December 18, 2007
A Midnight Service Helps African Immigrants Combat Demons
By NEELA BANERJEE
WASHINGTON — At an hour when most people here are sleeping or sinning, the worshipers of the Spiritual Warfare ministry gather in the cold sanctuary of a neighborhood church to battle evil.
The students, taxicab drivers, homemakers and entrepreneurs, all Christians, mostly from French-speaking Africa, attend a midnight service four nights a week to seek deliverance from lust, anger, fear and sadness.
They sing. They pray fervently. Finally, they kick and shadowbox with what they contend is the real force behind life’s problems: the witches and devils whose curses they believe have ground down their families, towns, entire nations in Africa and that have pursued them to a new country, making it hard to find work, be healthy and survive.
“Some situations you need to address at night, because in the ministry of spiritual warfare, demons, the spirits bewitching people, choose this time to work,” said Nicole Sangamay, 40, who came from Congo in 1998 to study and is a co-pastor of the ministry. “And we pick this time to pray to nullify what they are doing.”
Founded by a Congolese couple, Spiritual Warfare is one of many ministries and congregations in the growing African diaspora in the United States and abroad grappling with witchcraft. In most other churches, Ms. Sangamay said, you could not even raise the issue, let alone pray to combat its effects.
Those other churches might argue that such a focus on witchcraft is a relic of Africans’ old beliefs, a dangerously pagan preoccupation. But scholars say this is Christianity made profoundly African. Spiritual Warfare considers itself Pentecostal, and like many other Pentecostals, worshipers see the battle between God and Satan, or what they also call the Bible against witchcraft, shaping the world.
“Religion for them is not like in the West,” said Jacob K. Olupona, professor of African religious traditions at the Harvard Divinity School. “It’s not simply seen as meaning and reference to a transcendental order. Religion is seen as something that works. It has a utilitarian view, and people are looking for solutions in different angles and different ways.”
The Spiritual Warfare congregants here said that because their ancestors were not Christians, they were cursed, Africa is cursed and the sins of their fathers are now visited upon all the children.
One blustery Monday night, men and women trickled into the ministry’s rented space at Deeper Life Bible Church on Sargent Road Northeast, some groggy from the nap they had to take to stay awake to midnight.
René Tameghi put his Bible and notebook down before kneeling, placing elbows in his chair and praying. Sita Waba would have to be at work at 8:30 a.m., but these two hours, Ms. Waba said, holding a cup of coffee, gave her strength. A few parents carried sleeping toddlers.
“Say, ‘Jesus, I am here for you tonight,’” José Shinga told the congregation from a small, raised stage covered in red carpeting and bordered by pots of silk flowers.
The men and women, still in coats, vests and caps, sang a song of “Allelujahs” in French, stomping, clapping and shuffling along with the joyful beat. The voices seemed stronger than those of the 25 people gathered, a quarter of the regular Sunday attendance. The neighbors once called the police to complain, a congregant said, and the police told them to keep it down.
The day before, the parishioners began a fast. “Why do we fast toward the end of the year?” Mrs. Shinga said to the worshipers. “That is when Satan wants sacrifices, blood, and so we ask God to protect us and our families.”
When Mrs. Shinga asked the worshipers to pray for forgiveness, the loud pleas of each man and woman, faces turned to the floor or heavenward, rose together like the rumble of a train.
People repeat accounts that they have heard of cancer and infertility cured through Spiritual Warfare. But few such events have occurred so far in Washington, Ms. Sangamay said, because the congregation is just two years old. Still, she said, people turn to her and her husband for “soul therapy,” which involves prayer and fasting. The ministry does not turn away people from secular resources like counseling or medicine.
“Every day in the village, or even here, people are putting curses on you,” said Yemba Shinga, Mrs. Shinga’s husband and the other preacher on Monday. “They declare that you won’t get a job, or will be separated from your family or get an incurable disease.
“But you know how to pray to God. Tell them, ‘C’est fini!’ I will not repeat the story of my ancestors, of my past, of the devil.”
The congregants shouted, “C’est fini!”
They listened, they moved the red chairs to the back of the hall, and then they called on the Holy Spirit to fight the enemy. Following Mr. Shinga, they said: “I rise now against every form of the devil! You want me under a curse, but I renounce you in the name of Jesus.”
With each prayer, young men and middle-age women punched, kicked or stood and quaked. They pounded their fists. They reviled the devil in all his forms.
They sliced their arms through the air to cut the chains of evil binding them. They pretended to tie up Satan. A toddler happily stamped the floor like the grown-ups. Mr. Shinga ran out of breath as he urged on the worshipers. The prayers ended. They did all that they could.
“We declare this place to be blessed,” Mrs. Shinga said, as the worshipers quieted down. “Thank you, Lord, Jesus Christ. Go in the peace of the Lord.”
People had already zipped up against the chill. They walked out into the Washington night, ready.
AFRICA
There is an interesting video related to the essay linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/22/world ... &th&emc=th
December 22, 2007
In Helicopter or Hummer, Kenya Contender Dazzles
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
SUSWA, Kenya — At the sound of the copter blades, a thousand Masai tribesmen crane their necks upward.
It is as if their savior is dropping from the sky.
“Railaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!” they yell.
The tribesmen turn into a stampede, hollering and poking their gnarled wooden clubs in the air.
An enormous cloud of dust swallows the copter as it lands. Out comes Raila Odinga, one of Kenya’s most flamboyant politicians, a man who when he is not buzzing over the savannah in a helicopter is being chauffeured around in a red Hummer, who favors purple suits, whose son’s name is Fidel Castro and who may very well become Kenya’s next president.
The election is Thursday, and for months most polls have predicted that Mr. Odinga, 62, will unseat President Mwai Kibaki, though some recent surveys show the president catching up, with the race too close to call.
Mr. Kibaki, 76, is vintage old guard. He is from Kenya’s dominant tribe, the Kikuyu; he has been a member of Parliament since Kenya’s independence in 1963, and he is a reliable friend of big business and the United States (his campaign ads are even red, white and blue).
Mr. Odinga seems different. For starters, he is Luo, one of the country’s largest tribes, but one that many Kenyans say has never gotten its due. Although Kenya has one of the most mature democracies in Africa, many Kenyans still vote along tribal lines.
Kenya’s 37 million people are split among some 40 distinct ethnic groups. And unlike many politicians who would rather not acknowledge tribal frictions, Mr. Odinga is confronting them head on and has made inclusion and an end to discrimination the cornerstones of his campaign.
“Ethnicity is the disease of the elite,“ he says, adding that throughout Kenya’s history, money, land and opportunity have been sprinkled around unequally, based on tribe.
But it is not as if Mr. Odinga is working class. His father was one of Kenya’s first limousine liberals, a businessman and former vice president who, despite his vast wealth and land holdings, espoused socialist values. The Odingas were clearly fond of the Eastern bloc, and when it came time for college, young Raila was sent to East Germany, where he earned a degree in mechanical engineering.
“You know, in the 60’s, those days of imperialism, when you had the Americans in Vietnam, in Cambodia,” he said, laughing, “it was very fashionable to be leftist!” He even played left wing in soccer.
After Mr. Odinga returned to Kenya, he became an opposition leader, when it was incredibly dangerous to do so. In 1982, he was accused of plotting a coup against the president at the time, Daniel arap Moi and spent eight years in jail, where he was beaten and tortured.
Since then, his Marxist politics have mellowed, though he still talks a big proletarian game. He promises to focus on poverty, unemployment and corruption.
The big question is, if he wins how much will Kenya change? The economy has been humming along, with a growth rate around 7 percent and a billion-dollar-a-year tourism industry. And there is peace, which is nothing to sneeze at in a neighborhood that includes war-racked Somalia, Sudan and Congo.
Macharia Gaitho, a managing editor at The Daily Nation, Kenya’s biggest newspaper, does not think Mr. Odinga will disrupt that stability. “I see a Jekyll and Hyde character,” Mr. Gaitho said. “He can set himself up as a populist leader who responds to the masses. But on the other level he is very pragmatic. He is a businessman, with ties across all ethnic lines.”
But some voters, especially Kikuyus, argue that Mr. Odinga profits from tribalism as much as he rails against it.
“Even if Kibaki could have improved this economy by 80 percent, believe you me, the people in Raila’s tribe, they would not vote for him, because they are kinsmen,” said Andrew Macharia, who is running for a city council seat in the capital, Nairobi. “It’s a sorry state that our politics are tribal-based.”
The president’s inner circle has accused Mr. Odinga of making promises he cannot keep. Amos Kimunya, the finance minister, dismissed Mr. Odinga’s economic plans as “domonomics,” a play on the Swahili word for mouth and meaning something like “talk economics.” Mr. Odinga’s proposals “will cause debt to balloon, interest rates and inflation to rise,” Mr. Kimunya wrote in a recent opinion piece.
The neck-and-neck race between Mr. Odinga and Mr. Kibaki shows how far Kenya’s democracy has come from just a decade ago, when it was still under the grip of Mr. Moi, who has been widely criticized as a dictator and who is campaigning for Mr. Kibaki.
Today, there is a free press, 2,548 candidates running for Parliament and genuine issues separating the leading parties, like strong central government versus federalism. Electoral politics here are not saddled by the deep cynicism that dogs Nigeria, Africa’s most populous democracy, or the one-party rule of South Africa, the continent’s most developed country.
Mr. Odinga, who has been a member of Parliament for the last 15 years, has taken full advantage of Kenya’s open system and used his flair for appealing to the masses to reel in millions of Kenyans who feel marginalized by the Kikuyu elite. He has also charmed many Muslims upset at the Kibaki government’s crackdowns in Muslim areas as part of its counterterrorism campaign.
“The best way to explain this is not who is popular but who is so unpopular,” said Chweya Ludeki, a political science professor at the University of Nairobi. “Raila’s harvesting from Kibaki’s unpopularity and the perception that the president has favored his ethnic group.”
Though the cabinet includes members of many tribes, the ministries that matter — like defense, justice, finance and internal security — are all run by Kikuyus. The government’s response has been that it hires the most qualified people.
Many of Mr. Odinga’s supporters are worried that these politicians might try to steal the election. Already the government’s own human rights commission accused Mr. Kibaki’s party of using public resources, like government planes and vehicles, for campaign events.
There have also been some cheap shots. Even Mr. Odinga’s foreskin was thrown into the fray. Circumcision is a rite of passage in many tribes, including the Kikuyu, but not the Luo. If a man is not circumcised, the whisper campaign goes, then he is not a real man.
Still, Mr. Odinga draws thousands of fans to his rallies.
“Roads! Electricity! Water!” Mr. Odinga belted out.
The crowd roared. It was a jostling mass of orange — orange hats, orange T-shirts, orange shopping bags, even orange shukas, the signature cloaks Maasai herders wear. Orange is the official color of Mr. Odinga’s party, the Orange Democratic Movement, and Nalanju Punyua, a woman selling sodas, said Mr. Odinga looked fabulous in it.
“Raila’s absolutely beautiful,“ she said. “He’s a very strong man. He could walk all the way from here to Narok.“
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/22/world ... &th&emc=th
December 22, 2007
In Helicopter or Hummer, Kenya Contender Dazzles
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
SUSWA, Kenya — At the sound of the copter blades, a thousand Masai tribesmen crane their necks upward.
It is as if their savior is dropping from the sky.
“Railaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!” they yell.
The tribesmen turn into a stampede, hollering and poking their gnarled wooden clubs in the air.
An enormous cloud of dust swallows the copter as it lands. Out comes Raila Odinga, one of Kenya’s most flamboyant politicians, a man who when he is not buzzing over the savannah in a helicopter is being chauffeured around in a red Hummer, who favors purple suits, whose son’s name is Fidel Castro and who may very well become Kenya’s next president.
The election is Thursday, and for months most polls have predicted that Mr. Odinga, 62, will unseat President Mwai Kibaki, though some recent surveys show the president catching up, with the race too close to call.
Mr. Kibaki, 76, is vintage old guard. He is from Kenya’s dominant tribe, the Kikuyu; he has been a member of Parliament since Kenya’s independence in 1963, and he is a reliable friend of big business and the United States (his campaign ads are even red, white and blue).
Mr. Odinga seems different. For starters, he is Luo, one of the country’s largest tribes, but one that many Kenyans say has never gotten its due. Although Kenya has one of the most mature democracies in Africa, many Kenyans still vote along tribal lines.
Kenya’s 37 million people are split among some 40 distinct ethnic groups. And unlike many politicians who would rather not acknowledge tribal frictions, Mr. Odinga is confronting them head on and has made inclusion and an end to discrimination the cornerstones of his campaign.
“Ethnicity is the disease of the elite,“ he says, adding that throughout Kenya’s history, money, land and opportunity have been sprinkled around unequally, based on tribe.
But it is not as if Mr. Odinga is working class. His father was one of Kenya’s first limousine liberals, a businessman and former vice president who, despite his vast wealth and land holdings, espoused socialist values. The Odingas were clearly fond of the Eastern bloc, and when it came time for college, young Raila was sent to East Germany, where he earned a degree in mechanical engineering.
“You know, in the 60’s, those days of imperialism, when you had the Americans in Vietnam, in Cambodia,” he said, laughing, “it was very fashionable to be leftist!” He even played left wing in soccer.
After Mr. Odinga returned to Kenya, he became an opposition leader, when it was incredibly dangerous to do so. In 1982, he was accused of plotting a coup against the president at the time, Daniel arap Moi and spent eight years in jail, where he was beaten and tortured.
Since then, his Marxist politics have mellowed, though he still talks a big proletarian game. He promises to focus on poverty, unemployment and corruption.
The big question is, if he wins how much will Kenya change? The economy has been humming along, with a growth rate around 7 percent and a billion-dollar-a-year tourism industry. And there is peace, which is nothing to sneeze at in a neighborhood that includes war-racked Somalia, Sudan and Congo.
Macharia Gaitho, a managing editor at The Daily Nation, Kenya’s biggest newspaper, does not think Mr. Odinga will disrupt that stability. “I see a Jekyll and Hyde character,” Mr. Gaitho said. “He can set himself up as a populist leader who responds to the masses. But on the other level he is very pragmatic. He is a businessman, with ties across all ethnic lines.”
But some voters, especially Kikuyus, argue that Mr. Odinga profits from tribalism as much as he rails against it.
“Even if Kibaki could have improved this economy by 80 percent, believe you me, the people in Raila’s tribe, they would not vote for him, because they are kinsmen,” said Andrew Macharia, who is running for a city council seat in the capital, Nairobi. “It’s a sorry state that our politics are tribal-based.”
The president’s inner circle has accused Mr. Odinga of making promises he cannot keep. Amos Kimunya, the finance minister, dismissed Mr. Odinga’s economic plans as “domonomics,” a play on the Swahili word for mouth and meaning something like “talk economics.” Mr. Odinga’s proposals “will cause debt to balloon, interest rates and inflation to rise,” Mr. Kimunya wrote in a recent opinion piece.
The neck-and-neck race between Mr. Odinga and Mr. Kibaki shows how far Kenya’s democracy has come from just a decade ago, when it was still under the grip of Mr. Moi, who has been widely criticized as a dictator and who is campaigning for Mr. Kibaki.
Today, there is a free press, 2,548 candidates running for Parliament and genuine issues separating the leading parties, like strong central government versus federalism. Electoral politics here are not saddled by the deep cynicism that dogs Nigeria, Africa’s most populous democracy, or the one-party rule of South Africa, the continent’s most developed country.
Mr. Odinga, who has been a member of Parliament for the last 15 years, has taken full advantage of Kenya’s open system and used his flair for appealing to the masses to reel in millions of Kenyans who feel marginalized by the Kikuyu elite. He has also charmed many Muslims upset at the Kibaki government’s crackdowns in Muslim areas as part of its counterterrorism campaign.
“The best way to explain this is not who is popular but who is so unpopular,” said Chweya Ludeki, a political science professor at the University of Nairobi. “Raila’s harvesting from Kibaki’s unpopularity and the perception that the president has favored his ethnic group.”
Though the cabinet includes members of many tribes, the ministries that matter — like defense, justice, finance and internal security — are all run by Kikuyus. The government’s response has been that it hires the most qualified people.
Many of Mr. Odinga’s supporters are worried that these politicians might try to steal the election. Already the government’s own human rights commission accused Mr. Kibaki’s party of using public resources, like government planes and vehicles, for campaign events.
There have also been some cheap shots. Even Mr. Odinga’s foreskin was thrown into the fray. Circumcision is a rite of passage in many tribes, including the Kikuyu, but not the Luo. If a man is not circumcised, the whisper campaign goes, then he is not a real man.
Still, Mr. Odinga draws thousands of fans to his rallies.
“Roads! Electricity! Water!” Mr. Odinga belted out.
The crowd roared. It was a jostling mass of orange — orange hats, orange T-shirts, orange shopping bags, even orange shukas, the signature cloaks Maasai herders wear. Orange is the official color of Mr. Odinga’s party, the Orange Democratic Movement, and Nalanju Punyua, a woman selling sodas, said Mr. Odinga looked fabulous in it.
“Raila’s absolutely beautiful,“ she said. “He’s a very strong man. He could walk all the way from here to Narok.“
December 25, 2007
Cases Without Borders
Food Scarcity and H.I.V. Interwoven in Uganda
By DAVID TULLER
MBARARA, Uganda — At the AIDS clinic here, the stories are brutal. A young cattle herder, infected with H.I.V. along with his wife, tells me that all four of their children died before turning 3.
A mother of five, also infected, reports that after her marriage she was forced to have sex with her husband’s three brothers, in accordance with tribal tradition.
And most patients I meet say they and their families scramble to survive from meal to meal, never far from the edge of starvation. Many say their H.I.V. drugs have drastically increased their appetites and made them crave food even more.
“Sometimes I am so hungry,” a 44-year-old widow says. “It’s intense. My whole body is shivering from hunger. Even when I have just finished eating, I am hungry again minutes later. It’s such a problem, because I don’t always have food.”
As a journalist turned graduate student in public health, I am in Uganda for five weeks as part of a research team investigating whether “food insecurity” — a persistent difficulty in finding enough to eat — undermines the effectiveness of H.I.V. treatment.
I am interviewing dozens of patients — anonymously, as is standard in such qualitative research — about what they eat, how much food they have, whether they grow it or buy it and whether the side effects from the medications are worse if they take the pills on an empty stomach. Our team also wants to know whether costs related to treatment limit their ability to cover basic foods and whether hunger forces women to offer men “live sex,” or intercourse without condoms, in exchange for food or money.
The study is part of a collaboration between the University of California, San Francisco, and the Mbarara University of Science and Technology, a prestigious institution in this small, bustling city southwest of Kampala, the Ugandan capital. Other patients will be followed for two years to monitor how food insecurity affects their drug regimens, and illness and death rates.
Western donors have increased the distribution of antiretroviral drugs in sub-Saharan Africa. But they have done little to make sure that the recipients do not starve to death or have to choose between paying for transportation to the clinic and feeding their children. Studies like this one seek to demonstrate that packaging food aid with H.I.V. drugs or reimbursing patients for travel can actually improve health and save lives.
Uganda has been hailed for its success in reducing H.I.V. infection, with adult prevalence falling to just below 7 percent in 2005, from 15 percent in 1991. That success is not apparent from my observation post, a small corner office at the ramshackle clinic here.
Every weekday morning, more than 100 people pack the clinic. About two-thirds are women, many swathed in brilliant colors. Men often refuse to be tested or seek treatment. The patients cluster on benches in the hallways, jostling infants on their knees and waiting to see clinicians or counselors and pick up their monthly supplies of medication.
Women, in particular, confront what medical anthropologists call “structural violence,” the social, cultural and legal constraints that often rob them of control over their own and their children’s destinies.
Their accounts of beatings, neglect and rape, of unfaithful and absent husbands and boyfriends, do not exactly showcase the human male’s most appealing qualities. More than one woman tells me she became infected because her H.I.V.-positive partner had threatened her with abuse or abandonment if she refused his demands for “live sex.”
“I used to tell my husband that we should use condoms, and he outright refused,” a mother of four says in a tone more resigned than bitter. “If I wouldn’t have live sex with him, he would refuse to bring home food and take care of the children.”
Most of the respondents grow some or all of their own food or they cultivate other people’s gardens in exchange for basics. The staples are matoke, a carbohydrate-heavy mush made from green plantains, and posho, a carbohydrate-heavy mush made from maize flour. They are served with “sauce,” if available — beans, a paste made from groundnuts, or another protein source. Meat, chicken and fish are luxuries. Many families can afford them just once a year, if that.
To make ends meet, parents have to engage in a desperate triage, navigating between bad choices and worse ones.
If they let their hungry children eat everything that the family grows, they will have nothing to sell at the market. If they do not sell part of the harvest, they will not have cash for the monthly clinic trip for the medication that keeps them alive.
But every time they go to the clinic, they lose a whole day of gardening or other work and spend cash they could otherwise use for the children’s diets.
“I feel bad that I have to spend that money for transport when I could have spent it on something else,” one mother says. “And then the days I’m at the clinic, of course, I come knowing that I won’t do anything that day.”
Listening to the accounts of poverty and deprivation, I feel helpless and miserable. I promise myself I will never again take a decent meal for granted.
I want to empty out my pockets and shove dollars at every patient I interview. Instead, I buy them a cup of chai, a milky African tea, from the clinic canteen. The chai costs 300 Ugandan shillings, or 18 cents in dollars. For most, that is a luxury beyond their means.
I wonder sometimes what is the point of researching this? Why not just give food to people so obviously in need? But international donors demand data and documentation. They want proof that an intervention will reduce the total misery index before they will shell out millions of euros for new programs, even if the need appears self-evident.
I get to return home when my work here is done. I will analyze my data, write up my findings and hope that what I have done makes some small contribution to change.
The women and men I have met will trek to the clinic month after month, if they can scrape together $5 or $8 for the bus fare. They will consult with the doctor, grab their drugs from the pharmacy and wonder where they will find enough beans and matoke to feed the kids tomorrow.
Cases Without Borders
Food Scarcity and H.I.V. Interwoven in Uganda
By DAVID TULLER
MBARARA, Uganda — At the AIDS clinic here, the stories are brutal. A young cattle herder, infected with H.I.V. along with his wife, tells me that all four of their children died before turning 3.
A mother of five, also infected, reports that after her marriage she was forced to have sex with her husband’s three brothers, in accordance with tribal tradition.
And most patients I meet say they and their families scramble to survive from meal to meal, never far from the edge of starvation. Many say their H.I.V. drugs have drastically increased their appetites and made them crave food even more.
“Sometimes I am so hungry,” a 44-year-old widow says. “It’s intense. My whole body is shivering from hunger. Even when I have just finished eating, I am hungry again minutes later. It’s such a problem, because I don’t always have food.”
As a journalist turned graduate student in public health, I am in Uganda for five weeks as part of a research team investigating whether “food insecurity” — a persistent difficulty in finding enough to eat — undermines the effectiveness of H.I.V. treatment.
I am interviewing dozens of patients — anonymously, as is standard in such qualitative research — about what they eat, how much food they have, whether they grow it or buy it and whether the side effects from the medications are worse if they take the pills on an empty stomach. Our team also wants to know whether costs related to treatment limit their ability to cover basic foods and whether hunger forces women to offer men “live sex,” or intercourse without condoms, in exchange for food or money.
The study is part of a collaboration between the University of California, San Francisco, and the Mbarara University of Science and Technology, a prestigious institution in this small, bustling city southwest of Kampala, the Ugandan capital. Other patients will be followed for two years to monitor how food insecurity affects their drug regimens, and illness and death rates.
Western donors have increased the distribution of antiretroviral drugs in sub-Saharan Africa. But they have done little to make sure that the recipients do not starve to death or have to choose between paying for transportation to the clinic and feeding their children. Studies like this one seek to demonstrate that packaging food aid with H.I.V. drugs or reimbursing patients for travel can actually improve health and save lives.
Uganda has been hailed for its success in reducing H.I.V. infection, with adult prevalence falling to just below 7 percent in 2005, from 15 percent in 1991. That success is not apparent from my observation post, a small corner office at the ramshackle clinic here.
Every weekday morning, more than 100 people pack the clinic. About two-thirds are women, many swathed in brilliant colors. Men often refuse to be tested or seek treatment. The patients cluster on benches in the hallways, jostling infants on their knees and waiting to see clinicians or counselors and pick up their monthly supplies of medication.
