Forgotten Kenyan conflict exposed

Political and land rivalries have reinforced each other this year

Medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) has exposed torture and appalling levels of sexual violence in a conflict in western Kenya.

It says people there are caught up in fighting which it claims is being ignored by the international community.

A major military operation to neutralise a militia group called the Sabaot Land Defence Force (SLDF) has left thousands of civilians trapped.

The militia took up arms over a land allocation scheme it considers unfair.

MSF says there are victims of "indiscriminate violence" on both sides.

But Western Provincial Commissioner Abdul Mwasera told the BBC's Focus on Africa that accusations that the security forces had used excessive force were unfounded.

I saw men beaten on their genitals, and their testicles pulled out Male witness Rise of Kenya's vigilantes

The SLDF says it is fighting for ancestral land in the fertile Mount Elgon region belonging to the Sabaot community, but has been accused of killing members of rival ethnic groups.

Correspondents say much of the chaos witnessed in Kenya after the country's presidential election in December was sparked by long-running disputes over land.

Torture

The MSF report paints a picture of a civilian population caught between a heavy-handed military - accused of extra judicial killings - and a vicious militia, the SLDF, the BBC's Karen Allen reports from Nairobi.

One woman cited in the report described how the militia took five people a day to the mountains and killed them.

"If they targeted a home, they took every member of that family, irrespective of age and sex," she said.

The militia extorted fines from people who were drunk, chopping their ears off if they had no money and killing them if they resisted, she added.

"One of my brothers-in-law tried to resist one day and his head was chopped off and his body was thrown into a pit latrine," she was quoted as saying.

The report also sets out testimonies of men, suspected to have been militia members, being subjected to torture and appalling levels of sexual violence at the hands of the police and the military.

"I saw men beaten on their genitals, and their testicles pulled out," said one man who had been taken to a screening centre Kapkota.

"The military told us to confess we had guns, otherwise the torture would continue," he said.

MSF has also condemned the cramped conditions in which suspects are held during pre-trial detention, and warned that the violent response of the military is simply making things worse for an already traumatised civilian population.

Mr Mwasera said his own interviews had found that people in Mount Elgon supported what the military was doing.

He also said that it was the government's responsibility to care for those civilians displaced by the violence and that they had been offered food and ongoing assistance.