It is 36 years to the day since the Wagalla Massacre happened.
Long enough perhaps for the collective national conscious to have forgotten, but it may never be long enough for the victims.
February 10, 1984, marked the genesis of the massacre. On that day, security forces gathered members of the Somali Degodia clan in a clandestine operation and took them to an airstrip in Wajir.
The operation was designed to identify bandits committing crimes in the district as well as disarm the Degodia people.
Regular and administrative police as well as the army were involved.
The events that started off the operation saw the army surround Bulla Jogoo and compel their residents to leave their homes.
The swoop saw countless women raped, property looted and houses burnt as the residents refused to heed the orders of the men in fatigues.
The military went on to forcibly remove men from their houses after which they took them to the airstrip where they would be held for three days of interrogation.
The men held were stripped naked and their movements restricted then they were forced to lie in the hot tarmac under the scorching sun.
Those who disobeyed the order were shot as others died from heat exhaustion. The rest reportedly survived by drinking urine to compensate for the lack of drinking water.
Others, it is reported, were showered with petrol and set ablaze.
When it was all over, 3000 people had died.
To this day, 36 years later, none of the perpetrators of the Wagalla Massacre has been brought to justice.
Only a monument in Wajir Town by the Kenyan National Commission on Human Rights (KNCHR) serves as a stark reminder of what happened nearly four decades back.
Speaking to Aljazeera on Feb 27, 2014, Salah Abdi Sheikh who authored the only account of the massacre in his book Blood on the Runway has little faith in anything change.
"I have come to the realisation that the way things are at the moment, the Kenyan government will do nothing about the Wagalla massacre, or about any other significant event that happened in the past, especially when it is about justice."