Women, in particular, confront what medical anthropologists call “structural violence,” the social, cultural and legal constraints that often rob them of control over their own and their children’s destinies.
Their accounts of beatings, neglect and rape, of unfaithful and absent husbands and boyfriends, do not exactly showcase the human male’s most appealing qualities. More than one woman tells me she became infected because her H.I.V.-positive partner had threatened her with abuse or abandonment if she refused his demands for “live sex.”
“I used to tell my husband that we should use condoms, and he outright refused,” a mother of four says in a tone more resigned than bitter. “If I wouldn’t have live sex with him, he would refuse to bring home food and take care of the children.”
Most of the respondents grow some or all of their own food or they cultivate other people’s gardens in exchange for basics. The staples are matoke, a carbohydrate-heavy mush made from green plantains, and posho, a carbohydrate-heavy mush made from maize flour. They are served with “sauce,” if available — beans, a paste made from groundnuts, or another protein source. Meat, chicken and fish are luxuries. Many families can afford them just once a year, if that.
To make ends meet, parents have to engage in a desperate triage, navigating between bad choices and worse ones.
If they let their hungry children eat everything that the family grows, they will have nothing to sell at the market. If they do not sell part of the harvest, they will not have cash for the monthly clinic trip for the medication that keeps them alive.
But every time they go to the clinic, they lose a whole day of gardening or other work and spend cash they could otherwise use for the children’s diets.
“I feel bad that I have to spend that money for transport when I could have spent it on something else,” one mother says. “And then the days I’m at the clinic, of course, I come knowing that I won’t do anything that day.”
Listening to the accounts of poverty and deprivation, I feel helpless and miserable. I promise myself I will never again take a decent meal for granted.
I want to empty out my pockets and shove dollars at every patient I interview. Instead, I buy them a cup of chai, a milky African tea, from the clinic canteen. The chai costs 300 Ugandan shillings, or 18 cents in dollars. For most, that is a luxury beyond their means.
I wonder sometimes what is the point of researching this? Why not just give food to people so obviously in need? But international donors demand data and documentation. They want proof that an intervention will reduce the total misery index before they will shell out millions of euros for new programs, even if the need appears self-evident.
I get to return home when my work here is done. I will analyze my data, write up my findings and hope that what I have done makes some small contribution to change.
The women and men I have met will trek to the clinic month after month, if they can scrape together $5 or $8 for the bus fare. They will consult with the doctor, grab their drugs from the pharmacy and wonder where they will find enough beans and matoke to feed the kids tomorrow.
December 26, 2007
Editorial
Democracy and South Africa
The recent leadership election held by South Africa’s ruling African National Congress wasn’t pretty — democracy often isn’t — but it was an encouraging step forward.
For the first time since the A.N.C. took power after the end of apartheid, there was a serious leadership race and somebody other than the front-runner won. If democracy is to fully flower in South Africa, the A.N.C. will now need a real competition to choose its candidate for the 2009 presidential elections — and it will need to encourage other parties to get into the race.
The A.N.C.’s triumph over apartheid is an inspiration to the world, but the country is still, all these years later, effectively a one-party state — with growing problems of corruption and arrogance. It is not surprising that other parties have a hard time competing with the A.N.C., but pluralism and dissent must be encouraged.
It was good to see real politics going on inside the A.N.C. Normally, party leaders are chosen behind closed doors, and the rank and file then loyally vote for their leaders’ choice. If it had worked that way again, Thabo Mbeki, South Africa’s president and the current party leader, would have come out the winner.
Instead, Jacob Zuma, whom Mr. Mbeki fired as the country’s deputy president in 2005, waged a robust and open contest. The 3,900 delegates at last week’s party conference chose him as their new leader. Unfortunately, the bitter Mbeki-Zuma rivalry is likely to continue to roil the country.
What makes Mr. Zuma’s selection even more important — and more problematic — is that Mr. Mbeki cannot run for another term. And Mr. Zuma will almost certainly use his new position to ensure that he is the party’s next candidate for president.
Mr. Zuma is no Nelson Mandela. He is sometimes referred to as the “comeback kid” because he overcame such daunting obstacles as being charged with raping a family friend in 2006. He was acquitted. But corruption allegations linger, and South Africa’s top prosecutor said he will soon bring formal charges against Mr. Zuma.
Mr. Zuma’s supporters suspect such allegations are politically motivated. The charges must be fairly adjudicated. And for that to happen, Mr. Mbeki must distance himself from the prosecution, perhaps by bringing in an independent prosecutor, to handle the case.
South Africa and the A.N.C. should also resist assuming that Mr. Zuma is the only possible nominee and the only possible next president. There are other credible candidates. For its democracy to develop, South Africa needs an open and inclusive political system in which any candidate, whether nominated by the A.N.C. or another party, can compete.
Editorial
Democracy and South Africa
The recent leadership election held by South Africa’s ruling African National Congress wasn’t pretty — democracy often isn’t — but it was an encouraging step forward.
For the first time since the A.N.C. took power after the end of apartheid, there was a serious leadership race and somebody other than the front-runner won. If democracy is to fully flower in South Africa, the A.N.C. will now need a real competition to choose its candidate for the 2009 presidential elections — and it will need to encourage other parties to get into the race.
The A.N.C.’s triumph over apartheid is an inspiration to the world, but the country is still, all these years later, effectively a one-party state — with growing problems of corruption and arrogance. It is not surprising that other parties have a hard time competing with the A.N.C., but pluralism and dissent must be encouraged.
It was good to see real politics going on inside the A.N.C. Normally, party leaders are chosen behind closed doors, and the rank and file then loyally vote for their leaders’ choice. If it had worked that way again, Thabo Mbeki, South Africa’s president and the current party leader, would have come out the winner.
Instead, Jacob Zuma, whom Mr. Mbeki fired as the country’s deputy president in 2005, waged a robust and open contest. The 3,900 delegates at last week’s party conference chose him as their new leader. Unfortunately, the bitter Mbeki-Zuma rivalry is likely to continue to roil the country.
What makes Mr. Zuma’s selection even more important — and more problematic — is that Mr. Mbeki cannot run for another term. And Mr. Zuma will almost certainly use his new position to ensure that he is the party’s next candidate for president.
Mr. Zuma is no Nelson Mandela. He is sometimes referred to as the “comeback kid” because he overcame such daunting obstacles as being charged with raping a family friend in 2006. He was acquitted. But corruption allegations linger, and South Africa’s top prosecutor said he will soon bring formal charges against Mr. Zuma.
Mr. Zuma’s supporters suspect such allegations are politically motivated. The charges must be fairly adjudicated. And for that to happen, Mr. Mbeki must distance himself from the prosecution, perhaps by bringing in an independent prosecutor, to handle the case.
South Africa and the A.N.C. should also resist assuming that Mr. Zuma is the only possible nominee and the only possible next president. There are other credible candidates. For its democracy to develop, South Africa needs an open and inclusive political system in which any candidate, whether nominated by the A.N.C. or another party, can compete.
December 30, 2007
Riots Batter Kenya as Rivals Declare Victory
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
NAIROBI, Kenya — With the results from Kenya’s closely contested elections still up in the air and evidence growing of election mischief, riots erupted across the country on Saturday.
Columns of black smoke boiled up from the slums ringing Nairobi, the capital, as supporters of Raila Odinga, the leading presidential challenger, poured into the streets to protest what they said was a plot by the government to steal the vote.
The demonstrators clashed with police officers in riot gear and tore apart metal shanties with their bare hands. The scene replayed itself in Kisumu, Kakamega, Kajiado, Eldoret and other towns across Kenya, with several people killed.
Just 12 hours before, Mr. Odinga, a flamboyant politician and businessman, had been cruising to victory, according to preliminary results. He was leading Kenya’s president, Mwai Kibaki, by about one million votes in an election that was predicted to be the most fiercely fought in Kenya’s history and perhaps the greatest test yet of this young, multiparty democracy.
But that lead nearly vanished overnight. On Saturday morning, the gap had been cut to about 100,000 votes, with Mr. Odinga still ahead, but barely, with 47 percent of the vote compared with 46 percent for Mr. Kibaki. By Saturday night, with about 90 percent of the vote counted, Mr. Odinga’s lead had shrunk to a mere 38,000 votes.
But those results may not be valid. According to Kenya’s election commission, which is considered somewhat independent from the government, at least three areas from Mr. Kibaki’s stronghold of central Kenya reported suspiciously high numbers. In one area, Mr. Kibaki received 105,000 votes, even though there were only 70,000 registered voters. In another, the vote tally was changed, at the last minute, to give the president an extra 60,000 votes. In a third area, the turnout was reported at 98 percent.
Samuel Kivuitu, the chief of Kenya’s election commission, said his officers would investigate.
“We have powers to refuse results if they have obvious defects,” he said. He delayed announcing final results until Sunday.
Mr. Kibaki’s party denied it did anything wrong and said it had simply gained many votes from areas where the president is immensely popular.
But the sudden reversal immediately ignited suspicions, especially after results showed that many members of Parliament close to the president — including the vice president, the defense minister, the foreign minister and more than 10 other cabinet members — were voted out of office in a wave of seeming dissatisfaction with the government.
Several foreign observers said they feared that the government was using its muscle to swing the election and stay in power, which could be a recipe for chaos, with the results rejected by millions of people and Kenya’s cherished stability in danger of collapsing.
Kenya is one of the most developed countries in Africa, but this election has exposed its ugly tribal underbelly.
Mr. Odinga is a Luo, a big tribe in Kenya that feels marginalized from the country’s Kikuyu elite that has dominated business and politics since independence in 1963. Mr. Kibaki is a Kikuyu, and the voting so far has split straight down tribal lines, with each candidate winning big in his tribal homeland.
On Saturday, the first signs of a tribal war flared up in Nairobi, with Luo gangs sweeping into a shantytown called Mathare and stoning several Kikuyu residents. In Kibera, another huge slum, supporters of Mr. Odinga burnt down kiosks that they said belonged to Kikuyu businessmen.
“No Raila, no Kenya!” they screamed, with the fires crackling behind them.
The streets were a collage of destruction, strewn with burning tires, broken bottles, fist-size rocks and fresh shell casings from soldiers who fired in the air to scare the demonstrators off. Some men sharpened machetes on the asphalt, vowing to shed blood should Mr. Odinga lose.
Kikuyus responded by forming packs of vigilantes to patrol their neighborhoods. As night fell, the gangs waited on corners, armed with machetes and lengths of wood.
Many Kenyans seemed distressed about what was happening. In Kibera, one man in a suit guided a young girl, her face a mask of panic, through the embers of burning tires.
“Unless they announce the winner soon,” said Lionel Joseph Ochieng, a Kibera resident, “this will only get worse.”
Election officials seemed to feel the clock ticking. They said they were trying to count the votes from Thursday’s election as quickly as possible but that they have been hampered by logistical problems and a record turnout, possibly upward of 70 percent.
Both political parties declared victory on Saturday, saying that by their calculations they had won the most votes. But by 1 p.m., the election commission had counted only 8 million votes out of a projected 10 to 11 million. The hush inside the heavily guarded election headquarters was a marked contrast to the raging street battles not far away.
The foreign diplomats who initially praised the election as being free and fair were beginning to change their tone.
Michael E. Ranneberger, the American ambassador to Kenya, rushed to the election headquarters at midnight on Friday because he said he had heard reports about vote rigging, though he declined to provide details. He urged voters to remain calm.
“This is a time for Kenyans to come together,” he said.
The head of the European Union’s election observer mission said that several election officials in the pro-Kibaki areas of central Kenya had initially kept their poll results secret, which is against Kenyan law.
“This is something we witnessed ourselves,” said Alexander Graf Lambsdorff, chief of the European delegation. “It’s clearly disturbing.”
The European Union is also investigating the high turnouts in the Kikuyu highlands north of Nairobi, where few have broken ranks with Mr. Kibaki’s party and some areas have voted nearly 100 percent in favor of the president.
The scenario that may be unfolding is the exact one that many foreign diplomats were dreading: a questionable razor-thin margin for the president, who had been trailing in just about every pre-election poll. It is not that Mr. Kibaki, 76, is so disliked himself. He has been in government since independence and is known as a courtly gentleman and economics whiz.
But he is seen by many Kenyans as continuing an unfair political system that has favored the Kikuyu at the expense of Kenya’s 30-plus other ethnic groups. Mr. Odinga, 62, boosted his popularity by tapping into those frustrations and building a coalition of many other tribes. His party has already demanded a recount in several districts and said it will not concede defeat if it loses.
Riots Batter Kenya as Rivals Declare Victory
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
NAIROBI, Kenya — With the results from Kenya’s closely contested elections still up in the air and evidence growing of election mischief, riots erupted across the country on Saturday.
Columns of black smoke boiled up from the slums ringing Nairobi, the capital, as supporters of Raila Odinga, the leading presidential challenger, poured into the streets to protest what they said was a plot by the government to steal the vote.
The demonstrators clashed with police officers in riot gear and tore apart metal shanties with their bare hands. The scene replayed itself in Kisumu, Kakamega, Kajiado, Eldoret and other towns across Kenya, with several people killed.
Just 12 hours before, Mr. Odinga, a flamboyant politician and businessman, had been cruising to victory, according to preliminary results. He was leading Kenya’s president, Mwai Kibaki, by about one million votes in an election that was predicted to be the most fiercely fought in Kenya’s history and perhaps the greatest test yet of this young, multiparty democracy.
But that lead nearly vanished overnight. On Saturday morning, the gap had been cut to about 100,000 votes, with Mr. Odinga still ahead, but barely, with 47 percent of the vote compared with 46 percent for Mr. Kibaki. By Saturday night, with about 90 percent of the vote counted, Mr. Odinga’s lead had shrunk to a mere 38,000 votes.
But those results may not be valid. According to Kenya’s election commission, which is considered somewhat independent from the government, at least three areas from Mr. Kibaki’s stronghold of central Kenya reported suspiciously high numbers. In one area, Mr. Kibaki received 105,000 votes, even though there were only 70,000 registered voters. In another, the vote tally was changed, at the last minute, to give the president an extra 60,000 votes. In a third area, the turnout was reported at 98 percent.
Samuel Kivuitu, the chief of Kenya’s election commission, said his officers would investigate.
“We have powers to refuse results if they have obvious defects,” he said. He delayed announcing final results until Sunday.
Mr. Kibaki’s party denied it did anything wrong and said it had simply gained many votes from areas where the president is immensely popular.
But the sudden reversal immediately ignited suspicions, especially after results showed that many members of Parliament close to the president — including the vice president, the defense minister, the foreign minister and more than 10 other cabinet members — were voted out of office in a wave of seeming dissatisfaction with the government.
Several foreign observers said they feared that the government was using its muscle to swing the election and stay in power, which could be a recipe for chaos, with the results rejected by millions of people and Kenya’s cherished stability in danger of collapsing.
Kenya is one of the most developed countries in Africa, but this election has exposed its ugly tribal underbelly.
Mr. Odinga is a Luo, a big tribe in Kenya that feels marginalized from the country’s Kikuyu elite that has dominated business and politics since independence in 1963. Mr. Kibaki is a Kikuyu, and the voting so far has split straight down tribal lines, with each candidate winning big in his tribal homeland.
On Saturday, the first signs of a tribal war flared up in Nairobi, with Luo gangs sweeping into a shantytown called Mathare and stoning several Kikuyu residents. In Kibera, another huge slum, supporters of Mr. Odinga burnt down kiosks that they said belonged to Kikuyu businessmen.
“No Raila, no Kenya!” they screamed, with the fires crackling behind them.
The streets were a collage of destruction, strewn with burning tires, broken bottles, fist-size rocks and fresh shell casings from soldiers who fired in the air to scare the demonstrators off. Some men sharpened machetes on the asphalt, vowing to shed blood should Mr. Odinga lose.
Kikuyus responded by forming packs of vigilantes to patrol their neighborhoods. As night fell, the gangs waited on corners, armed with machetes and lengths of wood.
Many Kenyans seemed distressed about what was happening. In Kibera, one man in a suit guided a young girl, her face a mask of panic, through the embers of burning tires.
“Unless they announce the winner soon,” said Lionel Joseph Ochieng, a Kibera resident, “this will only get worse.”
Election officials seemed to feel the clock ticking. They said they were trying to count the votes from Thursday’s election as quickly as possible but that they have been hampered by logistical problems and a record turnout, possibly upward of 70 percent.
Both political parties declared victory on Saturday, saying that by their calculations they had won the most votes. But by 1 p.m., the election commission had counted only 8 million votes out of a projected 10 to 11 million. The hush inside the heavily guarded election headquarters was a marked contrast to the raging street battles not far away.
The foreign diplomats who initially praised the election as being free and fair were beginning to change their tone.
Michael E. Ranneberger, the American ambassador to Kenya, rushed to the election headquarters at midnight on Friday because he said he had heard reports about vote rigging, though he declined to provide details. He urged voters to remain calm.
“This is a time for Kenyans to come together,” he said.
The head of the European Union’s election observer mission said that several election officials in the pro-Kibaki areas of central Kenya had initially kept their poll results secret, which is against Kenyan law.
“This is something we witnessed ourselves,” said Alexander Graf Lambsdorff, chief of the European delegation. “It’s clearly disturbing.”
The European Union is also investigating the high turnouts in the Kikuyu highlands north of Nairobi, where few have broken ranks with Mr. Kibaki’s party and some areas have voted nearly 100 percent in favor of the president.
The scenario that may be unfolding is the exact one that many foreign diplomats were dreading: a questionable razor-thin margin for the president, who had been trailing in just about every pre-election poll. It is not that Mr. Kibaki, 76, is so disliked himself. He has been in government since independence and is known as a courtly gentleman and economics whiz.
But he is seen by many Kenyans as continuing an unfair political system that has favored the Kikuyu at the expense of Kenya’s 30-plus other ethnic groups. Mr. Odinga, 62, boosted his popularity by tapping into those frustrations and building a coalition of many other tribes. His party has already demanded a recount in several districts and said it will not concede defeat if it loses.
There is a related multimedia linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/31/world ... ?th&emc=th
December 31, 2007
Tribal Rivalry Boils Over After Kenyan Election
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
NAIROBI, Kenya — It took all of about 15 minutes on Sunday, after Kenya’s president was declared the winner of a deeply controversial election, for the country to explode.
Thousands of young men burst out of Kibera, a shantytown of one million people, waving sticks, smashing shacks, burning tires and hurling stones. Soldiers poured into the streets to fight them. In several cities across Kenya, witnesses said, gangs went house to house, dragging out people of certain tribes and clubbing them to death.
“It’s war,” said Hudson Chate, a mechanic here. “Tribal war.”
The dubious conclusion of the most fiercely fought election in Kenya’s history has pitched the country toward chaos. The opposition rejected the results and vowed to inaugurate its leader, Raila Odinga, as “the people’s president,” which the government warned would be tantamount to a coup. As the riots spread, the government took the first steps toward martial law on Sunday night and banned all live media broadcasts.
Western observers said Kenya’s election commission ignored undeniable evidence of vote rigging to keep the government in power. Now, one of the most developed, stable nations in Africa, which has a powerhouse economy and a billion-dollar-a-year tourism industry, has plunged into intense uncertainty, losing its sheen as an exemplary democracy and quickly descending into tribal bloodletting.
With the president, Mwai Kibaki, a Kikuyu and Mr. Odinga a Luo, the election seems to have tapped into an atavistic vein of tribal tension that always lay beneath the surface in Kenya but until now had not provoked widespread mayhem.
The news media blackout made it difficult to assess the level of popular outrage. But it was clear Sunday night that the violence was spreading.
In Mathare, a slum in Nairobi, Luo gangs burned more than 100 Kikuyu homes. In Kibera, Kikuyu families loaded their belongings in cars and fled. Almost all the businesses in the country are shut. The only figures in downtown Nairobi, the capital, which is usually choked with traffic, are helmeted soldiers hunched behind plastic shields. Oily black clouds of smoke rose from the slums, smudging out the sun. At least 15 people have been killed.
“It’s a sad day for Kenya,” said Michael E. Ranneberger, the American ambassador to Kenya. “My biggest worry now is violence, which, let’s be honest, will be along tribal lines.”
Mr. Odinga’s supporters are unleashing their frustrations about the election, which was held on Thursday and initially praised as fair, against people they suspect supported the president, namely Kikuyus. The Odinga camp urged election officials to recount the votes after exposing serious discrepancies between the results announced on the night of the election versus the numbers that were later entered into a national total.
It had been predicted that the vote would be close, and the final results had Mr. Kibaki winning by a sliver, 46 percent to 44 percent. But that gap may have included thousands of invalid ballots. The European Union said its observers witnessed election officials in one constituency announce on election night that President Kibaki had won 50,145 votes. On Sunday, the election commission increased those same results to 75,261 votes.
“The presidential elections were flawed,” said Alexander Graf Lambsdorff, the chief European observer.
Koki Muli, co-chairwoman of the Kenya Election Domestic Observation Forum, said she was in the room on Sunday when the election commission was presented with dozens of suspicious tally sheets — some missing signatures, others missing stamps — and most of them were from the president’s stronghold of central Kenya. In some areas, more people voted for the president than there were registered voters. “I saw this with my own eyes,” she said.
Ms. Muli said that 75 of the 210 constituencies — meaning more than one-third of the vote — had serious question marks and that the election chairman initially agreed to investigate. But later on Sunday he changed his mind.
Kenya is a close American ally, and a team of Western diplomats, including the American ambassador, tried for hours to persuade election officials to recount the votes. One Western ambassador said they knew that if the dubious results were certified and the president declared the winner based on them, Kenya would plunge into crisis. But the commission would not budge.
“The government was determined to hold onto power,” said the ambassador, who did not want to be identified because he said he feared reprisals from the Kenyan government.
About 4 p.m., the election commission announced at its temporary headquarters in a downtown conference center that it was ready to declare a winner. The Western ambassadors filed in, looking worn out. Dozens of soldiers lined the walls, some armed with assault rifles and tear gas. Opposition leaders began shouting. The soldiers pounced and the room erupted into chaos, with men in suits fleeing, chairs getting knocked over and the election chairman making a hurried exit, with a crowd chasing him, yelling: “We want justice! Kenya has spoken!”
The commission then reconvened — in front of reporters chosen by government officials — and declared Mr. Kibaki the winner, with 4,584,721 votes compared with 4,352,993 for Mr. Odinga — a spread of about 2 percent.
There were indeed irregularities, the commissioners said, but it was not their job to deal with them. “The judicial system provides peaceable avenues to address these complaints,” said the chairman, Samuel Kivuitu.
The opposition has not indicated if it will contest the results in Kenya’s courts, which are notoriously slow and corrupt. But it announced a swearing-in ceremony for Mr. Odinga on Monday and declare him the “people’s president.”
Officials with Mr. Kibaki’s party warned that such a move could bring consequences. “If Raila does this, he will be attempting a coup and he will get what he deserves,” said Ngari Gituku, a spokesman for the Party of National Unity, Mr. Kibaki’s party.
Mr. Odinga was jailed in the 1980s for several years for plotting a coup in Kenya and was beaten and tortured.
As for the restrictions on the news media, which many journalists said were a severe setback to what had been considered one of the freest presses in the world, Mr. Gituku said: “The only thing the president wants to do is to heal this nation, and the media is not part of that process. The media has been propagating hate.”
Mr. Kibaki was sworn in almost immediately after the results were announced. In a surreal scene, as gunfire rattled in the slums, Mr. Kibaki stood serenely with a Bible in his hand. It was as if he were talking about another election.
“We have demonstrated to the world we are politically mature,” he said. He called the vote “honest, orderly and credible.”
The election did not start out ominously. Kenyans streamed to the polls in record numbers on Thursday. Some waited for hours in lines that were miles long.
The contest was seen as a test of Kenya’s young multiparty democracy, with Mr. Kibaki, 76, representing the establishment and Mr. Odinga, 62, a new brand of politics. Mr. Kibaki has been in government since independence in 1963 and was seen by many Kenyans as continuing an unfair political system that has favored the Kikuyu at the expense of Kenya’s 30-plus other ethnic groups. Mr. Odinga, a rich businessman who campaigned as a champion of the poor, added to his popularity by tapping into those frustrations and building a coalition of many tribes.
The first batch of results showed a sweeping victory for the opposition, with Mr. Odinga ahead by one million votes on Friday. But that lead evaporated overnight, and by Saturday the race was essentially a tie.
