have died and 60,000 been displaced.
The little-publicised conflict pre-dates the violence in Kenya after Kibaki's disputed December re-election. But it shares some of its root causes - land disputes, ethnic rivalries and neglect of outlying areas - and is a microcosm of historical problems bedevilling the east African nation.
Army and police spokesmen have repeatedly in recent weeks denied accusations of torture, harassment and some killings. "We have not tortured anybody. We are there to help, to get rid of criminals," regional police boss Abdul Mwasserah told Reuters.
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