Kenya Challenges British Military Immunity Amid Decades of Abuse Allegations

When Noldonyo Piro and her older sister were growing up, they were inseparable. Just a year apart, Piro, then about 15, and Mantoi Lekoloi Kaunda, 16, spent most days grazing the family’s herd of about 250 goats and sheep across the vast plains that stretch for miles around their home in northern Kenya. “We lived a very simple life,” Piro, now in her 40s, recalls, sitting outside her small home made of tin sheets and sticks, topped with a patchwork roof of plastic bags in Archer’s Post, a rural settlement in Samburu County.

As teenagers in the mid-1990s, their biggest fears involved the wildlife roaming the area — lions, cheetahs and elephants. The sisters had no reason to fear the British soldiers who had long trained on the outskirts of Archer’s Post. In fact, neither had ever seen a white man before — until, on one afternoon, everything changed. Piro and Mantoi, who was about six months pregnant, were out herding livestock when Piro saw white soldiers approaching from behind.

A new generation of Kenyan lawyers and activists is now challenging the decades-old sovereign immunity protecting the British Army Training Unit Kenya, or BATUK, following numerous allegations of abuse, murder, and negligence.