But the sudden reversal ignited suspicions, especially after many members of Parliament close to the president were voted out of office in a wave of seeming dissatisfaction with the government.
Ms. Muli, the Kenyan election observer, said it was clear the government had rigged the election. “This country has come a long way,” she said. “And now we have been set back many miles.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/31/world ... ?th&emc=th
December 31, 2007
Tribal Rivalry Boils Over After Kenyan Election
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
NAIROBI, Kenya — It took all of about 15 minutes on Sunday, after Kenya’s president was declared the winner of a deeply controversial election, for the country to explode.
Thousands of young men burst out of Kibera, a shantytown of one million people, waving sticks, smashing shacks, burning tires and hurling stones. Soldiers poured into the streets to fight them. In several cities across Kenya, witnesses said, gangs went house to house, dragging out people of certain tribes and clubbing them to death.
“It’s war,” said Hudson Chate, a mechanic here. “Tribal war.”
The dubious conclusion of the most fiercely fought election in Kenya’s history has pitched the country toward chaos. The opposition rejected the results and vowed to inaugurate its leader, Raila Odinga, as “the people’s president,” which the government warned would be tantamount to a coup. As the riots spread, the government took the first steps toward martial law on Sunday night and banned all live media broadcasts.
Western observers said Kenya’s election commission ignored undeniable evidence of vote rigging to keep the government in power. Now, one of the most developed, stable nations in Africa, which has a powerhouse economy and a billion-dollar-a-year tourism industry, has plunged into intense uncertainty, losing its sheen as an exemplary democracy and quickly descending into tribal bloodletting.
With the president, Mwai Kibaki, a Kikuyu and Mr. Odinga a Luo, the election seems to have tapped into an atavistic vein of tribal tension that always lay beneath the surface in Kenya but until now had not provoked widespread mayhem.
The news media blackout made it difficult to assess the level of popular outrage. But it was clear Sunday night that the violence was spreading.
In Mathare, a slum in Nairobi, Luo gangs burned more than 100 Kikuyu homes. In Kibera, Kikuyu families loaded their belongings in cars and fled. Almost all the businesses in the country are shut. The only figures in downtown Nairobi, the capital, which is usually choked with traffic, are helmeted soldiers hunched behind plastic shields. Oily black clouds of smoke rose from the slums, smudging out the sun. At least 15 people have been killed.
“It’s a sad day for Kenya,” said Michael E. Ranneberger, the American ambassador to Kenya. “My biggest worry now is violence, which, let’s be honest, will be along tribal lines.”
Mr. Odinga’s supporters are unleashing their frustrations about the election, which was held on Thursday and initially praised as fair, against people they suspect supported the president, namely Kikuyus. The Odinga camp urged election officials to recount the votes after exposing serious discrepancies between the results announced on the night of the election versus the numbers that were later entered into a national total.
It had been predicted that the vote would be close, and the final results had Mr. Kibaki winning by a sliver, 46 percent to 44 percent. But that gap may have included thousands of invalid ballots. The European Union said its observers witnessed election officials in one constituency announce on election night that President Kibaki had won 50,145 votes. On Sunday, the election commission increased those same results to 75,261 votes.
“The presidential elections were flawed,” said Alexander Graf Lambsdorff, the chief European observer.
Koki Muli, co-chairwoman of the Kenya Election Domestic Observation Forum, said she was in the room on Sunday when the election commission was presented with dozens of suspicious tally sheets — some missing signatures, others missing stamps — and most of them were from the president’s stronghold of central Kenya. In some areas, more people voted for the president than there were registered voters. “I saw this with my own eyes,” she said.
Ms. Muli said that 75 of the 210 constituencies — meaning more than one-third of the vote — had serious question marks and that the election chairman initially agreed to investigate. But later on Sunday he changed his mind.
Kenya is a close American ally, and a team of Western diplomats, including the American ambassador, tried for hours to persuade election officials to recount the votes. One Western ambassador said they knew that if the dubious results were certified and the president declared the winner based on them, Kenya would plunge into crisis. But the commission would not budge.
“The government was determined to hold onto power,” said the ambassador, who did not want to be identified because he said he feared reprisals from the Kenyan government.
About 4 p.m., the election commission announced at its temporary headquarters in a downtown conference center that it was ready to declare a winner. The Western ambassadors filed in, looking worn out. Dozens of soldiers lined the walls, some armed with assault rifles and tear gas. Opposition leaders began shouting. The soldiers pounced and the room erupted into chaos, with men in suits fleeing, chairs getting knocked over and the election chairman making a hurried exit, with a crowd chasing him, yelling: “We want justice! Kenya has spoken!”
The commission then reconvened — in front of reporters chosen by government officials — and declared Mr. Kibaki the winner, with 4,584,721 votes compared with 4,352,993 for Mr. Odinga — a spread of about 2 percent.
There were indeed irregularities, the commissioners said, but it was not their job to deal with them. “The judicial system provides peaceable avenues to address these complaints,” said the chairman, Samuel Kivuitu.
The opposition has not indicated if it will contest the results in Kenya’s courts, which are notoriously slow and corrupt. But it announced a swearing-in ceremony for Mr. Odinga on Monday and declare him the “people’s president.”
Officials with Mr. Kibaki’s party warned that such a move could bring consequences. “If Raila does this, he will be attempting a coup and he will get what he deserves,” said Ngari Gituku, a spokesman for the Party of National Unity, Mr. Kibaki’s party.
Mr. Odinga was jailed in the 1980s for several years for plotting a coup in Kenya and was beaten and tortured.
As for the restrictions on the news media, which many journalists said were a severe setback to what had been considered one of the freest presses in the world, Mr. Gituku said: “The only thing the president wants to do is to heal this nation, and the media is not part of that process. The media has been propagating hate.”
Mr. Kibaki was sworn in almost immediately after the results were announced. In a surreal scene, as gunfire rattled in the slums, Mr. Kibaki stood serenely with a Bible in his hand. It was as if he were talking about another election.
“We have demonstrated to the world we are politically mature,” he said. He called the vote “honest, orderly and credible.”
The election did not start out ominously. Kenyans streamed to the polls in record numbers on Thursday. Some waited for hours in lines that were miles long.
The contest was seen as a test of Kenya’s young multiparty democracy, with Mr. Kibaki, 76, representing the establishment and Mr. Odinga, 62, a new brand of politics. Mr. Kibaki has been in government since independence in 1963 and was seen by many Kenyans as continuing an unfair political system that has favored the Kikuyu at the expense of Kenya’s 30-plus other ethnic groups. Mr. Odinga, a rich businessman who campaigned as a champion of the poor, added to his popularity by tapping into those frustrations and building a coalition of many tribes.
The first batch of results showed a sweeping victory for the opposition, with Mr. Odinga ahead by one million votes on Friday. But that lead evaporated overnight, and by Saturday the race was essentially a tie.
But the sudden reversal ignited suspicions, especially after many members of Parliament close to the president were voted out of office in a wave of seeming dissatisfaction with the government.
Ms. Muli, the Kenyan election observer, said it was clear the government had rigged the election. “This country has come a long way,” she said. “And now we have been set back many miles.”
There is a related multimedia linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/01/world ... ?th&emc=th
January 1, 2008
Fighting Intensifies After Election in Kenya
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
NAIROBI, Kenya — Kenya sank deeper into trouble on Monday, with a curfew imposed in Kisumu, the country’s third-largest city, ethnic fighting intensifying and more than 100 people killed in election-related violence.
A knot of rage seems to be moving across the country, from the slums of Nairobi, the capital, to the cities along the Indian Ocean, to usually tranquil towns on the savannah. Many people are furious that President Mwai Kibaki was declared the winner on Sunday of the country’s most fiercely fought election, despite widespread evidence of ballot rigging.
After three days of rioting, some streets in Nairobi are beginning to look like war zones. Trucks filled with soldiers rumbled through a wasteland of burned cars and abandoned homes, their tires crunching over broken glass. Gangs of young men have built roadblocks between neighborhoods of the Kikuyus, Mr. Kibaki’s tribe, and the Luos, the tribe of Raila Odinga, the top opposition leader, who narrowly lost the election.
The no man’s land between them is often a single lane of potholed asphalt, patrolled by men holding huge rocks in their hands.
The election has uncorked dangerous resentment toward the Kikuyus, the privileged ethnic group of Kenya, who have dominated business and politics since independence in 1963.
Witnesses said that in some areas mobs had stopped cars and pulled out passengers. They demanded identification cards to determine whether they were Kikuyu — one can often tell by the name — and if so, they were lynched. Six Kikuyus were hacked to death in Mombasa, on Kenya’s eastern coast, Agence France-Presse reported.
The most intense fighting, though, is in western Kenya, Mr. Odinga’s stronghold, where a mix of hooliganism, political protest and ethnic violence has taken dozens of lives. The police have responded by shooting looters on sight and ordering a curfew in Kisumu, barring people from leaving home at night or walking around during the day in groups of more than two.
The Kenyan internal security minister has outlawed live television broadcasts nationwide because, he said, the coverage was inciting riots.
Many Kenyans, who take pride that their country is one of the most stable and prosperous in Africa, said they felt ashamed about the turn their nation has taken. “This is a total throwback,” said Maina Kiai, chairman of the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights. “We are going back to the days of dictatorship.”
But a lot of people have not given up on democracy. On Monday, several hundred men in a mixed Kikuyu-Luo slum held a peace march. They met in the road that divides their enclaves, distinctions nobody really cared about until a few days ago, and spoke about putting down their weapons and working out their problems.
“For all these years, we’ve been living together,” said Stanley Maina, a Kikuyu shopkeeper. “Why are we fighting now?”
One Luo man yelled out, “Let Raila and Kibaki fight! They are presidents; we are just people!”
Those in the crowd pumped their fists in the air and cheered.
The decision by Kenya’s election commission on Sunday to declare Mr. Kibaki the winner of the disputed election held Thursday has thrown the country into a crisis without an obvious solution. Western diplomats said that there was undeniable evidence of fraud at the ballot tallying level but that election officials refused to do a recount because they wanted to keep the government in power.
Mr. Kibaki, 76, faces trouble not just on the streets but in Parliament as well. More than half of his cabinet was voted out of office, and his party won about 35 seats in Parliament, compared with about 100 for the opposition.
Before the election, Mr. Kibaki was considered a courtly gentleman who stirred few passions. Now mobs of outraged voters are burning pictures of him and calling him a cheat.
It is not clear what opposition leaders will do. They had planned to hold their own inauguration on Monday and anoint Mr. Odinga, 62, the “people’s president.” But the government warned that such an event would be considered a coup and sent hundreds of riot police officers in padded suits to the Nairobi park where the ceremony was to take place. The opposition decided to postpone the ceremony until Thursday.
Mr. Odinga has rebuffed the government’s invitations to negotiate a power-sharing deal, saying that Mr. Kibaki is not the legitimate head of state. “We will bring down this government by peaceful and democratic means,” he said Monday, without specifying the means.
Western officials have become increasingly critical of the elections, and two of Kenya’s largest donors issued pointed statements on Monday. The United States, which initially congratulated Mr. Kibaki on his victory, said there were “serious problems experienced during the vote counting process” including “unrealistically high voter turnout” and “apparent manipulation of some election reporting documents.”
Canada deplored the news media blackout and said it was “very concerned about incidents of violence, and by irregularities in the post-election process and the response by Kenyan authorities.”
The mood in Nairobi was hardly festive on New Year’s Eve. Though the wealthier neighborhoods have not been hit by riots, stores were running out of food. Many people skipped parties, frightened of driving in the dark. Many roads to town were blocked by soldiers who warned drivers that if they entered the city, their cars could be burned.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/01/world ... ?th&emc=th
January 1, 2008
Fighting Intensifies After Election in Kenya
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
NAIROBI, Kenya — Kenya sank deeper into trouble on Monday, with a curfew imposed in Kisumu, the country’s third-largest city, ethnic fighting intensifying and more than 100 people killed in election-related violence.
A knot of rage seems to be moving across the country, from the slums of Nairobi, the capital, to the cities along the Indian Ocean, to usually tranquil towns on the savannah. Many people are furious that President Mwai Kibaki was declared the winner on Sunday of the country’s most fiercely fought election, despite widespread evidence of ballot rigging.
After three days of rioting, some streets in Nairobi are beginning to look like war zones. Trucks filled with soldiers rumbled through a wasteland of burned cars and abandoned homes, their tires crunching over broken glass. Gangs of young men have built roadblocks between neighborhoods of the Kikuyus, Mr. Kibaki’s tribe, and the Luos, the tribe of Raila Odinga, the top opposition leader, who narrowly lost the election.
The no man’s land between them is often a single lane of potholed asphalt, patrolled by men holding huge rocks in their hands.
The election has uncorked dangerous resentment toward the Kikuyus, the privileged ethnic group of Kenya, who have dominated business and politics since independence in 1963.
Witnesses said that in some areas mobs had stopped cars and pulled out passengers. They demanded identification cards to determine whether they were Kikuyu — one can often tell by the name — and if so, they were lynched. Six Kikuyus were hacked to death in Mombasa, on Kenya’s eastern coast, Agence France-Presse reported.
The most intense fighting, though, is in western Kenya, Mr. Odinga’s stronghold, where a mix of hooliganism, political protest and ethnic violence has taken dozens of lives. The police have responded by shooting looters on sight and ordering a curfew in Kisumu, barring people from leaving home at night or walking around during the day in groups of more than two.
The Kenyan internal security minister has outlawed live television broadcasts nationwide because, he said, the coverage was inciting riots.
Many Kenyans, who take pride that their country is one of the most stable and prosperous in Africa, said they felt ashamed about the turn their nation has taken. “This is a total throwback,” said Maina Kiai, chairman of the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights. “We are going back to the days of dictatorship.”
But a lot of people have not given up on democracy. On Monday, several hundred men in a mixed Kikuyu-Luo slum held a peace march. They met in the road that divides their enclaves, distinctions nobody really cared about until a few days ago, and spoke about putting down their weapons and working out their problems.
“For all these years, we’ve been living together,” said Stanley Maina, a Kikuyu shopkeeper. “Why are we fighting now?”
One Luo man yelled out, “Let Raila and Kibaki fight! They are presidents; we are just people!”
Those in the crowd pumped their fists in the air and cheered.
The decision by Kenya’s election commission on Sunday to declare Mr. Kibaki the winner of the disputed election held Thursday has thrown the country into a crisis without an obvious solution. Western diplomats said that there was undeniable evidence of fraud at the ballot tallying level but that election officials refused to do a recount because they wanted to keep the government in power.
Mr. Kibaki, 76, faces trouble not just on the streets but in Parliament as well. More than half of his cabinet was voted out of office, and his party won about 35 seats in Parliament, compared with about 100 for the opposition.
Before the election, Mr. Kibaki was considered a courtly gentleman who stirred few passions. Now mobs of outraged voters are burning pictures of him and calling him a cheat.
It is not clear what opposition leaders will do. They had planned to hold their own inauguration on Monday and anoint Mr. Odinga, 62, the “people’s president.” But the government warned that such an event would be considered a coup and sent hundreds of riot police officers in padded suits to the Nairobi park where the ceremony was to take place. The opposition decided to postpone the ceremony until Thursday.
Mr. Odinga has rebuffed the government’s invitations to negotiate a power-sharing deal, saying that Mr. Kibaki is not the legitimate head of state. “We will bring down this government by peaceful and democratic means,” he said Monday, without specifying the means.
Western officials have become increasingly critical of the elections, and two of Kenya’s largest donors issued pointed statements on Monday. The United States, which initially congratulated Mr. Kibaki on his victory, said there were “serious problems experienced during the vote counting process” including “unrealistically high voter turnout” and “apparent manipulation of some election reporting documents.”
Canada deplored the news media blackout and said it was “very concerned about incidents of violence, and by irregularities in the post-election process and the response by Kenyan authorities.”
The mood in Nairobi was hardly festive on New Year’s Eve. Though the wealthier neighborhoods have not been hit by riots, stores were running out of food. Many people skipped parties, frightened of driving in the dark. Many roads to town were blocked by soldiers who warned drivers that if they entered the city, their cars could be burned.
There is a related slide show linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/02/world ... ?th&emc=th
January 2, 2008
Mob Sets Kenya Church on Fire, Killing Dozens
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
NAIROBI, Kenya — Dozens of people seeking refuge in a church in Kenya were burned to death by a mob on Tuesday in an explosion of ethnic violence that is threatening to engulf this country, which until last week was one of the most stable in Africa.
According to witnesses and Red Cross officials, up to 50 people died inside the church in a small village in western Kenya after a furious crowd doused it with gasoline and set it on fire.
In Nairobi, the capital, tribal militias squared off against each other in several slums, with gunshots ringing out and clouds of black smoke wafting over the shanties. The death toll across the country is steadily rising.
Witnesses indicate that more than 250 people have been killed in the past two days in bloodshed connected to a disputed election Kenya held last week.
The European Union said Tuesday that there was clear evidence of ballot rigging, and European officials called for an independent investigation. Kenya’s president, Mwai Kibaki, who won the election by a razor-thin margin, has refused such an inquiry.
Government officials said Tuesday that they would crack down on anyone who threatened law and order, and they banned political rallies. Meanwhile, Raila Odinga, the opposition leader who lost the election, has vowed to hold a million-person march on Thursday, which many Kenyans fear could become a bloodbath.
The Kenya celebrated for its spectacular wildlife and robust economy is now a land of distress. Tens of thousands of people have fled their homes, and some are so frightened that they have crossed into Uganda.
“We’ve had tribal fighting before, but never like this,” said Abdalla Bujra, a retired Kenyan professor who runs a democracy-building organization.
As for the people burned alive in the church, Mr. Bujra echoed what many Kenyans were thinking: “It reminds me of Rwanda.”
While the bloodshed of the past few days in Kenya has fallen far short of the Rwandan genocide in 1994, many Kenyans are worried that it is spiraling out of control.
The violence has been a mix of hooliganism, political protest and ethnic bloodletting. Most of the victims have been Kikuyus, the tribe of the president and Kenya’s traditional ruling class. Kikuyus have dominated business and politics since independence in 1963. They run shops, restaurants, banks and factories across Kenya, from the Indian Ocean coast to the scenic savannah to the muggy shores of Lake Victoria in the west.
They make up only 22 percent of the population and are part of Kenya’s mosaic of roughly 40 ethnic groups, which have intermarried and coexisted for decades. But the election controversy has created a new dynamic in which many of Kenya’s other tribes, furious about the ballot rigging that may have kept Mr. Kibaki in power, have vented their frustrations against them.
“We are easy targets,” said Stephen Kahianyu, a Kikuyu, staring at the embers of his home in Nairobi that was burned to the ground on Saturday.
Over the past few days, Kikuyus have fled to police stations and churches for protection.
On Monday night, several hundred Kikuyus barricaded themselves inside the Kenya Assemblies of God church in Kiambaa, a small village near the town of Eldoret. The next morning, a rowdy mob showed up.
According to witnesses, the mob was mostly Kalenjins, Luhyas and Luos, Mr. Odinga’s tribe, which makes up about 13 percent of the population. They overran Kikuyu guards in front of the church and then pulled out cans of gasoline. There were no police officers around, witnesses said, and no water to put the fire out.
Most people escaped. But in addition to those killed, dozens were hospitalized with severe burns. Witnesses said most of the people hiding inside had been women and children.
The Eldoret area has become a killing zone. Residents say dozens of Kikuyus have been hacked to death, including four who were beheaded on Monday.
In Nairobi, a much-feared Kikuyu street gang called the Mungiki seems to be taking revenge. According to residents in a Luo area, the Mungiki, who are said to take an oath in which they drink human blood, were sweeping through the slums and killing Luos.
The government is now blaming Mr. Odinga for the violence.
“This isn’t random,” said Alfred Mutua, a government spokesman. “This is part of Raila’s plan to create hysteria and trouble and make us declare a state of emergency,” which Kenya seems to be rapidly approaching, with curfews in several areas and a ban on live news media coverage.
Western diplomats have been urging the political leaders to reconcile, but the lines between those leaders seem to be only hardening.
Mr. Odinga said he would not talk to Mr. Kibaki until the president admitted that he had lost the election.
Still, he urged his followers to calm down. “This is tarnishing our image as democratic and peaceful seekers of change,” Mr. Odinga said.
Mr. Odinga and Mr. Kibaki ran together in 2002, in what was considered Kenya’s first free election. The tribal alliance they built steamrolled Kenya’s governing party and was a watershed moment. But the two fell out soon afterward, and diplomats here said that it has been very difficult trying to broker a truce.
“We just want them to meet,” said Bo Jensen, the Danish ambassador to Kenya. “But at the moment they’re quite far from each other.”
The election did not start off badly. A record number of Kenyans, nearly 10 million, waited in lines miles long on Thursday to scratch an X next to their chosen candidate.
Mr. Kibaki, 76, vowed to keep growing Kenya’s economy, one of the strongest in Africa, partly because of its billion-dollar tourist trade. Mr. Odinga, 62, ran as a champion of the poor and promised to end the tradition of Kikuyu favoritism.
Voting followed tribal lines, with a vast majority of Luos going for Mr. Odinga and up to 98 percent of Kikuyus in some areas voting for Mr. Kibaki.
Tribes, obviously, do matter in Kenya. But for the most part, the country has escaped the widespread ethnic bloodletting that has haunted so many of its neighbors, like Rwanda, Congo, Sudan and Ethiopia. In Kenya, the Kikuyu elite has shared the spoils of the system with select members of other tribes, which has helped defuse resentment.
That has led to decades of stability and is a reason why most Kenyans, including Mr. Bujra, the retired professor, do not think their country will end up like Rwanda, where nearly one million people were killed. Clearly, Kenya is a long way from that.
“In Rwanda, the conflict was between a small minority and a large majority,” he said, referring to the history of Tutsis dominating the Hutu majority. “Here, it is different, because many tribes have a stake.”
But election time in this country, where politics and tribe are so intertwined, is often bloody. Hundreds of people were killed in tribal clashes surrounding the 1992 and 1997 elections. And this time, passions were as high as ever.
The early results showed Mr. Odinga well ahead and more than half of Mr. Kibaki’s cabinet losing their Parliament seats and therefore their jobs.
But when Mr. Odinga’s lead began to vanish as further results were announced over the weekend, his supporters suspected that something was amiss. It was slow-motion theft to them, and they began to riot.
Even before Kenya’s election commission declared Mr. Kibaki the winner on Sunday, election observers said the president’s party had changed tally sheets to reflect more votes than were cast on election day. In some areas, there were more votes for the president than registered voters.
On Tuesday, Samuel Kivuitu, the election chairman, said he had been “under undue pressure” to certify the results.
Western governments, including the United States, are calling for a vote recount.
“It’s the only way forward,” said Graham Elson, the deputy chief of the European observer delegation.
Kennedy Abwao contributed reporting from Nairobi, and Matthew L. Wald from Washington.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/02/world ... ?th&emc=th
January 2, 2008
Mob Sets Kenya Church on Fire, Killing Dozens
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
NAIROBI, Kenya — Dozens of people seeking refuge in a church in Kenya were burned to death by a mob on Tuesday in an explosion of ethnic violence that is threatening to engulf this country, which until last week was one of the most stable in Africa.
According to witnesses and Red Cross officials, up to 50 people died inside the church in a small village in western Kenya after a furious crowd doused it with gasoline and set it on fire.
In Nairobi, the capital, tribal militias squared off against each other in several slums, with gunshots ringing out and clouds of black smoke wafting over the shanties. The death toll across the country is steadily rising.
Witnesses indicate that more than 250 people have been killed in the past two days in bloodshed connected to a disputed election Kenya held last week.
The European Union said Tuesday that there was clear evidence of ballot rigging, and European officials called for an independent investigation. Kenya’s president, Mwai Kibaki, who won the election by a razor-thin margin, has refused such an inquiry.
Government officials said Tuesday that they would crack down on anyone who threatened law and order, and they banned political rallies. Meanwhile, Raila Odinga, the opposition leader who lost the election, has vowed to hold a million-person march on Thursday, which many Kenyans fear could become a bloodbath.
The Kenya celebrated for its spectacular wildlife and robust economy is now a land of distress. Tens of thousands of people have fled their homes, and some are so frightened that they have crossed into Uganda.
“We’ve had tribal fighting before, but never like this,” said Abdalla Bujra, a retired Kenyan professor who runs a democracy-building organization.
