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The Gikondo Detention Center

Status of the Center

City and police officials say that the Gikondo center is operated by the Kigali city council,⁵ and one of these officials admitted to a Human Rights Watch researcher that the center does not have legal status and does not adhere to basic norms for detention sites.⁶ Under Rwandan law, the city council has no legal authority to establish or operate a facility that deprives persons of their liberty.⁷ Not formally recognized, the center receives no regular budgetary allocation, a situation that may account at least in part for the scarcity of food and services provided to the detainees.⁸

Police officers at the Gikondo center and former detainees told Human Rights Watch that the center is guarded during the day by police and at night by members of the Local Defence Force, a poorly trained and ordinarily unpaid government-organized paramilitary force.⁹ 

Within the buildings certain adult detainees called “counselors” have been granted authority by guards to “maintain order” among other detainees.  “Counselors” sometimes protect children against harassment by other detainees or provide them with a place to sleep at night (see below). According to former detainees, “counselors” often expect and receive payment for these services.  In some cases “counselors” beat weaker detainees, including children, to extort money or belongings from them, or simply steal their possessions outright.¹⁰ As one former detainee said, “‘Counselors’ are thieves who are given power over us because they are physically strong.”¹¹

The Facility

The center, located a short distance from up-scale businesses and national government buildings, consists of two large single-storey concrete buildings within a barren walled compound. In places the wall has collapsed and rolls of razor-wire fence keep the detainees from leaving. The buildings, at least one of which was previously a warehouse, were also used in the past as a regular prison. They have small barred windows that admit little light.  Once owned by Felicien Kabuga, a wealthy merchant now indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda on charges including genocide, the property is apparently now in the hands of Kigali ­city authorities. In late March 2006, police spokesman Theo Badege told human rights activists that the center had been in operation for more than a year.¹²

On the day that a Human Rights Watch researcher visited the center, one police officer guarded the gate. Another officer, inside the compound, prevented the detainees who were crowding the open doorways from coming out of the buildings.  Those few detainees observed outside the buildings were doing various tasks, such as chopping wood to cook food.

At least some detainees were allowed to talk with visitors, but they could not leave the doorways. Nor could visitors enter the buildings. Local human rights monitors and representatives of centers caring for street children have sought permission to enter the buildings without success.  Members of the Rwandan Red Cross were allowed to enter the buildings for a number of months in 2005 to provide basic medical care, a service they no longer provide. The International Committee of the Red Cross at one point supplied material assistance, presumably food, but no longer does so. Its representatives continue to have access to the buildings.¹³

Detainees

According to persons formerly detained in the Gikondo center, the persons held there include street children, sex workers, street vendors, drug users, foreigners without proper identity documents, the mentally ill, and persons suspected of minor crimes like petty theft.¹⁴

Police spokesman Badege told human rights activists in late March 2006 that persons detained at the Gikondo center were “vagrants.”¹⁵ In the Rwandan penal code vagrants are defined as persons “with no fixed domicile nor means of subsistence and who do not ordinarily engage in any trade or profession.”¹⁶ Residents of Kigali carry documents indicating that they are authorized to live in the city and are supposed to be able to move about freely. In some cases residents have been rounded up by the police and taken to the Gikondo center either because they do not have the necessary documents with them or for some other reason; Human Rights Watch’s researcher learned of one instance in which a pastor’s wife who is a legal resident of the city was detained for several days at the center before she was able to obtain her release.¹⁷  In other cases, children who were registered and receiving care at recognized centers operated by nongovernmental organizations were mistakenly detained.¹⁸ Children and other persons who havecome to the city from elsewhere in Rwanda and who have not established legal residence in the city are subject to being transported back to their regions of origin. Many are sent to the Gikondo center until transport becomes available.

Some detainees rounded up by the police were brought to a police station before being taken to the center, but others were taken directly to the center from the streets. Although the law against vagrancy may be used as the pretext for rounding up children and others from the streets, few, if any, are actually charged with this offense.

