In Kenya, the LGBTQIA+ community is always on guard

Homophobia

In June 2019, Nairobi police lifted a group of 76 LGBTQIA+ refugees from their beds in the middle of the night. The refugees were put on a bus and taken with a police escort to refugee camps miles away from the city. The police had failed to guarantee the safety of the refugees and had therefore decided to move them elsewhere. But the camps where the refugees were taken were the same ones they had fled a few months earlier. After a few extremely violent incidents, the organization had indicated once again that they could not guarantee their safety. However, the police did not care about that.

“Everywhere we have lived we have faced homophobia. We no longer know where we can flee, ”said one of the members of the group in an interview with the BBC.

Petition

Unfortunately, this powerlessness and violence are not unknown to the LGBTQIA+ community in Kenya. There doesn’t seem to be a safe place for them anywhere. The government responds to this as in the example above: by means of forced relocations to other camps. But as said, the LGBTQIA+ community is not safe there either.

The Community Support Initiative for Refugees (COSIR) takes action against this. They will hold a petition and have it signed by various social organizations. Through two different marches, they will offer the petition to the responsible government agencies in the hope that the rights of the LGBTQIA+ community will be better guaranteed. They do all this with the support of Het Actiefonds.

Photo: United Nations Photo at https://bit.ly/37NyrBZ from Flickr / CC BY-SA