As for the people burned alive in the church, Mr. Bujra echoed what many Kenyans were thinking: “It reminds me of Rwanda.”
While the bloodshed of the past few days in Kenya has fallen far short of the Rwandan genocide in 1994, many Kenyans are worried that it is spiraling out of control.
The violence has been a mix of hooliganism, political protest and ethnic bloodletting. Most of the victims have been Kikuyus, the tribe of the president and Kenya’s traditional ruling class. Kikuyus have dominated business and politics since independence in 1963. They run shops, restaurants, banks and factories across Kenya, from the Indian Ocean coast to the scenic savannah to the muggy shores of Lake Victoria in the west.
They make up only 22 percent of the population and are part of Kenya’s mosaic of roughly 40 ethnic groups, which have intermarried and coexisted for decades. But the election controversy has created a new dynamic in which many of Kenya’s other tribes, furious about the ballot rigging that may have kept Mr. Kibaki in power, have vented their frustrations against them.
“We are easy targets,” said Stephen Kahianyu, a Kikuyu, staring at the embers of his home in Nairobi that was burned to the ground on Saturday.
Over the past few days, Kikuyus have fled to police stations and churches for protection.
On Monday night, several hundred Kikuyus barricaded themselves inside the Kenya Assemblies of God church in Kiambaa, a small village near the town of Eldoret. The next morning, a rowdy mob showed up.
According to witnesses, the mob was mostly Kalenjins, Luhyas and Luos, Mr. Odinga’s tribe, which makes up about 13 percent of the population. They overran Kikuyu guards in front of the church and then pulled out cans of gasoline. There were no police officers around, witnesses said, and no water to put the fire out.
Most people escaped. But in addition to those killed, dozens were hospitalized with severe burns. Witnesses said most of the people hiding inside had been women and children.
The Eldoret area has become a killing zone. Residents say dozens of Kikuyus have been hacked to death, including four who were beheaded on Monday.
In Nairobi, a much-feared Kikuyu street gang called the Mungiki seems to be taking revenge. According to residents in a Luo area, the Mungiki, who are said to take an oath in which they drink human blood, were sweeping through the slums and killing Luos.
The government is now blaming Mr. Odinga for the violence.
“This isn’t random,” said Alfred Mutua, a government spokesman. “This is part of Raila’s plan to create hysteria and trouble and make us declare a state of emergency,” which Kenya seems to be rapidly approaching, with curfews in several areas and a ban on live news media coverage.
Western diplomats have been urging the political leaders to reconcile, but the lines between those leaders seem to be only hardening.
Mr. Odinga said he would not talk to Mr. Kibaki until the president admitted that he had lost the election.
Still, he urged his followers to calm down. “This is tarnishing our image as democratic and peaceful seekers of change,” Mr. Odinga said.
Mr. Odinga and Mr. Kibaki ran together in 2002, in what was considered Kenya’s first free election. The tribal alliance they built steamrolled Kenya’s governing party and was a watershed moment. But the two fell out soon afterward, and diplomats here said that it has been very difficult trying to broker a truce.
“We just want them to meet,” said Bo Jensen, the Danish ambassador to Kenya. “But at the moment they’re quite far from each other.”
The election did not start off badly. A record number of Kenyans, nearly 10 million, waited in lines miles long on Thursday to scratch an X next to their chosen candidate.
Mr. Kibaki, 76, vowed to keep growing Kenya’s economy, one of the strongest in Africa, partly because of its billion-dollar tourist trade. Mr. Odinga, 62, ran as a champion of the poor and promised to end the tradition of Kikuyu favoritism.
Voting followed tribal lines, with a vast majority of Luos going for Mr. Odinga and up to 98 percent of Kikuyus in some areas voting for Mr. Kibaki.
Tribes, obviously, do matter in Kenya. But for the most part, the country has escaped the widespread ethnic bloodletting that has haunted so many of its neighbors, like Rwanda, Congo, Sudan and Ethiopia. In Kenya, the Kikuyu elite has shared the spoils of the system with select members of other tribes, which has helped defuse resentment.
That has led to decades of stability and is a reason why most Kenyans, including Mr. Bujra, the retired professor, do not think their country will end up like Rwanda, where nearly one million people were killed. Clearly, Kenya is a long way from that.
“In Rwanda, the conflict was between a small minority and a large majority,” he said, referring to the history of Tutsis dominating the Hutu majority. “Here, it is different, because many tribes have a stake.”
But election time in this country, where politics and tribe are so intertwined, is often bloody. Hundreds of people were killed in tribal clashes surrounding the 1992 and 1997 elections. And this time, passions were as high as ever.
The early results showed Mr. Odinga well ahead and more than half of Mr. Kibaki’s cabinet losing their Parliament seats and therefore their jobs.
But when Mr. Odinga’s lead began to vanish as further results were announced over the weekend, his supporters suspected that something was amiss. It was slow-motion theft to them, and they began to riot.
Even before Kenya’s election commission declared Mr. Kibaki the winner on Sunday, election observers said the president’s party had changed tally sheets to reflect more votes than were cast on election day. In some areas, there were more votes for the president than registered voters.
On Tuesday, Samuel Kivuitu, the election chairman, said he had been “under undue pressure” to certify the results.
Western governments, including the United States, are calling for a vote recount.
“It’s the only way forward,” said Graham Elson, the deputy chief of the European observer delegation.
Kennedy Abwao contributed reporting from Nairobi, and Matthew L. Wald from Washington.
As received from Nairobi [name withheld]
Ismailis have been evacuated from Kisumu today by plane, some towards Kampala and the other group towards Mwanza. That was announced in Nairobi JK tonight.
The USA Ambassador in Kenya has played the Raila Odinga card, supporting him openly. Raila Odinga has played the Tribal card. For both of them failure has been difficult to swallow.
In Kenya everyone makes stories, it is not like in the Western World [though there also they do stories some times]. They may show documents and make a show but it does not mean the document is authentic.
We are in a country where even a piece of land has sometimes several owners all with a "real" title deeds. Only the courts can decide the right from the wrong. But the opposition does not want to go to court, they are pressuring the Election commission to change the results.
Since both parties have rigged the elections, chances are that a recount will just show both of them had less votes then those reported on the official election forms for each constituency [and believe me, they may find several official contradictory forms!] and the end result will probably not change with a recount. ODM is popular and got majority of seats but Kibaki is preferred as President so no wonder he got majority of votes.
Kibaki has shown a great deal of patience and maturity. he has disallow the press to cover and to show in real times the events and massacre done by the Oppositions supporters and averted major retaliation by Kikuyus. But there are already 200+ innocent people dead, all Kikuyu's from kibaki's tribe.
Odinga has been very arrogant and inflexible, refusing to talk with Kibaki unless Kibaki accept him as president. Odinga had said before even the announcement of the results that if he is not the winner he will refuse the results and transform the country into an Ivory Coast [he has almost succeeded]. Mediation has been called. maybe Desmond Tutu.. we will see.
I have attended the Great Lake Conference, the last Comesa Conference and the East African Head of States conference in Arusha, Kibaki has always taken a lead role. I was very much impressed.
When I came to Kenya 3 years ago, there were metal detector in every hotel lobby, safety was questionable. Only 500,000 tourists a year but within 3 years, safety has returned in city center, there are no more metal detector and there are 3 times more tourists per year. All this has been washed away by opposition supporter who have recently killed hundreds and scared away the tourists. Pray for Kenya and that peace should come back fast.
Ismailis have been evacuated from Kisumu today by plane, some towards Kampala and the other group towards Mwanza. That was announced in Nairobi JK tonight.
The USA Ambassador in Kenya has played the Raila Odinga card, supporting him openly. Raila Odinga has played the Tribal card. For both of them failure has been difficult to swallow.
In Kenya everyone makes stories, it is not like in the Western World [though there also they do stories some times]. They may show documents and make a show but it does not mean the document is authentic.
We are in a country where even a piece of land has sometimes several owners all with a "real" title deeds. Only the courts can decide the right from the wrong. But the opposition does not want to go to court, they are pressuring the Election commission to change the results.
Since both parties have rigged the elections, chances are that a recount will just show both of them had less votes then those reported on the official election forms for each constituency [and believe me, they may find several official contradictory forms!] and the end result will probably not change with a recount. ODM is popular and got majority of seats but Kibaki is preferred as President so no wonder he got majority of votes.
Kibaki has shown a great deal of patience and maturity. he has disallow the press to cover and to show in real times the events and massacre done by the Oppositions supporters and averted major retaliation by Kikuyus. But there are already 200+ innocent people dead, all Kikuyu's from kibaki's tribe.
Odinga has been very arrogant and inflexible, refusing to talk with Kibaki unless Kibaki accept him as president. Odinga had said before even the announcement of the results that if he is not the winner he will refuse the results and transform the country into an Ivory Coast [he has almost succeeded]. Mediation has been called. maybe Desmond Tutu.. we will see.
I have attended the Great Lake Conference, the last Comesa Conference and the East African Head of States conference in Arusha, Kibaki has always taken a lead role. I was very much impressed.
When I came to Kenya 3 years ago, there were metal detector in every hotel lobby, safety was questionable. Only 500,000 tourists a year but within 3 years, safety has returned in city center, there are no more metal detector and there are 3 times more tourists per year. All this has been washed away by opposition supporter who have recently killed hundreds and scared away the tourists. Pray for Kenya and that peace should come back fast.
January 3, 2008
Editorial
Ambition and Horror in Kenya
The murderous tribal violence that has spread through Kenya in recent days would be horrifying anywhere. It is particularly tragic to see this happening in a country that seemed finally to be on the path to a democratic and economically sound future. There may still be a chance to retrieve some of these hopes. That will likely require stepping back from the suspicious and hastily declared election results that sparked this ugly upheaval.
Officially, those results gave a second term to President Mwai Kibaki, despite independent reports of egregious irregularities. Even the chairman of Kenya’s national election commission now says that he was pressured into an early declaration and cannot say who won.
Mr. Kibaki should renounce that official declaration and the embarassingly swift swearing in that followed. He should then meet with his principal challenger, Raila Odinga, to discuss a possible vote recount, election re-run or other reasonable compromise.
That isn’t likely to happen without outside prodding. Urgent mediation by the leader of the African Union, John Kufuor, could help bring the two together before the violence gets worse. Already, more than 300 Kenyans are dead, 70,000 have been driven from their homes and thousands have fled to neighboring countries.
How different things seemed five years ago. Then Mr. Kibaki, allied with Mr. Odinga, was the democratic reformer challenging Kenya’s longtime autocratic leader Daniel arap Moi and his handpicked candidate. Mr. Moi’s reign was repressive and notoriously corrupt. International donors grew wary and despite having some of the best agricultural land, the most attractive tourist destinations and the best urban infrastructure in East Africa, Kenya’s economy stagnated.
Mr. Kibaki promised change and won in what was the freest election Kenya has ever known. Since then, he has delivered on many of his promises. Corruption is still a serious problem, but Kenya has enjoyed an expansion of free primary and secondary education, vibrant growth and important reforms of the judiciary, civil service and economy. Now, Mr. Kibaki’s apparent attempt to rig his own re-election has put these gains at grave risk.
Tribal resentments have long played a role in Kenyan politics. They flared anew after Mr. Kibaki and Mr. Odinga fell out over the spoils of the 2002 election. Mr. Kibaki comes from the long-dominant Kikuyu group, Kenya’s largest. Mr. Odinga comes from the Luo, a smaller but politically important tribe. Much of the violence of recent days has involved these two groups. In rural Eldoret, some 50 Kikuyu were burned to death inside a church where they had sought refuge. In the vast and tribally mixed urban slums of Nairobi, rival militias have been waging open warfare.
Mr. Kibaki and Mr. Odinga cannot ignore the chaos around them. No matter their personal ambitions and resentments, they must be brought together and pushed to come up with a solution that will calm their followers and restore Kenyans’ faith in their democratic system — before the damage becomes irreversible.
****
January 3, 2008
Kenya, Known for Its Stability, Topples Into Post-Election Chaos
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
KIAMBAA, Kenya — Daniel Kibigo said he was there, hiding in the burned cornfields nearby, as the mob gleefully stuffed mattresses in front of the church’s doors and set them on fire.
He watched women try to claw their way out of the church windows as if they were drowning as the building burned all the way down, with up to 50 people inside.
“We couldn’t do anything; there were too many,” he said of the crowd that descended on the church in the paroxysm of ethnic violence that has gripped Kenya since its deeply flawed elections last week.
On Wednesday, Mr. Kibigo slowly picked through the embers, looking for whatever was left — a dented trunk here, a bicycle burned beyond recognition there, a pair of Nike children’s shoes 6 inches long.
“The violence will end,” said Mr. Kibigo, a brick mason, “when the politicians want to end it.”
But on Wednesday, the politicians seemed as far apart as ever. Western diplomats, who have been putting enormous pressure on Kenya’s government and opposition leaders to negotiate and bring an end to the bloodletting that has killed more than 300 people in the past three days, said the two sides remained locked in a standoff.
“The government is not backing down, and neither is the opposition,” said one Western diplomat on Wednesday, speaking anonymously because negotiations were still under way. “It doesn’t look good.”
Within the span of a week, one of the most developed, promising countries in Africa has turned into a starter kit for disaster. Tribal militias are roaming the countryside with rusty machetes, neighborhoods are pulling apart, and Kenya’s economy, one of the biggest on the continent, is unraveling — with fuel shortages rippling across East Africa because the roads in Kenya, a regional hub, are too dangerous to use. Roadblocks set up by armed men, something synonymous with anarchic Somalia, have cropped up across the country, in towns on the savannah and in the cramped slums.
Kenya’s president, Mwai Kibaki, who was declared the victor by a narrow margin on Sunday despite widespread evidence of ballot rigging, has rejected the opposition’s offers for outside mediation.
“Are we in a civil war? Is this Somalia? Is this Darfur?” said Alfred Mutua, Mr. Kibaki’s spokesman. “Our problem is with some hooligans. And we can take care of it.”
As for the opposition, its most recent proposal was a joint government for three months and then a new election, which the government roundly rejected.
Adding to the incendiary atmosphere, Raila Odinga, the opposition figure who said he was robbed of the presidency, has vowed to go ahead with a million-person rally in the capital, Nairobi, on Thursday. The government has said the rally is illegal, and busloads of police officers in helmets and padded suits have begun to muster downtown.
“We want to appeal directly to the people,” Mr. Odinga said on Wednesday. Many Kenyans are worried the rally will turn into an enormous brawl.
The Bush administration said that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was calling both sides to urge them to do everything they could to end the violence, and the United Nations issued a statement on Wednesday saying that Ban Ki-moon, the secretary general, was “concerned with the deteriorating humanitarian situation, as large numbers of people have been displaced by the violence.”
The Red Cross estimates that nearly 100,000 people have fled their homes. Some have even crossed into Uganda. Kenya historically has been a country that accepts refugees, not creates them.
The fighting is especially brutal in the Rift Valley, which is ethnically divided between tribes that support the president and tribes that back the opposition.
In Kiambaa, a village in the Rift Valley about a five-hour drive from Nairobi, the tensions boil down to Kalenjin, the biggest tribe in this area, and Luo, the tribe of Mr. Odinga, versus Kikuyu, Mr. Kibaki’s tribe.
It was Kikuyus who were burned to death on Tuesday in the Kenya Assemblies of God church. The church was simple, made of mud and sticks, and about the size of a tennis court.
Over the weekend, several hundred Kikuyus sought refuge here. The election was on Thursday, and serious trouble started on Saturday, when the first signs of ballot rigging emerged. Members of the Luo and other tribes across Kenya, who had been encouraged by many pre-election polls to believe that Mr. Odinga would win the presidency, began to riot and lash out at Kikuyus as the news spread that Kikuyu government officials had turned in dubious election results.
In Nairobi, the slums exploded, with crowds hurling rocks at police officers and burning down Kikuyu businesses. In the Rift Valley, where the tawny veldt meets lush green farms, and mountains loom on both sides, Kalenjins and Luos began hunting down the outnumbered Kikuyus.
Kenya is a mosaic of some 40 tribes, and for most of its history, they have intermarried and gotten along fine. That is one reason the country has enjoyed decades of stability, avoiding the turbulent fate of neighbors like Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan and Rwanda. But this election, the first competitive one between political heavyweights from different tribes, seems to have cracked open a new divide.
“As soon as we heard about the Kalenjins coming, we brought our people to the church,” said John Njorge, a Kikuyu. “A church is supposed to be safe.”
Most of those who packed inside were women and children. Because it was so crowded, they left their belongings outside. On Wednesday, the mattresses, belts, shoes, pots and pans were still there, strewn in the grass. Their owners were nowhere to be found.
The Kikuyu are Kenya’s biggest tribe at 22 percent of the population. They are concentrated in central Kenya, but because they were the tribe favored by the British during colonial times, they became the privileged class and branched out across the country, running shops, restaurants, banks and factories. In the Rift Valley, many Kikuyus have small businesses and farms.
James Kimemia sells watches. He says he has never swung a machete in his life. But on Sunday, he was recruited by fellow Kikuyus to guard the church. He was given a rusty blade and told to be ready. He is 20 years old and thin.
“But I was ready,” he said.
The men slept during the day in nearby farms and patrolled around the church at night. After the election results were announced on Sunday, they went on high alert. Mobs across Kenya began massacring Kikuyus after Mr. Kibaki was declared the winner, with a 2-percentage-point advantage. In Eldoret, a big town near here, four Kikuyus were beheaded.
On Tuesday morning, Mr. Kimemia, Mr. Kibigo and their fellow guards woke up to screaming. They could not tell if the sounds were war cries or panic. It seems now they were both.
They ran to the church and found it surrounded by a mob, of mostly Kalenjins and Luos, they said.
“We threw rocks at them,” Mr. Kimemia said.
But rocks were not enough. Several witnesses said the mob numbered around 800 people. They were pumped up young men, armed with machetes, slingshots, bows and arrows and thick, 18-inch sticks, sharpened at both ends. Some of the sticks were still stuck in the ground on Wednesday.
“You can use these as a club or a spear,” Mr. Kibigo explained, extracting one from the earth and examining its points.
The Kikuyu guards said they flung themselves at the attackers but were repulsed. Mr. Kibigo said his brother, George, was slashed in the neck and died. The mob closed in. The guards fled. They said they were powerless to stop what happened next.
Mr. Njorge, a bicycle taxi driver, said the mob threw mattresses in front of the church doors so no one could get out. Then the young men set them on fire. The mattresses were made from foam. The fire quickly grew.
As the mud walls began to crumble, Mr. Njorge said, he watched one woman with a baby strapped to her back try to squeeze out a window.
“Her head caught on fire,” he said. She lived, he said, but she dropped her baby behind her.
A disabled man named Mwangi, known in the village as a decent shoe cobbler and a great conversationalist, also tried to escape. He made it out of the window but could not run fast because of a lame leg.
“The mob got him right there,” Mr. Kibigo said, stabbing a finger toward a spot in the cornfield.
Policemen showed up a few hours later. In rural areas, there are few. They helped collect the bodies. The Red Cross said at least 18 people died, but several witnesses said the number was closer to 50.
On Wednesday a truckload of officers escorted some of the Kikuyu men back to the church to collect what was salvageable.
Mr. Kibigo said he still felt scared. “I am fed up with life,” he said.
Editorial
Ambition and Horror in Kenya
The murderous tribal violence that has spread through Kenya in recent days would be horrifying anywhere. It is particularly tragic to see this happening in a country that seemed finally to be on the path to a democratic and economically sound future. There may still be a chance to retrieve some of these hopes. That will likely require stepping back from the suspicious and hastily declared election results that sparked this ugly upheaval.
Officially, those results gave a second term to President Mwai Kibaki, despite independent reports of egregious irregularities. Even the chairman of Kenya’s national election commission now says that he was pressured into an early declaration and cannot say who won.
Mr. Kibaki should renounce that official declaration and the embarassingly swift swearing in that followed. He should then meet with his principal challenger, Raila Odinga, to discuss a possible vote recount, election re-run or other reasonable compromise.
That isn’t likely to happen without outside prodding. Urgent mediation by the leader of the African Union, John Kufuor, could help bring the two together before the violence gets worse. Already, more than 300 Kenyans are dead, 70,000 have been driven from their homes and thousands have fled to neighboring countries.
How different things seemed five years ago. Then Mr. Kibaki, allied with Mr. Odinga, was the democratic reformer challenging Kenya’s longtime autocratic leader Daniel arap Moi and his handpicked candidate. Mr. Moi’s reign was repressive and notoriously corrupt. International donors grew wary and despite having some of the best agricultural land, the most attractive tourist destinations and the best urban infrastructure in East Africa, Kenya’s economy stagnated.
Mr. Kibaki promised change and won in what was the freest election Kenya has ever known. Since then, he has delivered on many of his promises. Corruption is still a serious problem, but Kenya has enjoyed an expansion of free primary and secondary education, vibrant growth and important reforms of the judiciary, civil service and economy. Now, Mr. Kibaki’s apparent attempt to rig his own re-election has put these gains at grave risk.
Tribal resentments have long played a role in Kenyan politics. They flared anew after Mr. Kibaki and Mr. Odinga fell out over the spoils of the 2002 election. Mr. Kibaki comes from the long-dominant Kikuyu group, Kenya’s largest. Mr. Odinga comes from the Luo, a smaller but politically important tribe. Much of the violence of recent days has involved these two groups. In rural Eldoret, some 50 Kikuyu were burned to death inside a church where they had sought refuge. In the vast and tribally mixed urban slums of Nairobi, rival militias have been waging open warfare.
Mr. Kibaki and Mr. Odinga cannot ignore the chaos around them. No matter their personal ambitions and resentments, they must be brought together and pushed to come up with a solution that will calm their followers and restore Kenyans’ faith in their democratic system — before the damage becomes irreversible.
****
January 3, 2008
Kenya, Known for Its Stability, Topples Into Post-Election Chaos
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
KIAMBAA, Kenya — Daniel Kibigo said he was there, hiding in the burned cornfields nearby, as the mob gleefully stuffed mattresses in front of the church’s doors and set them on fire.
He watched women try to claw their way out of the church windows as if they were drowning as the building burned all the way down, with up to 50 people inside.
“We couldn’t do anything; there were too many,” he said of the crowd that descended on the church in the paroxysm of ethnic violence that has gripped Kenya since its deeply flawed elections last week.
On Wednesday, Mr. Kibigo slowly picked through the embers, looking for whatever was left — a dented trunk here, a bicycle burned beyond recognition there, a pair of Nike children’s shoes 6 inches long.
“The violence will end,” said Mr. Kibigo, a brick mason, “when the politicians want to end it.”
But on Wednesday, the politicians seemed as far apart as ever. Western diplomats, who have been putting enormous pressure on Kenya’s government and opposition leaders to negotiate and bring an end to the bloodletting that has killed more than 300 people in the past three days, said the two sides remained locked in a standoff.
“The government is not backing down, and neither is the opposition,” said one Western diplomat on Wednesday, speaking anonymously because negotiations were still under way. “It doesn’t look good.”
Within the span of a week, one of the most developed, promising countries in Africa has turned into a starter kit for disaster. Tribal militias are roaming the countryside with rusty machetes, neighborhoods are pulling apart, and Kenya’s economy, one of the biggest on the continent, is unraveling — with fuel shortages rippling across East Africa because the roads in Kenya, a regional hub, are too dangerous to use. Roadblocks set up by armed men, something synonymous with anarchic Somalia, have cropped up across the country, in towns on the savannah and in the cramped slums.
Kenya’s president, Mwai Kibaki, who was declared the victor by a narrow margin on Sunday despite widespread evidence of ballot rigging, has rejected the opposition’s offers for outside mediation.
“Are we in a civil war? Is this Somalia? Is this Darfur?” said Alfred Mutua, Mr. Kibaki’s spokesman. “Our problem is with some hooligans. And we can take care of it.”
As for the opposition, its most recent proposal was a joint government for three months and then a new election, which the government roundly rejected.
Adding to the incendiary atmosphere, Raila Odinga, the opposition figure who said he was robbed of the presidency, has vowed to go ahead with a million-person rally in the capital, Nairobi, on Thursday. The government has said the rally is illegal, and busloads of police officers in helmets and padded suits have begun to muster downtown.
“We want to appeal directly to the people,” Mr. Odinga said on Wednesday. Many Kenyans are worried the rally will turn into an enormous brawl.