A police officer told a Human Rights Watch researcher that detained persons were meant to spend no more than three days at the center before being sent back to their places of origin, but that shortage of transportation had made longer stays necessary.¹⁹ According to former detainees interviewed by a Human Rights Watch researcher, many persons spend weeks or even months in the detention center.  One young woman said she had spent more than three months at Gikondo in late 2005.  Other recently released detainees provided a Human Rights Watch researcher with the name of a boy who had been held more than four months at the time when they were released.²⁰

Some 350 to 400 people are usually detained at the site, according to the police spokesman.²¹  But an adult who had been present at the center recently estimated the number of persons detained in March and April 2006 as approximately six hundred, one third to one half of whom were children.²² According to another informed source, the number of detainees varied according to how recently police had done roundups in the city streets, but could reach several hundred in the period just after such sweeps.²³ According to one visitor to the center, the number of detainees increased enormously in the week of May 8, when a delegation of the African Peer Review Mechanism was visiting Kigali.²⁴ The percentage of children among the detainees also varied according to the circumstances of when and where round-ups were done.

Conditions of Life in the Detention Center

The buildings are severely overcrowded. Detainees pay a “counselor” in order to be sure to have enough space on the floor to sleep lying down. The usual fee is 500 Rwandan francs (about U.S.$0.90), a large sum for a child who lives hand to mouth on the street. There are no mattresses or blankets provided by the center. The buildings house men and women as well as children of both sexes. Adult men, and boys thought likely to be troublesome (such as those who have been detained in the center two or three times previously), sleep in the same rooms, with other rooms for women and for children not expected to cause trouble.²⁵

Detainees sometimes must pay for water, whether for drinking or for washing. A bucket of water for bathing can cost up to 1,000 Rwandan francs (about U.S.$1.80). At such a price, bathing is a luxury that few detainees can afford. Those who cannot pay may be denied water for days at a time.²⁶

Detainees are allowed to use latrines once a day, before daybreak. They are filthy. Because lines are long in the morning and because detainees are not allowed to use the latrines at any other time of day, many urinate in the rooms where they sleep and spend their days.²⁷ 

Food is scant and poor in quality. According to former detainees, the usual ration is a handful of boiled maize and beans once a day or, sometimes, once every two days. Detainees have no utensils for eating. They line up in front of large basins of cooked food and receive a lump of food doled out by means of a wooden paddle onto pieces of paper if the detainees have them, or else the detainees take the food using some part of their shirts, or directly into their hands.²⁸

One ten-year-old boy described his arrival at the center:

At about ten o’clock in the morning we were arrested by a member of the Local Defence Force in the center of Kigali. They took us to the police station at Muhima, where we found about sixty other children. We waited for eighteen hours, crammed in the courtyard of the police station, before we were taken to the “prison” at Gikondo… we passed the entire night without eating. The next day, they let us leave the room where we were kept to go to the toilet, and then they made us return to the room. In the afternoon, the “counselors” gave us some maize mixed with a few beans. Each of us got a handful, which was not enough.²⁹

The 2003 government policy statement mentioned above refers to schooling and training of children housed in “transit centers,” and according to police inspector Edward Baramba, the Gikondo center is one such “transit center.” Yet no training is provided there.³⁰ Nor is there any program of exercise or other organized activities.³¹

The conditions described above constitute inhuman and degrading conditions for any detainee, and children are particularly vulnerable to the physical consequences of the deprivation and abuse at the center. According to former detainees and persons who regularly work with street children, several children have died at the Gikondo center.³² In a recent case, a boy of about thirteen died at approximately 3 p.m. on April 16, 2006. At about 7 p.m., when it had gotten dark, the “counselors” carried the body outside. Children confined in the building could not see what was done with the body. Also on April 16, a young malnourished woman detainee suffered a miscarriage and was hospitalized.³³

Release

It appears that in most cases, detainees are released as they were detained, with little or no formal procedure. Children are released in no better educational or psychological condition and possibly in worse physical condition than when they were taken from the streets. Most return within hours or days to the life they had known on the streets, once again surviving as best they can through begging, petty crime, and providing sexual services.³⁴

Given the absence of any real gain to either the child or society as a result of the detentions, it appears that the policy serves the primary purpose of simply removing the children and other persons from sight for certain periods of time.