Night Of Terror Haunts Kenya -- 19 Schoolgirls Died During Riot

MERU, Kenya - The dormitory is a time capsule: July 13, 1991.

Everything remains as it was the morning after the slayings of 19 schoolgirls. The bodies have been removed, but the bunk beds lie in twisted heaps. Suitcases and clothes are strewn around the room. Several pairs of torn and bloody underwear lie on the floor.

"This is the death chamber," a teacher says.

Although the St. Kizito boarding school is closed now, the teachers still report for work each day. They sit quietly on chairs outside the empty classrooms, as if doing penance.

A teacher takes a visitor to the dormitory, views the scene silently and then rejoins his colleagues in their circle of silence. None of the teachers wants to talk about the night of horror, the night when 19 girls were killed and 71 others were reportedly raped by the boys of St. Kizito.

"We've been told not to say anything," one teacher says.

The rest of Kenya has not been so silent.

The night of terror at the

boarding school near Mount Kenya has torn the soul of the Kenyan people. What had the girls done to invoke the wrath of their male schoolmates? They dared say no to the boys, who wanted them to join a protest against the school's headmaster, according to police and to those girls who lived through the night.

In Kenya, one-party rule has resulted in a tyranny of the majority. Dissent, even in politics, is not welcome. "Here, the minority must always go along with the majority's wishes," says a businessman who has done a lot of work with the government in the past 15 years. "And it is said that a woman cannot say no to a man."

Women's groups in Kenya have said that the reported rapes and the deaths were an extreme metaphor for what goes on in society. The girls of St. Kizito dared to say no to the boys, and 19 paid with their lives while 71 others were beaten and reportedly raped.

How did it ever get that far? How could something as simple as a high-school protest turn into one of the most brutal crimes in the history of Kenya?

The saddest part of the St. Kizito story is that it could have been prevented if police had reacted more quickly to reports of a disturbance at the school. Several teachers who board at the school could have stopped it, but were too terrified of the 306 male students. Two night watchmen, armed with bows and arrows, did not attempt to stop the assault on the girls' dormitory because the boys stoned them and chased them off.

And what of the police? About midnight, two teachers managed to escape the school grounds and run to a police station, 15 minutes from the school, just down the dirt road.

Two hours later, the police still had not arrived, and the watchmen called the station from a nearby hospital where they had run for safety.

"The police said they were aware of the situation, but they said they had no petrol and couldn't come," said Massimo Ballottino, administrator of the Tigania Hospital, about 500 yards from the school gate. Ballottino said the police finally arrived about 3:30 a.m.

By then it was too late. Nineteen girls were dead.

There have been many school protests in Kenya this year. This summer alone, 20 protests have turned into riots that destroyed school property. Girls at other schools have been raped for refusing to protest with boys.

The issues have ranged from no sugar in the breakfast porridge to the denial of boys' requests to wear long pants instead of shorts with their school uniforms. At St. Kizito, a Roman Catholic school that receives public money, the boys had decided to stage a strike against the headmaster because he had not allowed several boys to attend a sports meeting.

All one day the boys planned their strike and urged the girls to join them. The girls refused. When they did, the boys began to threaten them with physical violence.

Just after 9 p.m., the first clue that madness had broken out at the St. Kizito boarding school appeared when Massimo Ballottino's house went dark. Living in the remote hills around Mount Kenya, Ballottino had lost his power many times before. Each time he would fiddle with the fuse box, and his lights would go back on. But this night, he could not restore the power.

"I found out later that the boys had cut the power line to the girls' dormitories," Ballottino recalls, "and it so happens that my house also lost power. But the hospital never lost power."

Once the boys cut the power, they began screaming and throwing rocks at the girls' dorms. The dorms are made of cinder block and have tin roofs. The girls retreated to one dormitory, which had metal bars on the windows. The boys broke the windows with rocks and continued to terrorize the girls by tossing a barrage of rocks onto the tin roof.

Just before 2 a.m., the Rev. Alexander Kiranja, who runs a mission next door to St. Kizito, was awakened by someone knocking on his door. It was the terrified watchmen, who told Kiranja that the boys were on a rampage and that the boys had threatened them with death by stoning.

"Have they disturbed the girls?" Kiranja asked the men. "No," the watchmen replied.

Kiranja had no phone, so he took the watchmen next door to the hospital to call police. Why didn't the priest go to the school with the watchmen and try to restore order? He bowed his head and answered: "I will not enter there when the boys are unruly. They are not easy to face."

The 271 girls of St. Kizito stuffed themselves into one dormitory. As the boys battered the door in an attempt to get to them, the girls rushed to the far corner of the room. The door gave way, and the boys rushed in.

"We were attacked as if by a pack of hungry hyenas," one girl later told reporters. The girls packed themselves into one corner. All the dead girls were found in that spot. They had suffocated.

At about 3 a.m., two or three girls managed to escape and run to the hospital.

"They were in a state of shock when they arrived," says John Mutembei, a clinical nurse on duty that night.

Mutembei was not alarmed by the girls' report. Rape is a police matter, he maintains, not a medical matter. Mutembei says the first girls at the hospital didn't receive pelvic examinations, nor were samples taken to check for the presence of semen, even though the girls said they had been raped.

"We don't do that unless the police tell us to," says Ballottino, the hospital administrator.

By 3:30, the hospital was overflowing with injured girls. Finally, the police arrived and went to the now deserted school. Ballottino drove an ambulance to the school with the police.

They discovered the 19 bodies piled atop one another. "I have never seen anything like it," Ballottino says. "It was like a civil war. There were bodies everywhere. They were already stiff. The doctor said they had been dead about three hours."

Autopsies showed that none of the dead had been raped.

Twenty-nine St. Kizito boys are being held without bail on manslaughter charges. None has been charged with rape, although prosecutors have said additional charges are likely.

The investigation is continuing, and other charges could be added.