The Bush administration said that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was calling both sides to urge them to do everything they could to end the violence, and the United Nations issued a statement on Wednesday saying that Ban Ki-moon, the secretary general, was “concerned with the deteriorating humanitarian situation, as large numbers of people have been displaced by the violence.”
The Red Cross estimates that nearly 100,000 people have fled their homes. Some have even crossed into Uganda. Kenya historically has been a country that accepts refugees, not creates them.
The fighting is especially brutal in the Rift Valley, which is ethnically divided between tribes that support the president and tribes that back the opposition.
In Kiambaa, a village in the Rift Valley about a five-hour drive from Nairobi, the tensions boil down to Kalenjin, the biggest tribe in this area, and Luo, the tribe of Mr. Odinga, versus Kikuyu, Mr. Kibaki’s tribe.
It was Kikuyus who were burned to death on Tuesday in the Kenya Assemblies of God church. The church was simple, made of mud and sticks, and about the size of a tennis court.
Over the weekend, several hundred Kikuyus sought refuge here. The election was on Thursday, and serious trouble started on Saturday, when the first signs of ballot rigging emerged. Members of the Luo and other tribes across Kenya, who had been encouraged by many pre-election polls to believe that Mr. Odinga would win the presidency, began to riot and lash out at Kikuyus as the news spread that Kikuyu government officials had turned in dubious election results.
In Nairobi, the slums exploded, with crowds hurling rocks at police officers and burning down Kikuyu businesses. In the Rift Valley, where the tawny veldt meets lush green farms, and mountains loom on both sides, Kalenjins and Luos began hunting down the outnumbered Kikuyus.
Kenya is a mosaic of some 40 tribes, and for most of its history, they have intermarried and gotten along fine. That is one reason the country has enjoyed decades of stability, avoiding the turbulent fate of neighbors like Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan and Rwanda. But this election, the first competitive one between political heavyweights from different tribes, seems to have cracked open a new divide.
“As soon as we heard about the Kalenjins coming, we brought our people to the church,” said John Njorge, a Kikuyu. “A church is supposed to be safe.”
Most of those who packed inside were women and children. Because it was so crowded, they left their belongings outside. On Wednesday, the mattresses, belts, shoes, pots and pans were still there, strewn in the grass. Their owners were nowhere to be found.
The Kikuyu are Kenya’s biggest tribe at 22 percent of the population. They are concentrated in central Kenya, but because they were the tribe favored by the British during colonial times, they became the privileged class and branched out across the country, running shops, restaurants, banks and factories. In the Rift Valley, many Kikuyus have small businesses and farms.
James Kimemia sells watches. He says he has never swung a machete in his life. But on Sunday, he was recruited by fellow Kikuyus to guard the church. He was given a rusty blade and told to be ready. He is 20 years old and thin.
“But I was ready,” he said.
The men slept during the day in nearby farms and patrolled around the church at night. After the election results were announced on Sunday, they went on high alert. Mobs across Kenya began massacring Kikuyus after Mr. Kibaki was declared the winner, with a 2-percentage-point advantage. In Eldoret, a big town near here, four Kikuyus were beheaded.
On Tuesday morning, Mr. Kimemia, Mr. Kibigo and their fellow guards woke up to screaming. They could not tell if the sounds were war cries or panic. It seems now they were both.
They ran to the church and found it surrounded by a mob, of mostly Kalenjins and Luos, they said.
“We threw rocks at them,” Mr. Kimemia said.
But rocks were not enough. Several witnesses said the mob numbered around 800 people. They were pumped up young men, armed with machetes, slingshots, bows and arrows and thick, 18-inch sticks, sharpened at both ends. Some of the sticks were still stuck in the ground on Wednesday.
“You can use these as a club or a spear,” Mr. Kibigo explained, extracting one from the earth and examining its points.
The Kikuyu guards said they flung themselves at the attackers but were repulsed. Mr. Kibigo said his brother, George, was slashed in the neck and died. The mob closed in. The guards fled. They said they were powerless to stop what happened next.
Mr. Njorge, a bicycle taxi driver, said the mob threw mattresses in front of the church doors so no one could get out. Then the young men set them on fire. The mattresses were made from foam. The fire quickly grew.
As the mud walls began to crumble, Mr. Njorge said, he watched one woman with a baby strapped to her back try to squeeze out a window.
“Her head caught on fire,” he said. She lived, he said, but she dropped her baby behind her.
A disabled man named Mwangi, known in the village as a decent shoe cobbler and a great conversationalist, also tried to escape. He made it out of the window but could not run fast because of a lame leg.
“The mob got him right there,” Mr. Kibigo said, stabbing a finger toward a spot in the cornfield.
Policemen showed up a few hours later. In rural areas, there are few. They helped collect the bodies. The Red Cross said at least 18 people died, but several witnesses said the number was closer to 50.
On Wednesday a truckload of officers escorted some of the Kikuyu men back to the church to collect what was salvageable.
Mr. Kibigo said he still felt scared. “I am fed up with life,” he said.
There is a related multimedia linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/04/world ... ?ref=world
January 4, 2008
Kenyan Riot Police Turn Back Rallying Protesters
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
NAIROBI, Kenya — Nairobi degenerated into violence again on Thursday, as riot police officers used tear gas, batons and water cannons to push back thousands of opposition supporters who poured into the streets to answer a call for a million-person rally that had been banned by the government.
But later in the day, Kenya’s attorney general broke ranks with the president and insisted on an independent investigation into disputed election results. It was the first clear indication of the growing divide not just on the streets but also within Kenya’s government about how to resolve a crisis that has ignited chaos and ethnic fighting across the country, killing more than 300 people in the past four days.
Starting about 10 a.m., protesters burned tires, smashed windows and clashed with the police across this capital.
Some demonstrators showed restraint, yelling to the rowdier members in their ranks, “Drop your stones!” Others tore through the slums, witnesses said, raping women and attacking people with machetes. The body of one young man who had been hacked to death lay in a muddy alley. His face was covered with plastic bags and his shoes had been stolen.
The trouble even spilled into the garden of the Serena Hotel, one of the fanciest in town. Guests in safari vests watched the turmoil from the balconies of their $400-a-night rooms. Police officers in padded suits charged a scrum of demonstrators and fired tear gas. As soon as the acrid smoke wafted up, the tourists ducked inside.
“This country is going to burn!” a protester yelled.
It has been a week since Kenyans went to the polls in the most highly contested elections in the country’s history, and the dispute over whether Mwai Kibaki, the president, honestly won the most votes continues to destabilize the nation.
The government and opposition leaders blame each other for the bloodshed, trading accusations of genocide and ethnic cleansing. They have set such strict conditions on negotiating that nothing — including the entreaties of Western ambassadors, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the cries of their own people — has succeeded in getting talks started.
Kenya’s two biggest newspapers printed the identical banner headline on Thursday: “Save Our Beloved Country.”
Kenya’s attorney general, Amos Wako, said on Thursday afternoon that an independent body should investigate the disputed vote tabulations, which gave the president, at the 11th hour of the counting process, a razor-thin margin of victory. Western officials and opposition leaders have been calling for such an inquiry.
However, it is not clear if Mr. Kibaki will agree to this. A few hours after the attorney general spoke, the president reiterated at a news conference that he had won the elections fair and square and would not relinquish power.
“I will personally lead this nation in healing,” he said.
Alfred Mutua, the government’s top spokesman, said that Mr. Wako was merely making a suggestion and that an independent investigation into election irregularities “was not necessarily going to happen.”
“The president prefers the court system,” Mr. Mutua said, meaning the opposition could file a complaint in court, which most people here think is futile. But, he added, “the president has nothing to hide.”
Foreign diplomats have been meeting day and night to find a way to ease tension between Mr. Kibaki and Raila Odinga, the top opposition leader, who says he was cheated out of the presidency.
Until last week, Kenya was one of the most promising countries on the continent, but the ethnic violence, fueled by political passions, is threatening to ruin that reputation. The economy, one of the biggest in Africa, has ground to a halt. Roads are blocked. Shops are closed. Factories are idle. The currency, the Kenyan shilling, is taking a dive.
The World Bank said on Thursday that the unrest threatened Kenya’s impressive recent economic growth and poverty reduction, citing business leaders’ estimates that the country was losing some $30 million a day.
And the ills here are hurting the entire region. Gas stations in Rwanda are now rationing fuel because their supply from Kenya has been cut. In Uganda, Sudan and Congo, displaced people are running low on food because United Nations relief trucks cannot get past vigilante checkpoints. Production in places like Tanzania is slowing because materials that come from Kenya have not arrived.
“Kenya is the dynamo of this whole region,” said Harvey Rouse, a diplomat for the European Union.
Mr. Rouse spoke from a hill overlooking an enormous slum where the police were battling protesters.
The slum, named Kibera, has become the protesters’ stage. Every morning, journalists take their spots on the hillside, police officers line up at the mouth of a road leading from the shanties to the glass towers downtown and protesters mass in the streets, screaming slogans, lighting fires and burning pictures of the president. On Thursday it was an effigy stuffed with greasy rags.
Thursday was supposed to be the day that Mr. Odinga’s supporters rallied in downtown Nairobi at a place called Uhuru Park. But they never got close.
The government has banned all political rallies, and thousands of riot police officers fanned out at dawn to seal off the main routes into the city. They refused to let any demonstrators pass.
Many of the protesters seemed harmless, like the hundreds of women carrying palm leaves and walking barefoot to town. They were chased away, choking on tear gas and clawing at their eyes.
Others’ intentions were not so clear. One young protester crouched in the street with a green leaf, the sign of peace, in one hand and a rock in the other.
“We have been patient long enough!” he yelled.
It is difficult to tell which way things are going here. In the past two days, there have been no big attacks, like the one on Tuesday in which up to 50 people hiding in a church were burned alive in a village in the west. But reports from the provinces indicate the killings are still going on.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/04/world ... ?ref=world
January 4, 2008
Kenyan Riot Police Turn Back Rallying Protesters
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
NAIROBI, Kenya — Nairobi degenerated into violence again on Thursday, as riot police officers used tear gas, batons and water cannons to push back thousands of opposition supporters who poured into the streets to answer a call for a million-person rally that had been banned by the government.
But later in the day, Kenya’s attorney general broke ranks with the president and insisted on an independent investigation into disputed election results. It was the first clear indication of the growing divide not just on the streets but also within Kenya’s government about how to resolve a crisis that has ignited chaos and ethnic fighting across the country, killing more than 300 people in the past four days.
Starting about 10 a.m., protesters burned tires, smashed windows and clashed with the police across this capital.
Some demonstrators showed restraint, yelling to the rowdier members in their ranks, “Drop your stones!” Others tore through the slums, witnesses said, raping women and attacking people with machetes. The body of one young man who had been hacked to death lay in a muddy alley. His face was covered with plastic bags and his shoes had been stolen.
The trouble even spilled into the garden of the Serena Hotel, one of the fanciest in town. Guests in safari vests watched the turmoil from the balconies of their $400-a-night rooms. Police officers in padded suits charged a scrum of demonstrators and fired tear gas. As soon as the acrid smoke wafted up, the tourists ducked inside.
“This country is going to burn!” a protester yelled.
It has been a week since Kenyans went to the polls in the most highly contested elections in the country’s history, and the dispute over whether Mwai Kibaki, the president, honestly won the most votes continues to destabilize the nation.
The government and opposition leaders blame each other for the bloodshed, trading accusations of genocide and ethnic cleansing. They have set such strict conditions on negotiating that nothing — including the entreaties of Western ambassadors, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the cries of their own people — has succeeded in getting talks started.
Kenya’s two biggest newspapers printed the identical banner headline on Thursday: “Save Our Beloved Country.”
Kenya’s attorney general, Amos Wako, said on Thursday afternoon that an independent body should investigate the disputed vote tabulations, which gave the president, at the 11th hour of the counting process, a razor-thin margin of victory. Western officials and opposition leaders have been calling for such an inquiry.
However, it is not clear if Mr. Kibaki will agree to this. A few hours after the attorney general spoke, the president reiterated at a news conference that he had won the elections fair and square and would not relinquish power.
“I will personally lead this nation in healing,” he said.
Alfred Mutua, the government’s top spokesman, said that Mr. Wako was merely making a suggestion and that an independent investigation into election irregularities “was not necessarily going to happen.”
“The president prefers the court system,” Mr. Mutua said, meaning the opposition could file a complaint in court, which most people here think is futile. But, he added, “the president has nothing to hide.”
Foreign diplomats have been meeting day and night to find a way to ease tension between Mr. Kibaki and Raila Odinga, the top opposition leader, who says he was cheated out of the presidency.
Until last week, Kenya was one of the most promising countries on the continent, but the ethnic violence, fueled by political passions, is threatening to ruin that reputation. The economy, one of the biggest in Africa, has ground to a halt. Roads are blocked. Shops are closed. Factories are idle. The currency, the Kenyan shilling, is taking a dive.
The World Bank said on Thursday that the unrest threatened Kenya’s impressive recent economic growth and poverty reduction, citing business leaders’ estimates that the country was losing some $30 million a day.
And the ills here are hurting the entire region. Gas stations in Rwanda are now rationing fuel because their supply from Kenya has been cut. In Uganda, Sudan and Congo, displaced people are running low on food because United Nations relief trucks cannot get past vigilante checkpoints. Production in places like Tanzania is slowing because materials that come from Kenya have not arrived.
“Kenya is the dynamo of this whole region,” said Harvey Rouse, a diplomat for the European Union.
Mr. Rouse spoke from a hill overlooking an enormous slum where the police were battling protesters.
The slum, named Kibera, has become the protesters’ stage. Every morning, journalists take their spots on the hillside, police officers line up at the mouth of a road leading from the shanties to the glass towers downtown and protesters mass in the streets, screaming slogans, lighting fires and burning pictures of the president. On Thursday it was an effigy stuffed with greasy rags.
Thursday was supposed to be the day that Mr. Odinga’s supporters rallied in downtown Nairobi at a place called Uhuru Park. But they never got close.
The government has banned all political rallies, and thousands of riot police officers fanned out at dawn to seal off the main routes into the city. They refused to let any demonstrators pass.
Many of the protesters seemed harmless, like the hundreds of women carrying palm leaves and walking barefoot to town. They were chased away, choking on tear gas and clawing at their eyes.
Others’ intentions were not so clear. One young protester crouched in the street with a green leaf, the sign of peace, in one hand and a rock in the other.
“We have been patient long enough!” he yelled.
It is difficult to tell which way things are going here. In the past two days, there have been no big attacks, like the one on Tuesday in which up to 50 people hiding in a church were burned alive in a village in the west. But reports from the provinces indicate the killings are still going on.
January 5, 2008
Opposition Seeks New Vote as Violence Ebbs in Kenya
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
NAIROBI, Kenya — If the price of cabbage is any indicator, things here in Kenya’s capital may be edging back to normal.
Before last week’s election, a head of cabbage in Mathare, an enormous slum, cost 15 shillings, or about 20 cents. After the much-debated results were announced on Sunday and the country exploded into chaos, cabbage prices doubled. By Thursday, as the police tear-gassed protesters in the streets and gangs from opposing tribes hacked one another to death — some of it right here in the sour-smelling, garbage-strewn footpaths of Mathare — cabbage prices shot up to 100 shillings.
But on Friday, many shops opened up for the first time since election day and the price of cabbage dropped to 50 shillings. Not normal, for sure, but better than it was, which seems to be the story in many parts of the country.
“A few days ago things were very, very bad,” said Dominick Mutuku, who runs a small restaurant in Mathare and was hit in the head with a rock over the weekend. “But now it’s over.”
Kenya’s crisis is probably not over, though many Kenyans clearly wish it was, but for the first time in a week tensions have cooled somewhat. The overnight death toll on Friday, according to local news reports, was fewer than 10, compared with the more than 300 people killed in a few shocking days of violence earlier this week.
Politically, some space seems to be opening up as well. Mwai Kibaki, the president who narrowly won re-election, and Raila Odinga, the opposition leader who contends that the government rigged the results, have yet to meet or even agree on how to do so. They are still negotiating about negotiating.
But the government on Friday said that it would hold a new election — as opposition leaders are demanding — if a court so ordered. And Mr. Odinga has dropped his insistence that before any talks take place, the government admit to rigging. Just a few days ago, Mr. Odinga accused the president of pulling off a “civilian coup.” Now Mr. Odinga says he will consider some type of power-sharing arrangement with Mr. Kibaki.
“We want a revote, but we are not being so rigid as saying that is the only option,” said Salim Lone, a spokesman for Mr. Odinga.
Alfred Mutua, the government’s top spokesman, said Friday, “We are willing to talk with anybody.”
But Mr. Mutua reiterated the government’s stance against having those talks mediated by outsiders. Opposition leaders are confident that foreign mediators will side with them. Already, the European Union, the United States, Japan and just about every major donor to Kenya have said that the presidential election results were deeply flawed. That may be why the Kenyan government has refused to sit down with a foreign mediator and why Kenyan officials put the brakes on a visit from the president of Ghana, who was planning to fly in earlier this week.
“This is a Kenya problem, and we can solve it ourselves,” Mr. Mutua said.
That said, the government has been willing to entertain some high-profile foreign visitors eager to get Kenya back to its old self as one of Africa’s most stable countries and a regional economic powerhouse. Mr. Kibaki met with the retired South African archbishop Desmond Tutu on Friday to discuss options for reconciliation. And Jendayi Frazer, the American assistant secretary of state for African affairs and the highest ranking Western official to come to Kenya since the unrest began, was scheduled to land in Nairobi on Friday night and meet with Mr. Odinga and Mr. Kibaki over the weekend.
Obviously, there are still political differences. Mr. Odinga and Mr. Kibaki both insist that they won the election. The opposition controls the most seats in Parliament, and more than half of Mr. Kibaki’s cabinet was voted out of office. Accommodation will have to be made if the government is going to accomplish anything in the next five years, the length of the presidential term.
Of more concern, though, are the tribal issues. This election stirred up strong undercurrents of ethnic-based hatred that will not recede any time soon. Mr. Kibaki is a Kikuyu, known as Kenya’s privileged tribe, and Mr. Odinga is a Luo, a tribe that has long felt marginalized. The voting followed mostly tribal lines. After Mr. Kibaki was declared the winner, despite disputed vote tabulations that gave the president a razor-thin margin of victory at the 11th hour of the counting process, Luos and members of other tribes lashed out at Kikuyus. Mobs swept through towns across the country, looting Kikuyu stores, attacking Kikuyus and in one case burning to death up to 50 Kikuyu women and children who were taking refuge in a church.
Thousands of Kikuyus have evacuated ethnically mixed areas and are streaming back to central Kenya, their homeland and a Kibaki stronghold. Aid officials said more than 100,000 people had been displaced. Many are still scared.
“Kenya has changed,” said Francis Mwaniki, a Kikuyu who said gangs destroyed his home. He has no plans to go back.
But in Kisii, a town in western Kenya that had been the scene of brutal clashes among tribes, people returned to work. For the first time in a week, farmers were loading bananas and lettuce into trucks bound for Nairobi. In Mombasa, Kenya’s biggest port, several hundred people demonstrated outside a mosque and the police fired tear gas at them. But fuel and freight were beginning to flow again, which is crucial for the rest of East Africa.
In the Eldoret area, where the church was burned, the town was still tense, residents said, but no episodes of violence were reported.
Mathare, the giant slum, seemed to represent the national mood. Things were hardly cheery here. Two bodies were found by the river on Friday morning, and dozens of families were still camped out by an air force base seeking protection.
But the stores were open and the streets full, and Chuck Norris movies were playing again on Biashara Street.
“We want to go back to normal,” said Anthony Irungu, a shopkeeper, as he put a fresh coat of green paint on his stall. “We are trying.”
Opposition Seeks New Vote as Violence Ebbs in Kenya
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
NAIROBI, Kenya — If the price of cabbage is any indicator, things here in Kenya’s capital may be edging back to normal.
Before last week’s election, a head of cabbage in Mathare, an enormous slum, cost 15 shillings, or about 20 cents. After the much-debated results were announced on Sunday and the country exploded into chaos, cabbage prices doubled. By Thursday, as the police tear-gassed protesters in the streets and gangs from opposing tribes hacked one another to death — some of it right here in the sour-smelling, garbage-strewn footpaths of Mathare — cabbage prices shot up to 100 shillings.
But on Friday, many shops opened up for the first time since election day and the price of cabbage dropped to 50 shillings. Not normal, for sure, but better than it was, which seems to be the story in many parts of the country.
“A few days ago things were very, very bad,” said Dominick Mutuku, who runs a small restaurant in Mathare and was hit in the head with a rock over the weekend. “But now it’s over.”
Kenya’s crisis is probably not over, though many Kenyans clearly wish it was, but for the first time in a week tensions have cooled somewhat. The overnight death toll on Friday, according to local news reports, was fewer than 10, compared with the more than 300 people killed in a few shocking days of violence earlier this week.
Politically, some space seems to be opening up as well. Mwai Kibaki, the president who narrowly won re-election, and Raila Odinga, the opposition leader who contends that the government rigged the results, have yet to meet or even agree on how to do so. They are still negotiating about negotiating.
But the government on Friday said that it would hold a new election — as opposition leaders are demanding — if a court so ordered. And Mr. Odinga has dropped his insistence that before any talks take place, the government admit to rigging. Just a few days ago, Mr. Odinga accused the president of pulling off a “civilian coup.” Now Mr. Odinga says he will consider some type of power-sharing arrangement with Mr. Kibaki.
“We want a revote, but we are not being so rigid as saying that is the only option,” said Salim Lone, a spokesman for Mr. Odinga.
Alfred Mutua, the government’s top spokesman, said Friday, “We are willing to talk with anybody.”
But Mr. Mutua reiterated the government’s stance against having those talks mediated by outsiders. Opposition leaders are confident that foreign mediators will side with them. Already, the European Union, the United States, Japan and just about every major donor to Kenya have said that the presidential election results were deeply flawed. That may be why the Kenyan government has refused to sit down with a foreign mediator and why Kenyan officials put the brakes on a visit from the president of Ghana, who was planning to fly in earlier this week.
“This is a Kenya problem, and we can solve it ourselves,” Mr. Mutua said.
That said, the government has been willing to entertain some high-profile foreign visitors eager to get Kenya back to its old self as one of Africa’s most stable countries and a regional economic powerhouse. Mr. Kibaki met with the retired South African archbishop Desmond Tutu on Friday to discuss options for reconciliation. And Jendayi Frazer, the American assistant secretary of state for African affairs and the highest ranking Western official to come to Kenya since the unrest began, was scheduled to land in Nairobi on Friday night and meet with Mr. Odinga and Mr. Kibaki over the weekend.
Obviously, there are still political differences. Mr. Odinga and Mr. Kibaki both insist that they won the election. The opposition controls the most seats in Parliament, and more than half of Mr. Kibaki’s cabinet was voted out of office. Accommodation will have to be made if the government is going to accomplish anything in the next five years, the length of the presidential term.
Of more concern, though, are the tribal issues. This election stirred up strong undercurrents of ethnic-based hatred that will not recede any time soon. Mr. Kibaki is a Kikuyu, known as Kenya’s privileged tribe, and Mr. Odinga is a Luo, a tribe that has long felt marginalized. The voting followed mostly tribal lines. After Mr. Kibaki was declared the winner, despite disputed vote tabulations that gave the president a razor-thin margin of victory at the 11th hour of the counting process, Luos and members of other tribes lashed out at Kikuyus. Mobs swept through towns across the country, looting Kikuyu stores, attacking Kikuyus and in one case burning to death up to 50 Kikuyu women and children who were taking refuge in a church.
Thousands of Kikuyus have evacuated ethnically mixed areas and are streaming back to central Kenya, their homeland and a Kibaki stronghold. Aid officials said more than 100,000 people had been displaced. Many are still scared.
“Kenya has changed,” said Francis Mwaniki, a Kikuyu who said gangs destroyed his home. He has no plans to go back.
But in Kisii, a town in western Kenya that had been the scene of brutal clashes among tribes, people returned to work. For the first time in a week, farmers were loading bananas and lettuce into trucks bound for Nairobi. In Mombasa, Kenya’s biggest port, several hundred people demonstrated outside a mosque and the police fired tear gas at them. But fuel and freight were beginning to flow again, which is crucial for the rest of East Africa.
In the Eldoret area, where the church was burned, the town was still tense, residents said, but no episodes of violence were reported.
