Between 2005 and 2008, the Mt. Elgon region in western Kenya was the scene of a little-known but violent conflict involving the Sabaot Land Defense Force (SLDF) militia group and the Kenyan security forces. What began as a land dispute escalated under the influence of outside political forces, leaving hundreds dead and thousands displaced.

My story is about interventions I initiated in response to the violence carried out by both the SLDF and the Kenyan security forces. At the time I was working as a team leader for the Rural Women Peace Link (RWPL), a network of grassroots women’s organizations working for peace at the community level in western Kenya.

When conflict began to build, many young men who did not join the SLDF fled, leaving their wives to tend their farms. There were reports of rape by members of the SLDF, although people were too scared to report violations to the police, having been warned by the SLDF not to go to the police or seek hospital treatment.

When security forces were eventually deployed to mitigate, they too became implicated in the violence.

The extent of the violence that residents of Mt. Elgon had been subjected to began to come to light toward the end of 2008. In December of that year, RWPL registered more than 600 women who had lost their husbands to the conflict. We listened to stories of torture. We documented the cases of rape. We interacted with child-headed families in which both parents had been lost in the conflict, and with boys and girls who were forced into militias. We also supported widowers whose wives had been killed.

Initially, the outside world knew nothing of what was occurring, as the government declared Mt. Elgon a closed zone, prohibiting any organizations from entering the district. In the face of this, in March 2007, I organized a forum, “The Multi-Sectoral Forum on the Security of Women and Children in Mt. Elgon,” that brought together and mobilized all service providers from Mt. Elgon and neighboring districts. The main aim was to stimulate them to question and discuss what was going on. We used United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women as tools to sensitize and mobilize the participants and to call for the protection of women and children, in particular, against atrocities.

All of the actors, from the Ministry of Health to the relief providers, committed themselves to action. I personally transported media workers to cover the situation of women and children in the area, and, for the first time, stories about Mt. Elgon ran through all the major media for a full month.

From the forum, a lobby group was formed calling for stakeholders to be granted entry to Mt. Elgon, in order to help the vulnerable groups in the community. I appealed to the Law Society of Kenya to speak to the media, and stood with them as they did. I also organized press conferences and invited influential personalities to comment on the situation in Mt. Elgon. I documented the incidents of rape and the torching of houses in both video and narratives and shared these with national stakeholders through the Internet. From these actions, the parliamentary select committee on internal security, the National Office of the Law Society and other actors from NGOs and government departments began to take an interest. Later, international organizations such as UNIFEM and Human Rights Watch visited. It was now not only RWPL trying to deal with the situation alone.

When the media was highlighting the politics and focusing on the politicians, I initiated training for all reporters and correspondents on how to report issues of women and children in conflict situations. This training was inspired by and utilized Resolution 1325.

I took the stories of rape and defilement that I had documented to the police and children’s department, and the children’s department opted to partner with us to address the problems.

We brought in specialists in trauma healing and engaged Nairobi Women’s Hospital to help address issues of HIV/AIDS. This has led to a major project to help the community know their HIV/AIDS status.

I organized mediation between leaders of the Sabaot and the Ogiek communities of Mt. Elgon to dialogue and find ways of bringing an end to the suffering of the people of the area. We found out that the problem was being influenced by people outside the district more than by those living there. We gave the opportunity to those directly affected to make choices on how they wanted to live, and we brought in legal experts to help the community leaders understand their options of dealing with their dispute through legal channels. As a result, leaders from the Ogiek community organized to go to court, and this brought an end to the open fighting, even though the issues of conflict are still pending, awaiting the government verdict on how to divide the land.

We are currently working with ex-child-militias and widows to find ways of giving them a meaningful future—supporting trauma healing and assisting widows to venture into economic activities and the ex-militias to reintegrate into their communities. We are using rehabilitation strategies to prevent any recurrence of politically manipulated violence, especially as Kenya moves toward 2012 general elections.

International instruments such as 1325 which provide for protection of women and children in such violent situations empower women like me and my team to play an active role in peacebuilding, and at every step I have been propelled by a determination to increase awareness of this resolution among leaders at the national level and at the grassroots, and to encourage them to act in the spirit of the resolution.