Mathare, the giant slum, seemed to represent the national mood. Things were hardly cheery here. Two bodies were found by the river on Friday morning, and dozens of families were still camped out by an air force base seeking protection.
But the stores were open and the streets full, and Chuck Norris movies were playing again on Biashara Street.
“We want to go back to normal,” said Anthony Irungu, a shopkeeper, as he put a fresh coat of green paint on his stall. “We are trying.”
There is a related moving multimedia linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/world ... ?th&emc=th
January 6, 2008
Kenyan City Is Gripped by Violence
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
KISUMU, Kenya — Oginga Odinga Street, the main thoroughfare in town, is a testament to rage.
Dozens of stores have been looted, torched and smashed by rioters and then picked clean by an army of glue-sniffing street children searching for whatever was left. The scorched Ukwala supermarket looks as if a bomb blew up inside it. The gates of Zamana Electronic are mangled.
People here say this is just the beginning.
“We will never surrender!” yelled a man who attended a rally for opposition leaders on Saturday.
“We want guns, guns!” another man added.
While much of Kenya is trying to get back to normal after a week of post-election violence that has claimed more than 300 lives nationwide, Kisumu, Kenya’s third-largest city, is still quivering with anger. Few places have been so thoroughly gutted by the turbulence as here.
With Kenya’s leaders still at an impasse despite the efforts of Jendayi E. Frazer, the American assistant secretary of state for Africa who met with both sides on Saturday, it looks as if the tensions will linger dangerously for some time.
Kisumu is the stronghold of Raila Odinga, the opposition leader who said he had been cheated out of the presidency, and the town’s main street is named after his father, a local hero.
The people here followed the election so closely that they remember the precise hour last weekend, on Saturday, when the vote count suddenly changed, and Mwai Kibaki, Kenya’s president, went from trailing badly to winning with a suspiciously thin margin of victory.
The town exploded, and a furious mob stormed up Oginga Odinga street. The biggest businesses are now in ashes. Fuel, food and cellphone credit are in short supply. And around 2,000 people from Mr. Kibaki’s tribe, the Kikuyu, are camped out at the police station, trying to escape a wave of revenge killings.
“If I stay here, I’ll be lynched,” said Waweru Mburu, a Kikuyu, as he nervously waited outside a supermarket, one of the two open in this town of half a million people. His wife had been waiting for hours, trying to buy milk.
Trucks carrying Kikuyu and evacuees from another tribe, the Kisii, many of whom supported Mr. Kibaki, are jeered at as they pull out of town. Those doing the jeering are mostly Luo, like Mr. Odinga, who live here in great numbers.
“Traitors!” some Luo shouted on Saturday as a truck passed.
People on both sides said the tensions would not ease as long as Kenya’s political leaders refused to even speak to each other, which has been the situation since the election on Dec. 27.
On Saturday, Mr. Kibaki indicated that he was ready to form “a government of national unity.” Mr. Odinga did not reject that outright but said he would not entertain any offers until the two sides sat down in the presence of foreign mediators.
The government initially rebuffed outside help, but seems to have relented slightly and sent a diplomat to Ghana to discuss a role for the African Union, according to Reuters.
Ms. Frazer met separately with Mr. Kibaki and Mr. Odinga and urged them to work together to solve the crisis, which has dented Kenya’s image as one of the most stable countries in Africa and could cause permanent economic damage if peace is not restored soon.
It seems that momentum is growing toward negotiations. “There is slow progress being made,” said Salim Lone, a spokesman for Mr. Odinga.
Kenyans are waiting. Some areas, like the capital, have quieted down considerably. In the Rift Valley, the area most torn by violence, fewer killings have been reported in the past few days, but tens of thousands of people are displaced and in need of food.
In Kisumu, the killings have stopped, for the most part. But the banks are running out of money, few stores are open and the looting continues.
There is some opportunism to all this. The rage that swept through town was selective, striking at electronics shops, cellphone kiosks and shoe stores but leaving the drapery dealer alone.
On Saturday, Monica Awino tiptoed through the shattered interior of a Bata footwear store. Glass was everywhere. She used to work here and now is out of a job at the best time of year. No after-Christmas or back-to-school sales for her.
“I’m angry at everybody,” she said.
Up the street, Bernard Ndede, a high school English teacher, watched street children carefully sift through inches of rubble on the floor of a charred supermarket, as if they were urban archaeologists.
He said he did not approve of the looting, but he understood the anger.
“People woke up so early that day to vote for change,” he said, referring to election day and the millions of people who voted for Mr. Odinga. “They felt robbed.”
For some, the disappointment was lethal. On Saturday, Albert Ojonyo, an insurance agent, went to the city morgue to pick up the body of his brother, Daniel. More than 40 people were killed here in election-related violence. Many bodies have not been identified and wait in a sweltering room under strips of red cloth with their feet poking out.
Mr. Ojonyo said his brother, who was 27, had been shot in the head, most likely by police officers trying to quell the rioters.
“Daniel felt very strongly about these elections,” he said. “Afterward, he was a very bitter boy.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/world ... ?th&emc=th
January 6, 2008
Kenyan City Is Gripped by Violence
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
KISUMU, Kenya — Oginga Odinga Street, the main thoroughfare in town, is a testament to rage.
Dozens of stores have been looted, torched and smashed by rioters and then picked clean by an army of glue-sniffing street children searching for whatever was left. The scorched Ukwala supermarket looks as if a bomb blew up inside it. The gates of Zamana Electronic are mangled.
People here say this is just the beginning.
“We will never surrender!” yelled a man who attended a rally for opposition leaders on Saturday.
“We want guns, guns!” another man added.
While much of Kenya is trying to get back to normal after a week of post-election violence that has claimed more than 300 lives nationwide, Kisumu, Kenya’s third-largest city, is still quivering with anger. Few places have been so thoroughly gutted by the turbulence as here.
With Kenya’s leaders still at an impasse despite the efforts of Jendayi E. Frazer, the American assistant secretary of state for Africa who met with both sides on Saturday, it looks as if the tensions will linger dangerously for some time.
Kisumu is the stronghold of Raila Odinga, the opposition leader who said he had been cheated out of the presidency, and the town’s main street is named after his father, a local hero.
The people here followed the election so closely that they remember the precise hour last weekend, on Saturday, when the vote count suddenly changed, and Mwai Kibaki, Kenya’s president, went from trailing badly to winning with a suspiciously thin margin of victory.
The town exploded, and a furious mob stormed up Oginga Odinga street. The biggest businesses are now in ashes. Fuel, food and cellphone credit are in short supply. And around 2,000 people from Mr. Kibaki’s tribe, the Kikuyu, are camped out at the police station, trying to escape a wave of revenge killings.
“If I stay here, I’ll be lynched,” said Waweru Mburu, a Kikuyu, as he nervously waited outside a supermarket, one of the two open in this town of half a million people. His wife had been waiting for hours, trying to buy milk.
Trucks carrying Kikuyu and evacuees from another tribe, the Kisii, many of whom supported Mr. Kibaki, are jeered at as they pull out of town. Those doing the jeering are mostly Luo, like Mr. Odinga, who live here in great numbers.
“Traitors!” some Luo shouted on Saturday as a truck passed.
People on both sides said the tensions would not ease as long as Kenya’s political leaders refused to even speak to each other, which has been the situation since the election on Dec. 27.
On Saturday, Mr. Kibaki indicated that he was ready to form “a government of national unity.” Mr. Odinga did not reject that outright but said he would not entertain any offers until the two sides sat down in the presence of foreign mediators.
The government initially rebuffed outside help, but seems to have relented slightly and sent a diplomat to Ghana to discuss a role for the African Union, according to Reuters.
Ms. Frazer met separately with Mr. Kibaki and Mr. Odinga and urged them to work together to solve the crisis, which has dented Kenya’s image as one of the most stable countries in Africa and could cause permanent economic damage if peace is not restored soon.
It seems that momentum is growing toward negotiations. “There is slow progress being made,” said Salim Lone, a spokesman for Mr. Odinga.
Kenyans are waiting. Some areas, like the capital, have quieted down considerably. In the Rift Valley, the area most torn by violence, fewer killings have been reported in the past few days, but tens of thousands of people are displaced and in need of food.
In Kisumu, the killings have stopped, for the most part. But the banks are running out of money, few stores are open and the looting continues.
There is some opportunism to all this. The rage that swept through town was selective, striking at electronics shops, cellphone kiosks and shoe stores but leaving the drapery dealer alone.
On Saturday, Monica Awino tiptoed through the shattered interior of a Bata footwear store. Glass was everywhere. She used to work here and now is out of a job at the best time of year. No after-Christmas or back-to-school sales for her.
“I’m angry at everybody,” she said.
Up the street, Bernard Ndede, a high school English teacher, watched street children carefully sift through inches of rubble on the floor of a charred supermarket, as if they were urban archaeologists.
He said he did not approve of the looting, but he understood the anger.
“People woke up so early that day to vote for change,” he said, referring to election day and the millions of people who voted for Mr. Odinga. “They felt robbed.”
For some, the disappointment was lethal. On Saturday, Albert Ojonyo, an insurance agent, went to the city morgue to pick up the body of his brother, Daniel. More than 40 people were killed here in election-related violence. Many bodies have not been identified and wait in a sweltering room under strips of red cloth with their feet poking out.
Mr. Ojonyo said his brother, who was 27, had been shot in the head, most likely by police officers trying to quell the rioters.
“Daniel felt very strongly about these elections,” he said. “Afterward, he was a very bitter boy.”
January 7, 2008
Kenya Kikuyus, Long Dominant, Are Now Routed
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
NAKURU, Kenya — Kenya’s privileged tribe is on the run.
Over the past few days, tens of thousands of Kikuyus, the tribe of Kenya’s president, have packed into heavily guarded buses to flee the western part of the country because of ethnic violence. On Sunday, endless convoys of buses — some with their windshields smashed by rocks — crawled across a landscape of scorched homes and empty farms.
It is nothing short of a mass exodus. The tribe that has dominated business and politics in Kenya since independence in 1963 is now being chased off its land by machete-wielding mobs made up of members of other tribes furious about the Dec. 27 election, which Kenya’s president, Mwai Kibaki, won under dubious circumstances. In some places, Kikuyus have been hunted down with bows and arrows.
The hospital in Nakuru, a town in the Rift Valley, is full of Kikuyu men with deep ax wounds, fingers cut off and slash marks across their faces.
“It was the Kalenjin,” said Samuel Mburu, a Kikuyu farmer with rows of stitches in his head, when asked who had nearly killed him. The Kalenjin are one of the bigger tribes in the Rift Valley, and they have fought fiercely with the Kikuyus before, mostly over land.
Many Kalenjin are unapologetic. Robert Tutuny, a Kalenjin farmer, stood on a hillside on Sunday with an iron bar in his hands and looked down at the charred remains of a Kikuyu village that was razed a week ago.
“We hate these people,” Mr. Tutuny said.
The election — and the unresolved battle about who won — has ignited old tensions in Kenya, which in a week and a half has gone from being one of Africa’s most promising countries to another equatorial trouble zone.
The political impasse continued Sunday, with Jendayi E. Frazer, the American assistant secretary of state for African affairs, meeting again with opposition leaders and government officials, but no resolution was in sight.
The heavy fighting that claimed more than 300 lives last week has subsided and many people have gone back to work in the capital, Nairobi. There, people from different tribes live side by side and often work in the same office. They are aware of ethnic differences and sometimes joke about them, but it usually does not go further than that.
But out here — where little towns rise from the veld like mirages and where there is so much wide-open space it seems incongruous to fight over land — these differences matter. A tribal war is shaping up between the Kalenjin, who mostly support Kenya’s opposition leaders, and the Kikuyus, who voted heavily — up to 98 percent in some areas — for the president.
Tens of thousands of Kikuyus are camped out at police stations and churches for protection, waiting for buses guarded by military escorts to evacuate them to the central highlands, the traditional Kikuyu homeland. There, amid the lush tea fields and rolling green hills, they are safe because almost everyone who lives in the highlands is Kikuyu.
Ethnic conflict is now threatening the decades of stability that has set Kenya apart from so many of its neighbors, like Congo, Rwanda, Somalia and Sudan. But Kenya has struggled with ethnic violence before. Its rare bursts usually come around election time.
“You have to understand that these issues are much deeper than ethnic,” said Maina Kiai, chairman of the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights.
“They are political,” he said, and “they go back to land.”
The last time the Rift Valley was this violent was in 1992, another election year in Kenya and a time of turbulent transition between dictatorship and democracy. Kalenjin militias, stirred up by politicians who told them that the valley was Kalenjin ancestral land, massacred hundreds of Kikuyus in a bid to steal their farms.
Since then, Mr. Kiai said, “Emotions have been festering, resentments have been building and we sat around pretending ethnicity didn’t exist.”
Kenya has more than 40 tribes, but the Kikuyus have almost always been on top. They run shops, restaurants, banks and factories across the country. One reason Mr. Kibaki has engendered so much resentment from other tribes is because many of the top officials in his government — including the ministers of defense, justice, finance and internal security — are Kikuyus.
The Kikuyus are the biggest tribe in Kenya but far from a majority, at 22 percent of the population. The Kalenjins make up about 12 percent.
In the Rift Valley, the anti-Kikuyu grudge goes back to independence, when the British government bought out Britons who owned huge, picturesque farms. But instead of redistributing that land to the impoverished people who had lived here for centuries, like the Kalenjin and Masai, the newly formed Kenyan government, led by Jomo Kenyatta, a Kikuyu, gave much of it to Kikuyus from other areas.
Most of the Kikuyus here are hardly rich. The men lying on bloody sheets at the Nakuru hospital are emaciated farmers with threadbare clothes. The same goes for the Kikuyus who have been slaughtered by gangs of opposing tribes in Nairobi’s slums, causing an exodus from there, too. They lived in iron shanties just as their non-Kikuyu neighbors do.
But in many cases, the Kikuyus own kiosks or small patches of land or they are related to someone who does, and that makes them a little better off by local standards.
“Land is very important to us,” said Anthony Kirunga, a Kikuyu, who sells spare car parts in Nakuru. “It’s not our fault that other people are jealous.”
This election stirred up anti-Kikuyu jealousies like never before. Raila Odinga, the top opposition candidate and a member of the Luo tribe, built his campaign on a promise to end Kikuyu favoritism and share the fruits of Kenya’s growing economy with all tribes.
Early election results had him way ahead and his party winning the most seats in Parliament. But at the 11th hour of the vote-tallying process last Sunday, Mr. Kibaki surged. Election observers have said the president’s party rigged the results to stay in power.
Millions of opposition supporters across Kenya were outraged. Not only did their candidate lose, but it also seemed to them that their system, which until the election had been celebrated as one of the most vibrant democracies in Africa, had cheated them.
In western Kenya, where Kikuyus are vastly outnumbered, they became easy targets. In Kisumu, the third-largest city in the country, Luos went on a rampage, burning down Kikuyu shops and ransacking the downtown.
In the Rift Valley, Kalenjin gangs stormed Kikuyu farms. Police officers seemed reluctant to intervene. Dozens of Kikuyus were massacred, including up to 50 women and children hiding in a church who were burned alive. What has kept the death toll from rising even higher is the fact that few people here have guns; most of the clashes have been fought with clubs, knives and stones.
Jeremiah Mukuna, 75, a Kikuyu farmer, was attacked by a Kalenjin mob last Monday while he was sitting on the porch of his shack, his family said. His head was split open with an ax. On Sunday, he lay in a coma in the Nakuru hospital, taking short, shallow breaths.
His wife, Grace, said she was leaving the Rift Valley.
“I will never come back,” she said.
Kenya Kikuyus, Long Dominant, Are Now Routed
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
NAKURU, Kenya — Kenya’s privileged tribe is on the run.
Over the past few days, tens of thousands of Kikuyus, the tribe of Kenya’s president, have packed into heavily guarded buses to flee the western part of the country because of ethnic violence. On Sunday, endless convoys of buses — some with their windshields smashed by rocks — crawled across a landscape of scorched homes and empty farms.
It is nothing short of a mass exodus. The tribe that has dominated business and politics in Kenya since independence in 1963 is now being chased off its land by machete-wielding mobs made up of members of other tribes furious about the Dec. 27 election, which Kenya’s president, Mwai Kibaki, won under dubious circumstances. In some places, Kikuyus have been hunted down with bows and arrows.
The hospital in Nakuru, a town in the Rift Valley, is full of Kikuyu men with deep ax wounds, fingers cut off and slash marks across their faces.
“It was the Kalenjin,” said Samuel Mburu, a Kikuyu farmer with rows of stitches in his head, when asked who had nearly killed him. The Kalenjin are one of the bigger tribes in the Rift Valley, and they have fought fiercely with the Kikuyus before, mostly over land.
Many Kalenjin are unapologetic. Robert Tutuny, a Kalenjin farmer, stood on a hillside on Sunday with an iron bar in his hands and looked down at the charred remains of a Kikuyu village that was razed a week ago.
“We hate these people,” Mr. Tutuny said.
The election — and the unresolved battle about who won — has ignited old tensions in Kenya, which in a week and a half has gone from being one of Africa’s most promising countries to another equatorial trouble zone.
The political impasse continued Sunday, with Jendayi E. Frazer, the American assistant secretary of state for African affairs, meeting again with opposition leaders and government officials, but no resolution was in sight.
The heavy fighting that claimed more than 300 lives last week has subsided and many people have gone back to work in the capital, Nairobi. There, people from different tribes live side by side and often work in the same office. They are aware of ethnic differences and sometimes joke about them, but it usually does not go further than that.
But out here — where little towns rise from the veld like mirages and where there is so much wide-open space it seems incongruous to fight over land — these differences matter. A tribal war is shaping up between the Kalenjin, who mostly support Kenya’s opposition leaders, and the Kikuyus, who voted heavily — up to 98 percent in some areas — for the president.
Tens of thousands of Kikuyus are camped out at police stations and churches for protection, waiting for buses guarded by military escorts to evacuate them to the central highlands, the traditional Kikuyu homeland. There, amid the lush tea fields and rolling green hills, they are safe because almost everyone who lives in the highlands is Kikuyu.
Ethnic conflict is now threatening the decades of stability that has set Kenya apart from so many of its neighbors, like Congo, Rwanda, Somalia and Sudan. But Kenya has struggled with ethnic violence before. Its rare bursts usually come around election time.
“You have to understand that these issues are much deeper than ethnic,” said Maina Kiai, chairman of the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights.
“They are political,” he said, and “they go back to land.”
The last time the Rift Valley was this violent was in 1992, another election year in Kenya and a time of turbulent transition between dictatorship and democracy. Kalenjin militias, stirred up by politicians who told them that the valley was Kalenjin ancestral land, massacred hundreds of Kikuyus in a bid to steal their farms.
Since then, Mr. Kiai said, “Emotions have been festering, resentments have been building and we sat around pretending ethnicity didn’t exist.”
Kenya has more than 40 tribes, but the Kikuyus have almost always been on top. They run shops, restaurants, banks and factories across the country. One reason Mr. Kibaki has engendered so much resentment from other tribes is because many of the top officials in his government — including the ministers of defense, justice, finance and internal security — are Kikuyus.
The Kikuyus are the biggest tribe in Kenya but far from a majority, at 22 percent of the population. The Kalenjins make up about 12 percent.
In the Rift Valley, the anti-Kikuyu grudge goes back to independence, when the British government bought out Britons who owned huge, picturesque farms. But instead of redistributing that land to the impoverished people who had lived here for centuries, like the Kalenjin and Masai, the newly formed Kenyan government, led by Jomo Kenyatta, a Kikuyu, gave much of it to Kikuyus from other areas.
Most of the Kikuyus here are hardly rich. The men lying on bloody sheets at the Nakuru hospital are emaciated farmers with threadbare clothes. The same goes for the Kikuyus who have been slaughtered by gangs of opposing tribes in Nairobi’s slums, causing an exodus from there, too. They lived in iron shanties just as their non-Kikuyu neighbors do.
But in many cases, the Kikuyus own kiosks or small patches of land or they are related to someone who does, and that makes them a little better off by local standards.
“Land is very important to us,” said Anthony Kirunga, a Kikuyu, who sells spare car parts in Nakuru. “It’s not our fault that other people are jealous.”
This election stirred up anti-Kikuyu jealousies like never before. Raila Odinga, the top opposition candidate and a member of the Luo tribe, built his campaign on a promise to end Kikuyu favoritism and share the fruits of Kenya’s growing economy with all tribes.
Early election results had him way ahead and his party winning the most seats in Parliament. But at the 11th hour of the vote-tallying process last Sunday, Mr. Kibaki surged. Election observers have said the president’s party rigged the results to stay in power.
Millions of opposition supporters across Kenya were outraged. Not only did their candidate lose, but it also seemed to them that their system, which until the election had been celebrated as one of the most vibrant democracies in Africa, had cheated them.
In western Kenya, where Kikuyus are vastly outnumbered, they became easy targets. In Kisumu, the third-largest city in the country, Luos went on a rampage, burning down Kikuyu shops and ransacking the downtown.
In the Rift Valley, Kalenjin gangs stormed Kikuyu farms. Police officers seemed reluctant to intervene. Dozens of Kikuyus were massacred, including up to 50 women and children hiding in a church who were burned alive. What has kept the death toll from rising even higher is the fact that few people here have guns; most of the clashes have been fought with clubs, knives and stones.
Jeremiah Mukuna, 75, a Kikuyu farmer, was attacked by a Kalenjin mob last Monday while he was sitting on the porch of his shack, his family said. His head was split open with an ax. On Sunday, he lay in a coma in the Nakuru hospital, taking short, shallow breaths.
His wife, Grace, said she was leaving the Rift Valley.
“I will never come back,” she said.
January 8, 2008
Kenyan Leader and Opponent to Meet
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
ELDORET, Kenya — For the first time since Kenya exploded into election-related violence that has killed more than 400 people, the president and the top opposition leader have agreed to meet, both sides said Monday.
Mwai Kibaki, the president who won re-election last week after a deeply flawed vote count, invited Raila Odinga, the top opposition leader who said he was cheated out of victory, to talks on Friday; Mr. Odinga indicated that he would go, if certain conditions were met.
Mr. Kibaki’s press service issued a short statement on Monday night saying the purpose of the meeting was “to dialogue on the stoppage of violence in the country, consolidation of peace and national reconciliation” after more than a week of post-election turmoil that has dented the country’s prized image of stability.
Kenya’s highest-ranking religious leaders, including an Anglican archbishop and the chairman of the Supreme Council of Kenya Muslims, were invited to attend, along with five members of Mr. Odinga’s political party.
The much-anticipated meeting was announced as other progress seemed to be taking place on the political front, with the chairman of the African Union, John A. Kufuor, expected to arrive in Kenya this week and Mr. Odinga agreeing to call off huge protest rallies scheduled for Tuesday that many Kenyans feared would degenerate into bloodshed.
Salim Lone, a spokesman for Mr. Odinga, said the rallies had been canceled because “we wanted to create a conducive environment for negotiations; we wanted to show that we are serious.”
As for the negotiations, Mr. Lone said, “We will be happy to participate if this meeting is part of the process that will be put in place by John Kufuor.” Mr. Kufuor, who is also president of Ghana, is expected to arrive in Kenya on Tuesday or Wednesday.
Though the political impasse seems to be easing somewhat, the two sides are still very far apart, with both Mr. Kibaki, 76, and Mr. Odinga, 63, claiming victory in the elections and blaming each other for the shocking level of violence that burst in Kenya last weekend after disputed election results were announced.
For the most part, Kenya has escaped the ethnic hatreds that have consumed Rwanda, Congo and Sudan. But this election, the most competitive in the country’s history, seemed to aggravate deep-seated resentments that had been festering for years.
On Monday, a Kenyan government committee raised the death toll from the recent post-election fighting to 486, though the opposition said it was closer to 1,000.
Many of Mr. Odinga’s supporters vented their outrage toward Kikuyus, Mr. Kibaki’s tribe, which has dominated business and politics in Kenya since independence in 1963. Dozens, if not hundreds, of Kikuyus across the country have been massacred in the past 10 days, and tens of thousands have been forced to flee ethnically-mixed areas. Mr. Odinga is a member of the Luo tribe, and in Luo areas, mobs have hacked Kikuyus to death with machetes and burned down Kikuyu businesses.
Maina Kiai, chairman of the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights, said there is still a long way to go to negotiating an end to the crisis but the scheduled meeting “will clearly calm down the country.”
“People want to see them talking,” he said.
Jendayi E. Frazer, the American assistant secretary of state for African affairs, who has been in Kenya for the past three days trying to broker a truce between the government and opposition leaders, said that the vote count had indeed been rigged, but that both parties could have been involved. Election observers have said there was widespread evidence of irregularities during vote tabulations, which gave Mr. Kibaki, who had been trailing in the early stages of the counting process by as much as one million votes, a suspiciously thin margin of victory at the 11th hour.
“The people of Kenya were cheated,” Ms. Frazer said.
Mr. Odinga has been pushing for an outside mediator to broker negotiations because he says he does not trust the government. Government officials initially refused, saying that the crisis was a Kenyan problem and that they could handle it themselves.
But government officials seemed to relent over the weekend when they announced that an African Union delegation that the government originally rebuffed was on its way. However, on Monday, Alfred Mutua, a government spokesman, argued at a news conference that Mr. Kufuor was not coming as a mediator.
“This is a fact-finding tour,” he said.
Here in Eldoret, in the epicenter of Kenya’s post-election violence, the facts are rather disturbing.
In this ethnically-mixed area of the Rift Valley, more than 140 people have been killed, most by machete, blunt objects and fire.
There is a woman in Ward 5 of the main hospital whose body is covered with oozing burns except for one spot on her chest. That is where she was cradling her child.
She said she was inside a church last week after a mob set it on fire. As she tried to escape, she tripped on a burning mattress. She fell and her 2-year-old daughter, Joyce, burned to death in front of her. Up to 50 people who had been seeking refuge inside the church were killed, most of them women and children, all of them Kikuyus. Witnesses said the attackers were from the Kalenjin tribe, which voted heavily for Mr. Odinga and clashed fiercely with Kikuyus over land before the elections of 1992.
The woman, 36, is now the mother of six children and wanted to be identified only as Mary. She cannot sit up without wincing.
It is hard to tell what hurts more, Mary said, the guilt or the pain.
“My daughter liked to sing,” she said, as tears streaked down her puffy face. “I tried to save her, but I couldn’t. I was on fire, too.”
Kenyan Leader and Opponent to Meet
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
ELDORET, Kenya — For the first time since Kenya exploded into election-related violence that has killed more than 400 people, the president and the top opposition leader have agreed to meet, both sides said Monday.
Mwai Kibaki, the president who won re-election last week after a deeply flawed vote count, invited Raila Odinga, the top opposition leader who said he was cheated out of victory, to talks on Friday; Mr. Odinga indicated that he would go, if certain conditions were met.
Mr. Kibaki’s press service issued a short statement on Monday night saying the purpose of the meeting was “to dialogue on the stoppage of violence in the country, consolidation of peace and national reconciliation” after more than a week of post-election turmoil that has dented the country’s prized image of stability.
Kenya’s highest-ranking religious leaders, including an Anglican archbishop and the chairman of the Supreme Council of Kenya Muslims, were invited to attend, along with five members of Mr. Odinga’s political party.
The much-anticipated meeting was announced as other progress seemed to be taking place on the political front, with the chairman of the African Union, John A. Kufuor, expected to arrive in Kenya this week and Mr. Odinga agreeing to call off huge protest rallies scheduled for Tuesday that many Kenyans feared would degenerate into bloodshed.
Salim Lone, a spokesman for Mr. Odinga, said the rallies had been canceled because “we wanted to create a conducive environment for negotiations; we wanted to show that we are serious.”
As for the negotiations, Mr. Lone said, “We will be happy to participate if this meeting is part of the process that will be put in place by John Kufuor.” Mr. Kufuor, who is also president of Ghana, is expected to arrive in Kenya on Tuesday or Wednesday.
Though the political impasse seems to be easing somewhat, the two sides are still very far apart, with both Mr. Kibaki, 76, and Mr. Odinga, 63, claiming victory in the elections and blaming each other for the shocking level of violence that burst in Kenya last weekend after disputed election results were announced.
For the most part, Kenya has escaped the ethnic hatreds that have consumed Rwanda, Congo and Sudan. But this election, the most competitive in the country’s history, seemed to aggravate deep-seated resentments that had been festering for years.
On Monday, a Kenyan government committee raised the death toll from the recent post-election fighting to 486, though the opposition said it was closer to 1,000.
Many of Mr. Odinga’s supporters vented their outrage toward Kikuyus, Mr. Kibaki’s tribe, which has dominated business and politics in Kenya since independence in 1963. Dozens, if not hundreds, of Kikuyus across the country have been massacred in the past 10 days, and tens of thousands have been forced to flee ethnically-mixed areas. Mr. Odinga is a member of the Luo tribe, and in Luo areas, mobs have hacked Kikuyus to death with machetes and burned down Kikuyu businesses.
Maina Kiai, chairman of the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights, said there is still a long way to go to negotiating an end to the crisis but the scheduled meeting “will clearly calm down the country.”
“People want to see them talking,” he said.
Jendayi E. Frazer, the American assistant secretary of state for African affairs, who has been in Kenya for the past three days trying to broker a truce between the government and opposition leaders, said that the vote count had indeed been rigged, but that both parties could have been involved. Election observers have said there was widespread evidence of irregularities during vote tabulations, which gave Mr. Kibaki, who had been trailing in the early stages of the counting process by as much as one million votes, a suspiciously thin margin of victory at the 11th hour.
“The people of Kenya were cheated,” Ms. Frazer said.
Mr. Odinga has been pushing for an outside mediator to broker negotiations because he says he does not trust the government. Government officials initially refused, saying that the crisis was a Kenyan problem and that they could handle it themselves.
But government officials seemed to relent over the weekend when they announced that an African Union delegation that the government originally rebuffed was on its way. However, on Monday, Alfred Mutua, a government spokesman, argued at a news conference that Mr. Kufuor was not coming as a mediator.
“This is a fact-finding tour,” he said.
Here in Eldoret, in the epicenter of Kenya’s post-election violence, the facts are rather disturbing.
In this ethnically-mixed area of the Rift Valley, more than 140 people have been killed, most by machete, blunt objects and fire.
There is a woman in Ward 5 of the main hospital whose body is covered with oozing burns except for one spot on her chest. That is where she was cradling her child.
She said she was inside a church last week after a mob set it on fire. As she tried to escape, she tripped on a burning mattress. She fell and her 2-year-old daughter, Joyce, burned to death in front of her. Up to 50 people who had been seeking refuge inside the church were killed, most of them women and children, all of them Kikuyus. Witnesses said the attackers were from the Kalenjin tribe, which voted heavily for Mr. Odinga and clashed fiercely with Kikuyus over land before the elections of 1992.
The woman, 36, is now the mother of six children and wanted to be identified only as Mary. She cannot sit up without wincing.
It is hard to tell what hurts more, Mary said, the guilt or the pain.
“My daughter liked to sing,” she said, as tears streaked down her puffy face. “I tried to save her, but I couldn’t. I was on fire, too.”
January 9, 2008
Kenya Crisis Worsens as Opposition Cools to Talks
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
NAIROBI, Kenya — The political mood darkened again in Kenya on Tuesday, with opposition leaders cooling to the idea of negotiations with the government after the president unilaterally made major cabinet appointments, a move that set off riots across the country almost immediately.
Bonfires burned in Kisumu on Lake Victoria, ethnic clashes erupted in the slums around Nairobi, the capital, and protesters began to mass in the port city of Mombasa.
The political crisis here, which has claimed at least 486 lives and probably many more, seems to be raising wider concerns, with President Bush issuing a statement urging “both sides to engage in peaceful dialogue” and Senator Barack Obama speaking to opposition leaders by telephone.
Mr. Obama, Democrat from Illinois who is running for president, has close ties to Kenya. His father was Kenyan and a member of the same ethnic group as Kenya’s top opposition leader, Raila Odinga. Mr. Obama took a short break from campaigning on Monday and asked Mr. Odinga to meet directly with Kenya’s president without preconditions, a spokesman for Mr. Obama said.
John A. Kufuor, the president of Ghana and chairman of the African Union, arrived in Nairobi on Tuesday to help facilitate a truce, but it seemed that his trip, which had been proposed as mediation between the government and the opposition, had already begun to resemble an official state visit to help the Kenyan government solve this crisis. Opposition leaders say the question should be who is the rightful leader. Opposition leaders, with Western election observers, have said that evidence is widespread that the president’s party rigged the vote tallying process to stay in power.
Those accusations ignited a burst of violence across Kenya last week, with mobs stoning supporters of the president, burning down houses and clashing with the police. A Kenyan government committee said 486 people had been killed, but it counted only bodies taken to public hospitals. The fighting has been fueled by longstanding resentment toward the president’s ethnic group, the Kikuyus, whom other groups accuse of occupying their land and monopolizing power.
Unbowed, Mwai Kibaki, Kenya’s president, announced Tuesday, just moments before Mr. Kufuor strolled down a red carpet at Nairobi’s international airport, that he had chosen half of his new cabinet.
He entrusted the most important ministries, like internal security, finance, energy and justice, to political allies. He appointed Kalonzo Musyoka, who came in a distant third in last month’s election, as vice president. Not a single member of the Orange Democratic Party, Mr. Odinga’s opposition party, which won the most seats in Parliament, was appointed.
Opposition leaders called that “a slap in the face.”
“You don’t pre-empt negotiations by giving away all the important posts,” said Salim Lone, a spokesman for Mr. Odinga. “This shows that the government is not seriously committed to dialogue.”
Mr. Kibaki, in his brief televised address, said, “In naming the cabinet, I have considered the importance of keeping the country united, peaceful and prosperous and a strong broad-based leadership.”
On Monday, things had begun to look much better, and hope was growing that the political impasse was ending. The president invited opposition leaders to talks scheduled for Friday, and the opposition leaders indicated that they were willing to go if the talks were part of a peace process brokered by the African Union. Mr. Odinga called off huge protest rallies that many Kenyans had feared would deteriorate into bloodshed.
But the tone changed Tuesday, with Mr. Odinga calling the talks “a sideshow” and saying Mr. Kibaki was not Kenya’s legitimate president.
“Let Mr. Kibaki know we don’t recognize him,” Mr. Odinga said at a news conference. “We want to meet him. But we don’t recognize him.”
Mr. Kibaki also announced that Parliament would resume operations on Tuesday. Opposition leaders say that they will occupy the seats reserved for the government because they contend they are the lawful government.
Jendayi E. Frazer, the United States assistant secretary of state for African affairs, who is here trying to help end the standoff, said Tuesday that she was increasingly concerned, especially about the ethnic fighting that had driven more than 200,000 people from their homes.
“There is a certain poison in the air,” she said, in an interview broadcast on a Kenyan television network.
If the political impasse is not resolved, Ms. Frazer said, “Kenya will have a long future of instability.”
Kenya’s economy, the biggest in East Africa, is already hurting. The unrest, which has included gangs blocking roads with downed trees and mobs looting tea plantations, has impeded trade across the region.
On Tuesday, Amos Kimunya, Kenya’s finance minister who was reappointed to his post, said that the election turmoil had cost the country $1 billion.
Kenya Crisis Worsens as Opposition Cools to Talks
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
NAIROBI, Kenya — The political mood darkened again in Kenya on Tuesday, with opposition leaders cooling to the idea of negotiations with the government after the president unilaterally made major cabinet appointments, a move that set off riots across the country almost immediately.
Bonfires burned in Kisumu on Lake Victoria, ethnic clashes erupted in the slums around Nairobi, the capital, and protesters began to mass in the port city of Mombasa.
The political crisis here, which has claimed at least 486 lives and probably many more, seems to be raising wider concerns, with President Bush issuing a statement urging “both sides to engage in peaceful dialogue” and Senator Barack Obama speaking to opposition leaders by telephone.
Mr. Obama, Democrat from Illinois who is running for president, has close ties to Kenya. His father was Kenyan and a member of the same ethnic group as Kenya’s top opposition leader, Raila Odinga. Mr. Obama took a short break from campaigning on Monday and asked Mr. Odinga to meet directly with Kenya’s president without preconditions, a spokesman for Mr. Obama said.
John A. Kufuor, the president of Ghana and chairman of the African Union, arrived in Nairobi on Tuesday to help facilitate a truce, but it seemed that his trip, which had been proposed as mediation between the government and the opposition, had already begun to resemble an official state visit to help the Kenyan government solve this crisis. Opposition leaders say the question should be who is the rightful leader. Opposition leaders, with Western election observers, have said that evidence is widespread that the president’s party rigged the vote tallying process to stay in power.
Those accusations ignited a burst of violence across Kenya last week, with mobs stoning supporters of the president, burning down houses and clashing with the police. A Kenyan government committee said 486 people had been killed, but it counted only bodies taken to public hospitals. The fighting has been fueled by longstanding resentment toward the president’s ethnic group, the Kikuyus, whom other groups accuse of occupying their land and monopolizing power.
Unbowed, Mwai Kibaki, Kenya’s president, announced Tuesday, just moments before Mr. Kufuor strolled down a red carpet at Nairobi’s international airport, that he had chosen half of his new cabinet.
He entrusted the most important ministries, like internal security, finance, energy and justice, to political allies. He appointed Kalonzo Musyoka, who came in a distant third in last month’s election, as vice president. Not a single member of the Orange Democratic Party, Mr. Odinga’s opposition party, which won the most seats in Parliament, was appointed.
Opposition leaders called that “a slap in the face.”
“You don’t pre-empt negotiations by giving away all the important posts,” said Salim Lone, a spokesman for Mr. Odinga. “This shows that the government is not seriously committed to dialogue.”
Mr. Kibaki, in his brief televised address, said, “In naming the cabinet, I have considered the importance of keeping the country united, peaceful and prosperous and a strong broad-based leadership.”
On Monday, things had begun to look much better, and hope was growing that the political impasse was ending. The president invited opposition leaders to talks scheduled for Friday, and the opposition leaders indicated that they were willing to go if the talks were part of a peace process brokered by the African Union. Mr. Odinga called off huge protest rallies that many Kenyans had feared would deteriorate into bloodshed.
But the tone changed Tuesday, with Mr. Odinga calling the talks “a sideshow” and saying Mr. Kibaki was not Kenya’s legitimate president.
“Let Mr. Kibaki know we don’t recognize him,” Mr. Odinga said at a news conference. “We want to meet him. But we don’t recognize him.”
Mr. Kibaki also announced that Parliament would resume operations on Tuesday. Opposition leaders say that they will occupy the seats reserved for the government because they contend they are the lawful government.
Jendayi E. Frazer, the United States assistant secretary of state for African affairs, who is here trying to help end the standoff, said Tuesday that she was increasingly concerned, especially about the ethnic fighting that had driven more than 200,000 people from their homes.
“There is a certain poison in the air,” she said, in an interview broadcast on a Kenyan television network.
If the political impasse is not resolved, Ms. Frazer said, “Kenya will have a long future of instability.”
Kenya’s economy, the biggest in East Africa, is already hurting. The unrest, which has included gangs blocking roads with downed trees and mobs looting tea plantations, has impeded trade across the region.
On Tuesday, Amos Kimunya, Kenya’s finance minister who was reappointed to his post, said that the election turmoil had cost the country $1 billion.
THE AFTERMATH...Ismailis in Western Ke
As RECEIVED
==============
Subject: Re: FW: THE AFTERMATH.........................Ismailis in Western Kenya....................
Dear Jubilee,
Thanks for all e-mails..
This one on the horrible situstion in Western Kenya is really gut wrenching.
Yes the Isamilis from Eldoret and Kisumu were airlifted to Kampala from Wednesday night onwards. In actual fact we at AKES were told to get the school ready to accept some.So we got the high school classrooms ready.
Other families were requested to put up as many as they could. So we offered accomodation for 6 people.
As fuel crisis has hit the region, KQ susp ended all flights to and fro Kisumu.sSo AIR UGANDA-AKFED airline applied for landing rights to Kisumu which only came through on Wednesday 2nd.
So the Jamamt of Kisumu was told to be a the Khane to be taken to the airport by buses to be escorted by the army .So from 2pm thgroup of 60 were a the airport-Air Uganda en route from JUBA came at 7.00pm and took only 20-rest k were bumped and were told to be at Kahne for 6.00am on Thursday. They were at the airport until they were lifted, some waited upto 12 hours with no food or drinks as the airport canteen was closed.
The problem Air Uganda encountered was fuel , already short in the region., none in Kisumu, hardly enough in EBB -so it had to divert to Mwanza .
So first lot to arrive were from eldoret on cahters organised from Nairobi-total 80-they said their shops and houses were intact, but as purely precautioanry secutity measure following the burning o f locals in churches.
Some of these opted for hotels-Ismaili hotels reduced charges -Eqautoria-50USd, Fairway-60.00USd. so most went to these hotels-so did majority of Kisumu people, Tthose not at hotels have been put up at homes-we have 6 seniors -2 of whom have lost their shop to arson and thiefs.
So the school clssrooms were not needed.
The arrangements are that the lunches and diiners are provided at Khane -DJ HAll.As fuel is very scarce, transportation is the challenge we have as we have to make 2 trips from Ntinda-twice a day.
Mushkil Asan tasbi started in JKS in EA from the which was the first day the fuel crisis hit Uganda as the border was closed-ni fuel so prices have increased five fold. One saving grace-traffic situation has eased as very few matatus and bodas can afford the fuel!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Total number of Ismaiklis likely to be here t ill Chandrat is 80 from eldoret, 138 from Kisumu.-it is waiting game to see whther mediation efforts are gaining ground-even the Kikuyu ar so divided-young embarassed that an old President and his old guard could so blatantly rig the count!
Just hought to share this first hand news-so reminiscent of our plight 35 year ago.
Thanks again for all your prayers ,
Warm Regards,
Gulzar
==============
Subject: Re: FW: THE AFTERMATH.........................Ismailis in Western Kenya....................
Dear Jubilee,
Thanks for all e-mails..
This one on the horrible situstion in Western Kenya is really gut wrenching.
Yes the Isamilis from Eldoret and Kisumu were airlifted to Kampala from Wednesday night onwards. In actual fact we at AKES were told to get the school ready to accept some.So we got the high school classrooms ready.
Other families were requested to put up as many as they could. So we offered accomodation for 6 people.
As fuel crisis has hit the region, KQ susp ended all flights to and fro Kisumu.sSo AIR UGANDA-AKFED airline applied for landing rights to Kisumu which only came through on Wednesday 2nd.
So the Jamamt of Kisumu was told to be a the Khane to be taken to the airport by buses to be escorted by the army .So from 2pm thgroup of 60 were a the airport-Air Uganda en route from JUBA came at 7.00pm and took only 20-rest k were bumped and were told to be at Kahne for 6.00am on Thursday. They were at the airport until they were lifted, some waited upto 12 hours with no food or drinks as the airport canteen was closed.
The problem Air Uganda encountered was fuel , already short in the region., none in Kisumu, hardly enough in EBB -so it had to divert to Mwanza .
So first lot to arrive were from eldoret on cahters organised from Nairobi-total 80-they said their shops and houses were intact, but as purely precautioanry secutity measure following the burning o f locals in churches.
Some of these opted for hotels-Ismaili hotels reduced charges -Eqautoria-50USd, Fairway-60.00USd. so most went to these hotels-so did majority of Kisumu people, Tthose not at hotels have been put up at homes-we have 6 seniors -2 of whom have lost their shop to arson and thiefs.
So the school clssrooms were not needed.
The arrangements are that the lunches and diiners are provided at Khane -DJ HAll.As fuel is very scarce, transportation is the challenge we have as we have to make 2 trips from Ntinda-twice a day.
Mushkil Asan tasbi started in JKS in EA from the which was the first day the fuel crisis hit Uganda as the border was closed-ni fuel so prices have increased five fold. One saving grace-traffic situation has eased as very few matatus and bodas can afford the fuel!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Total number of Ismaiklis likely to be here t ill Chandrat is 80 from eldoret, 138 from Kisumu.-it is waiting game to see whther mediation efforts are gaining ground-even the Kikuyu ar so divided-young embarassed that an old President and his old guard could so blatantly rig the count!
Just hought to share this first hand news-so reminiscent of our plight 35 year ago.
Thanks again for all your prayers ,
Warm Regards,
Gulzar
Embassy, January 9th, 2008
COLUMN
Hope and Betrayal in Kenya
By Gwynne Dyer
More than two years ago, when Kenya's current opposition leader, Raila Odinga, quit President Mwai Kibaki's government, I wrote the following: "The trick will be to get Kibaki out without triggering a wave of violence that would do the country grave and permanent damage.... Bad times are coming to Kenya."
The bad times have arrived, but the violence that has swept Kenya since the stolen election on Dec. 27 is not just African "tribalism." Kikuyus have been the main target of popular wrath and non-Kikuyu protesters have been the principal victims of the security forces, but this confrontation is about trust betrayed, hopes dashed, and patience strained to the breaking point.
Nobody wants a civil war in Kenya, but it's easy to see why Raila Odinga rejects calls from abroad to accept the figures for the national vote that were announced last Sunday. If Odinga enters a "government of national unity" under Kibaki, as the African Union and the United States want, then he's back in the untenable situation that he was in until 2005, and Kibaki will run Kenya for another five years.
If Odinga leaves it to Kenya's courts to settle, the result will be the same: there have been no verdicts yet on disputed results that went to the courts after the 2002 election. So when the opposition leader was asked by the BBC if he would urge his supporters to calm down, he replied: "I refuse to be asked to give the Kenyan people an anaesthetic so that they can be raped."
Despite the ugly scenes of recent days, Kenya is not an ethnic tinderbox where people automatically back their own tribe and hate everyone else. For example, it is clear that more than half the people who voted Mwai Kibaki into the presidency in the 2002 election were not of his own Kikuyu tribe, because the Kikuyu, although they are the biggest tribe, only account for 22 per cent of the population.
Kibaki's appeal was the promise of honest government after 24 years of oppressive rule, rigged elections and massive corruption under the former president, Daniel arap Moi. If he had been just another thug in a suit, most Kenyans would have put up with Kibaki's subsequent behaviour in the same old cynical way, but his victory was seen as the dawn of a new Kenya where the bad old ways no longer reigned. It is his abuse of their high hopes that makes the current situation so emotional.
By 2005, Kibaki's dependence on an inner circle of fellow Kikuyu politicians was almost total and the corruption was almost as bad as it had been under Moi. The British ambassador, Sir Edward Clay, accused Kibaki's ministers of arrogance and greed which led them to "eat like gluttons" and "vomit on the shoes" of foreign donors and the Kenyan people. The biggest foreign donors, the United States, Britain and Germany, suspended their aid to the country in protest against the corruption.
Most of the leading reformers quit Kibaki's government in 2005, and in the weeks before last month's election their main political vehicle, the Orange Democratic Movement, had a clear lead in the polls. That lead was confirmed in the parliamentary vote on Dec. 27, which saw half of Kibaki's cabinet ministers lose their seats and gave the opposition a clear majority in parliament. But the presidential vote was another matter.
Raila Odinga won an easy majority in six of Kenya's eight provinces, but in Central, the Kikuyu heartland, the results were withheld until long after the vote had been announced for more remote regions. Observers were banned from the counting stations in Central and the central tallying room in Nairobi–and on Dec. 30 Samuel Kivuitu, the chairman of the electoral commission, declared that Kibaki had won the national vote by just 232,000 votes in a nation of 34 million.
It stank to high heaven. Ridiculously high turnouts were claimed for polling stations in Central–larger than the total of eligible voters, in some cases–and 97.3 per cent of the votes there allegedly went to Kibaki. It was an operation designed to return Kibaki to office while preserving a facade of democratic credibility, but no foreign government except the United States congratulated Kibaki on his "victory", not even African ones, and local people were not fooled.
Within two days Samuel Kivuitu retracted his declaration of a Kibaki victory, saying that the electoral commission had come under unbearable pressure from the government: "I do not know who won the election.... We are culprits as a commission. We have to leave it to an independent group to investigate what actually went wrong."
But Kibaki is digging in, and innocent Kikuyus–many of whom did not vote for Kibaki, despite the announced results–are being attacked by furious people from other tribes. Meanwhile, the police and army obey Kibaki's orders and attack non-Kikuyu protesters. It is not Odinga who needs to accept the "result" in order to save Kenya from calamity; it is Kibaki who needs to step down.
He probably won't, in which case violence may claim yet another African country. But don't blame it on mere "tribalism". Kenyans are not fools, and they know they have been betrayed.
[email protected]
COLUMN
Hope and Betrayal in Kenya
By Gwynne Dyer
More than two years ago, when Kenya's current opposition leader, Raila Odinga, quit President Mwai Kibaki's government, I wrote the following: "The trick will be to get Kibaki out without triggering a wave of violence that would do the country grave and permanent damage.... Bad times are coming to Kenya."
The bad times have arrived, but the violence that has swept Kenya since the stolen election on Dec. 27 is not just African "tribalism." Kikuyus have been the main target of popular wrath and non-Kikuyu protesters have been the principal victims of the security forces, but this confrontation is about trust betrayed, hopes dashed, and patience strained to the breaking point.
Nobody wants a civil war in Kenya, but it's easy to see why Raila Odinga rejects calls from abroad to accept the figures for the national vote that were announced last Sunday. If Odinga enters a "government of national unity" under Kibaki, as the African Union and the United States want, then he's back in the untenable situation that he was in until 2005, and Kibaki will run Kenya for another five years.
If Odinga leaves it to Kenya's courts to settle, the result will be the same: there have been no verdicts yet on disputed results that went to the courts after the 2002 election. So when the opposition leader was asked by the BBC if he would urge his supporters to calm down, he replied: "I refuse to be asked to give the Kenyan people an anaesthetic so that they can be raped."
Despite the ugly scenes of recent days, Kenya is not an ethnic tinderbox where people automatically back their own tribe and hate everyone else. For example, it is clear that more than half the people who voted Mwai Kibaki into the presidency in the 2002 election were not of his own Kikuyu tribe, because the Kikuyu, although they are the biggest tribe, only account for 22 per cent of the population.
Kibaki's appeal was the promise of honest government after 24 years of oppressive rule, rigged elections and massive corruption under the former president, Daniel arap Moi. If he had been just another thug in a suit, most Kenyans would have put up with Kibaki's subsequent behaviour in the same old cynical way, but his victory was seen as the dawn of a new Kenya where the bad old ways no longer reigned. It is his abuse of their high hopes that makes the current situation so emotional.
By 2005, Kibaki's dependence on an inner circle of fellow Kikuyu politicians was almost total and the corruption was almost as bad as it had been under Moi. The British ambassador, Sir Edward Clay, accused Kibaki's ministers of arrogance and greed which led them to "eat like gluttons" and "vomit on the shoes" of foreign donors and the Kenyan people. The biggest foreign donors, the United States, Britain and Germany, suspended their aid to the country in protest against the corruption.
Most of the leading reformers quit Kibaki's government in 2005, and in the weeks before last month's election their main political vehicle, the Orange Democratic Movement, had a clear lead in the polls. That lead was confirmed in the parliamentary vote on Dec. 27, which saw half of Kibaki's cabinet ministers lose their seats and gave the opposition a clear majority in parliament. But the presidential vote was another matter.
Raila Odinga won an easy majority in six of Kenya's eight provinces, but in Central, the Kikuyu heartland, the results were withheld until long after the vote had been announced for more remote regions. Observers were banned from the counting stations in Central and the central tallying room in Nairobi–and on Dec. 30 Samuel Kivuitu, the chairman of the electoral commission, declared that Kibaki had won the national vote by just 232,000 votes in a nation of 34 million.
It stank to high heaven. Ridiculously high turnouts were claimed for polling stations in Central–larger than the total of eligible voters, in some cases–and 97.3 per cent of the votes there allegedly went to Kibaki. It was an operation designed to return Kibaki to office while preserving a facade of democratic credibility, but no foreign government except the United States congratulated Kibaki on his "victory", not even African ones, and local people were not fooled.
Within two days Samuel Kivuitu retracted his declaration of a Kibaki victory, saying that the electoral commission had come under unbearable pressure from the government: "I do not know who won the election.... We are culprits as a commission. We have to leave it to an independent group to investigate what actually went wrong."
But Kibaki is digging in, and innocent Kikuyus–many of whom did not vote for Kibaki, despite the announced results–are being attacked by furious people from other tribes. Meanwhile, the police and army obey Kibaki's orders and attack non-Kikuyu protesters. It is not Odinga who needs to accept the "result" in order to save Kenya from calamity; it is Kibaki who needs to step down.
He probably won't, in which case violence may claim yet another African country. But don't blame it on mere "tribalism". Kenyans are not fools, and they know they have been betrayed.
[email protected]
January 12, 2008
Kenyan Opposition Calls for New Rallies and Sanctions
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN and KENNEDY ABWAO
NAIROBI, Kenya — Kenya’s opposition leaders on Friday called for three days of nationwide protests next week and urged foreign governments to impose sanctions over the country’s flawed elections last month.
Opposition leaders vowed to hold “mass action” from Wednesday through next Friday, heightening the standoff with the government in a crisis that has pitted ethnic groups against one another and left hundreds dead.
Mediation efforts have so far failed, and ethnic tensions are continuing to rise in some parts of the country. Kenyans are getting worn down by the killings, destruction, travel restrictions and uncertainty. But the opposition and the government seem to be only hardening their positions. Mwai Kibaki, the president, and Raila Odinga, the top opposition leader, still have refused to meet.
“The Kibaki side does not want a just solution,” Anyang Nyong’o, an opposition leader, said on Friday. “It is hellbent on clinging to power.”
Alfred Mutua, a government spokesman, responded by saying that opposition leaders “have ashamed our country.”
As for the opposition’s call for a new election and a transitional government, Mr. Mutua said, “The president is not crazy; he is not nuts.”
Opposition leaders say the government rigged the results from the Dec. 27 election. Several election observers have said that although both sides were guilty of some fraud, the government had raised final vote numbers to give itself a victory. The country’s top election commissioner has said that he regrets certifying the election and now does not know who really won.
The result is that Kenya, a country that until last month was considered one of the most stable in Africa, is now steeped in turmoil. One of the most disturbing aspects is a burst of ethnic violence, fueled by longstanding tensions over access to power, wealth and land. More than 450 people have been killed, many hacked to death with machetes and stoned by mobs.
Kofi Annan, the former United Nations secretary general, has agreed to lead a panel of African dignitaries to help find a political solution. He said Friday that “political negotiation is not an event, it is a process that can take a very long time, or a short time — all depends on the cooperation of the leaders,” Reuters reported.
Mr. Annan, who is from Ghana, is expected to arrive in Kenya soon, and opposition leaders here said the rallies next week would fortify “the mediation by involving the people.”
“Kofi Annan will see the message loud and clear,” Mr. Nyong’o said. He also called sanctions “necessary,” saying, “It would be irresponsible to trust such a government with resources, knowing it would be used to oppress the people.”
The government has banned all political rallies and live news media coverage of election-related events. Opposition leaders have called for the rallies to be peaceful, but most major protests have degenerated into bloodshed.
On Friday, the government urged people to stay away.
“The leaders calling on you as a Kenyan to take to the streets to burn shops and destroy property will not be with you or your family when you have no jobs anymore,” said a government statement. “They will be in their well-protected fortresses eating sumptuous meals and sending their children overseas to study.”
Jeffrey Gettleman reported from Nairobi, Kenya, and Graham Bowley from New York.
Kenyan Opposition Calls for New Rallies and Sanctions
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN and KENNEDY ABWAO
NAIROBI, Kenya — Kenya’s opposition leaders on Friday called for three days of nationwide protests next week and urged foreign governments to impose sanctions over the country’s flawed elections last month.
Opposition leaders vowed to hold “mass action” from Wednesday through next Friday, heightening the standoff with the government in a crisis that has pitted ethnic groups against one another and left hundreds dead.
Mediation efforts have so far failed, and ethnic tensions are continuing to rise in some parts of the country. Kenyans are getting worn down by the killings, destruction, travel restrictions and uncertainty. But the opposition and the government seem to be only hardening their positions. Mwai Kibaki, the president, and Raila Odinga, the top opposition leader, still have refused to meet.
“The Kibaki side does not want a just solution,” Anyang Nyong’o, an opposition leader, said on Friday. “It is hellbent on clinging to power.”
Alfred Mutua, a government spokesman, responded by saying that opposition leaders “have ashamed our country.”
As for the opposition’s call for a new election and a transitional government, Mr. Mutua said, “The president is not crazy; he is not nuts.”
Opposition leaders say the government rigged the results from the Dec. 27 election. Several election observers have said that although both sides were guilty of some fraud, the government had raised final vote numbers to give itself a victory. The country’s top election commissioner has said that he regrets certifying the election and now does not know who really won.
The result is that Kenya, a country that until last month was considered one of the most stable in Africa, is now steeped in turmoil. One of the most disturbing aspects is a burst of ethnic violence, fueled by longstanding tensions over access to power, wealth and land. More than 450 people have been killed, many hacked to death with machetes and stoned by mobs.
Kofi Annan, the former United Nations secretary general, has agreed to lead a panel of African dignitaries to help find a political solution. He said Friday that “political negotiation is not an event, it is a process that can take a very long time, or a short time — all depends on the cooperation of the leaders,” Reuters reported.
Mr. Annan, who is from Ghana, is expected to arrive in Kenya soon, and opposition leaders here said the rallies next week would fortify “the mediation by involving the people.”
“Kofi Annan will see the message loud and clear,” Mr. Nyong’o said. He also called sanctions “necessary,” saying, “It would be irresponsible to trust such a government with resources, knowing it would be used to oppress the people.”
The government has banned all political rallies and live news media coverage of election-related events. Opposition leaders have called for the rallies to be peaceful, but most major protests have degenerated into bloodshed.
On Friday, the government urged people to stay away.
“The leaders calling on you as a Kenyan to take to the streets to burn shops and destroy property will not be with you or your family when you have no jobs anymore,” said a government statement. “They will be in their well-protected fortresses eating sumptuous meals and sending their children overseas to study.”
Jeffrey Gettleman reported from Nairobi, Kenya, and Graham Bowley from New York.
Tribal tensions dim hope for Kenya
Mansoor Ladha
For the Calgary Herald
Sunday, January 13, 2008
CREDIT: Reuters
Opposition leader Raila Odinga in Nairobi Jan. 11.
When I was an undergraduate student at Dar es Salaam University in Tanzania in 1960, the tension between the Luo and Kikuyu tribes was palpable. Even at a time and place where people are expected to be more enlightened, one could sense the tribalism among these two Kenyan tribes as opposed to Africans from Tanzania or Uganda.
This legacy of tribal animosity has spread like cancer through post-independent Kenya, culminating in the present murderous crisis.
Kenya was supposed to be one of the more stable African countries, with a strong economy, an independent press and a strong African middle class. It was the envy of many other African states and its leaders destroyed that reputation by being power hungry.
If Kenya's President Mwai Kibaki allows another election to take place, he will surely lose because Kenyan opposition leader Raila Odinga will win by thousands of sympathy votes besides those of his own tribe.
It is unfortunate that the history of Kenya is punctuated with tribalism from pre-independence time.
Kenya's freedom struggle has firm beginnings in tribalism following the Mau Mau rebellion when the Kikuyu tribe required its members to take an oath to drive the white man from Kenya.
As part of the overall clampdown by the colonial government, Jomo Kenyatta was arrested for alleged Mau Mau involvement.
Kenyatta, Kenya's leading nationalist leader, known as the "Burning Spear" to his followers, was later charged for managing the Mau Mau as a terrorist society.
Kenya was the favourite of the British among its three British colonies of Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda, mainly because of the White Highlands, so called because during the colonial period white immigrants settled there in considerable numbers to take advantage of the good soils and growing conditions, as well as the cool climate.
By the time the colony of Kenya was established in 1920, approximately 10,000 British settlers had taken farms in the area, uprooting the original residents.
Kenya became independent on Dec. 12, 1963, and was declared a republic in 1964. There was always a great potential for ethnic division among the African population, but Kenya's first president, Kenyatta, had an ally in a Luo trade unionist, Tom Mboya, who had championed his release during the freedom struggle.
Mboya was included in Kenyatta's cabinet, holding major portfolios in a government heavily dominated by Kikuyus.
Kenyatta was grooming Mboya as a potential successor, a possibility that deeply worried many of the Kikuyu elite. When Mboya suggested in parliament that a number of Kikuyu politicians were enriching themselves at the cost of other tribal groups, the situation became explosive.
On July 5, 1969, the nation was shocked by the assassination of Mboya by a Kikuyu tribesman. Allegations linking the assassin to prominent KANU party members were dismissed, and in the ensuing political turmoil, Kenyatta banned the opposition party, the Kenya People's Union (KPU), and arrested its leader Jaramogi Oginga Odinga (father of the present opposition leader Raila Odinga.)
Anthony Ngare, a journalist with the country's East African Standard, has argued that discrimination along tribal lines has also dominated the Kenyan workplace.
Ngare said that although many Kenyans believe in the principles of a meritocracy, up to 80 per cent of the workforce of some Kenyan companies often comes from the same tribal area.
Agreeing with Ngare, Evelyn Mungai, the chair of the Kenyan branch of anti-corruption organization Transparency International, has admitted that the problem had become much worse in the last year. In particular, she said tribalism is rampant throughout the public sector, where it is about "who you know."
"You appoint people from your background because you want votes, and that's why the public sector has been very much in the news," she told a BBC World Service's Outlook program.
"Lately, what we have seen in the political arena is we have seen people from a particular tribe going to the president saying: 'you've got to appoint people from my area to such-and-such a position.' "
She believed that tribalism in the workplace has blossomed since Kenya became a multi-party democracy, with more people thinking in terms of their tribe. But Mungai also said she believed the younger generation was less inclined to think along tribal lines, which offered hope for the future.
However, we have to be optimistic and find a solution for tribalism. Part of the solution lies in economic development and growth.
If there is growth in the economy, it will be followed by more education and less ignorance among its residents and tribes. This would also mean that there will be fewer unemployed thugs for politicians to operate as their goons.
Another part of the solution is to have genuine democracy with independent law courts as was made evident during the recent Pakistan crisis when the judiciary clearly showed its independence.
People would have no need to rely on their tribe if they could rely on all of their ballot papers being counted, and could expect honest judgments from courts.
There is still hope for Kenya, which has a large group of intellectuals and a free press, which should lead the way for democratic reforms.
Mansoor Ladha, a freelance journalist living in Calgary, worked with The Daily Nation in Nairobi, Kenya.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
Mansoor Ladha
For the Calgary Herald
Sunday, January 13, 2008
CREDIT: Reuters
Opposition leader Raila Odinga in Nairobi Jan. 11.
When I was an undergraduate student at Dar es Salaam University in Tanzania in 1960, the tension between the Luo and Kikuyu tribes was palpable. Even at a time and place where people are expected to be more enlightened, one could sense the tribalism among these two Kenyan tribes as opposed to Africans from Tanzania or Uganda.
This legacy of tribal animosity has spread like cancer through post-independent Kenya, culminating in the present murderous crisis.
Kenya was supposed to be one of the more stable African countries, with a strong economy, an independent press and a strong African middle class. It was the envy of many other African states and its leaders destroyed that reputation by being power hungry.
If Kenya's President Mwai Kibaki allows another election to take place, he will surely lose because Kenyan opposition leader Raila Odinga will win by thousands of sympathy votes besides those of his own tribe.
It is unfortunate that the history of Kenya is punctuated with tribalism from pre-independence time.
Kenya's freedom struggle has firm beginnings in tribalism following the Mau Mau rebellion when the Kikuyu tribe required its members to take an oath to drive the white man from Kenya.
As part of the overall clampdown by the colonial government, Jomo Kenyatta was arrested for alleged Mau Mau involvement.
Kenyatta, Kenya's leading nationalist leader, known as the "Burning Spear" to his followers, was later charged for managing the Mau Mau as a terrorist society.
Kenya was the favourite of the British among its three British colonies of Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda, mainly because of the White Highlands, so called because during the colonial period white immigrants settled there in considerable numbers to take advantage of the good soils and growing conditions, as well as the cool climate.
By the time the colony of Kenya was established in 1920, approximately 10,000 British settlers had taken farms in the area, uprooting the original residents.
Kenya became independent on Dec. 12, 1963, and was declared a republic in 1964. There was always a great potential for ethnic division among the African population, but Kenya's first president, Kenyatta, had an ally in a Luo trade unionist, Tom Mboya, who had championed his release during the freedom struggle.
Mboya was included in Kenyatta's cabinet, holding major portfolios in a government heavily dominated by Kikuyus.
Kenyatta was grooming Mboya as a potential successor, a possibility that deeply worried many of the Kikuyu elite. When Mboya suggested in parliament that a number of Kikuyu politicians were enriching themselves at the cost of other tribal groups, the situation became explosive.
On July 5, 1969, the nation was shocked by the assassination of Mboya by a Kikuyu tribesman. Allegations linking the assassin to prominent KANU party members were dismissed, and in the ensuing political turmoil, Kenyatta banned the opposition party, the Kenya People's Union (KPU), and arrested its leader Jaramogi Oginga Odinga (father of the present opposition leader Raila Odinga.)
Anthony Ngare, a journalist with the country's East African Standard, has argued that discrimination along tribal lines has also dominated the Kenyan workplace.
Ngare said that although many Kenyans believe in the principles of a meritocracy, up to 80 per cent of the workforce of some Kenyan companies often comes from the same tribal area.
Agreeing with Ngare, Evelyn Mungai, the chair of the Kenyan branch of anti-corruption organization Transparency International, has admitted that the problem had become much worse in the last year. In particular, she said tribalism is rampant throughout the public sector, where it is about "who you know."
"You appoint people from your background because you want votes, and that's why the public sector has been very much in the news," she told a BBC World Service's Outlook program.
"Lately, what we have seen in the political arena is we have seen people from a particular tribe going to the president saying: 'you've got to appoint people from my area to such-and-such a position.' "
She believed that tribalism in the workplace has blossomed since Kenya became a multi-party democracy, with more people thinking in terms of their tribe. But Mungai also said she believed the younger generation was less inclined to think along tribal lines, which offered hope for the future.
However, we have to be optimistic and find a solution for tribalism. Part of the solution lies in economic development and growth.
If there is growth in the economy, it will be followed by more education and less ignorance among its residents and tribes. This would also mean that there will be fewer unemployed thugs for politicians to operate as their goons.
Another part of the solution is to have genuine democracy with independent law courts as was made evident during the recent Pakistan crisis when the judiciary clearly showed its independence.
People would have no need to rely on their tribe if they could rely on all of their ballot papers being counted, and could expect honest judgments from courts.
There is still hope for Kenya, which has a large group of intellectuals and a free press, which should lead the way for democratic reforms.
Mansoor Ladha, a freelance journalist living in Calgary, worked with The Daily Nation in Nairobi, Kenya.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
January 14, 2008
Empty Seas
Europe Takes Africa’s Fish, and Boatloads of Migrants Follow
By SHARON LAFRANIERE
KAYAR, Senegal — Ale Nodye, the son and grandson of fishermen in this northern Senegalese village, said that for the past six years he netted barely enough fish to buy fuel for his boat. So he jumped at the chance for a new beginning. He volunteered to captain a wooden canoe full of 87 Africans to the Canary Islands in the hopes of making their way illegally to Europe.
The 2006 voyage ended badly. He and his passengers were arrested and deported. His cousin died on a similar mission not long afterward.
Nonetheless, Mr. Nodye, 27, said he intended to try again.
“I could be a fisherman there,” he said. “Life is better there. There are no fish in the sea here anymore.”
Many scientists agree. A vast flotilla of industrial trawlers from the European Union, China, Russia and elsewhere, together with an abundance of local boats, have so thoroughly scoured northwest Africa’s ocean floor that major fish populations are collapsing.
That has crippled coastal economies and added to the surge of illegal migrants who brave the high seas in wooden pirogues hoping to reach Europe. While reasons for immigration are as varied as fish species, Europe’s lure has clearly intensified as northwest Africa’s fish population has dwindled.
Last year roughly 31,000 Africans tried to reach the Canary Islands, a prime transit point to Europe, in more than 900 boats. About 6,000 died or disappeared, according to one estimate cited by the United Nations.
The region’s governments bear much of the blame for their fisheries’ decline. Many have allowed a desire for money from foreign fleets to override concern about the long-term health of their fisheries. Illegal fishermen are notoriously common; efforts to control fishing, rare.
But in the view of West African fishermen, Europe is having its fish and eating them, too. Their own waters largely fished out, European nations have steered their heavily subsidized fleets to Africa.
“As Europe has sought to manage its fisheries and to limit its fishing, what we’ve done is to export the overfishing problem elsewhere, particularly to Africa,” said Steve Trent, executive director of the Environmental Justice Foundation, a London-based research group.
European Union officials insist that their bloc, which has negotiated fishing deals with Africa since 1979, is a scapegoat for Africa’s management failures and the misdeeds of other foreign fleets. They argue that African officials oversell fishing rights, inflate potential catches and allow pirate vessels and local boats free rein in breeding grounds.
Pierre Chavance, a scientist with the French Institute for Research and Development, said both foreign fleets and African governments allowed financial considerations to trump concerns for fish or local fishermen.
“One side has a big interest to sell, and the other side has a big interest to buy,” he said. “The negotiations are based upon what people want to hear, not the reality.”
Overfishing is hardly limited to African waters. Worldwide, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that 75 percent of fish stocks are overfished or fished to their maximum. But in a poor region like northwest Africa, the consequences are particularly stark.
Fish are the main source of protein for much of the region, but some species are now so scarce that the poor can no longer afford them, said Pierre Failler, senior research fellow for the British Center for Economics and Management of Aquatic Resources.
The coastal stock of bottom-dwelling fish is just a quarter of what it was 25 years ago, studies show. Already, scientists say, the sea’s ecological balance has shifted as species lower on the food chain replace some above them.
In Mauritania, lobsters vanished years ago. The catch of octopus — now the most valuable species — is four-fifths of what it should be if it were not overexploited. A 2002 report by the European Commission found that the most marketable fish species off the coast of Senegal were close to collapse — essentially sliding toward extinction.
“The sea is being emptied,” said Moctar Ba, a consultant who once led scientific research programs for Mauritania and West Africa.
In a region where at least 200,000 people depend on the sea for their livelihoods, local investments in fishing industries are drying up with the fish stocks. In Guinea-Bissau, fishermen who were buying more boats less than a decade ago now complain they are in debt and looking to get out of the business.
“Before, my whole family could live on what we caught in one pirogue,” said Niadye Diouf, 28, whose Senegalese family sold their pirogue for $500 to pay for an illegal — and ultimately unsuccessful — voyage to Spain. “Now even five pirogues would not be enough.”
Fishermen like Mr. Diouf argue that Africans should have first priority in their own waters — an idea enshrined in a 1994 United Nations treaty on the seas that acknowledges the right of local governments to sell foreigners fishing rights only to their surplus stocks.
But that rule has been repeatedly violated along northwest Africa’s nearly 2,000-mile coast.
Studies dating to 1991 indicated that Senegal’s fishery was in trouble. In 2002, a scientific report commissioned by the European Union stated that the biomass of important species had declined by three-fourths in 15 years — a finding the authors said should “cause significant alarm.”
But the week the report was issued, European Union officials signed a new four-year fishing deal with Senegal, agreeing to pay $16 million a year to fish for bottom-dwelling species and tuna.
Four years later, Mauritania followed suit. Despite reports that octopus were overfished by nearly a third, in 2006 Mauritania’s government sold six more years’ access to 43 European Union vessels for $146 million a year — the equivalent of nearly a fifth of Mauritania’s government budget.
“I don’t know a government in the region that can say no,” said Mr. Chavance, the French scientist. “This is good money, and they need it.”
Sid-Ahmed Ould-Abeid, who leads a Mauritanian association of small fishermen, said: “The E.U. has the money, so it has the power. It is easier to sacrifice the local fishermen.”
Those sacrifices are multiplying in Mauritania. One of the few countries with a private industrial fleet, most of it jointly owned with the Chinese, it has lost one-third of roughly 150 trawlers since 1996.
Ahmed and Mohamed Cherif, whose family owns P.C.A., a fish exporting firm in Nouadhibou, say they have lost money for two years running. Their two new orange trawlers spend weeks docked in Nouadhibou’s rough-hewn harbor.
“We can’t compete with the European Union,” Ahmed Cherif said as he strolled past row after row of idle pirogues. “The government should have kept this resource for Mauritanians. Let these people work.”
Europe is just one foreign contributor to fish declines. Countries from Asia and the former Soviet Union also dispatched ships to ply northwest Africa’s seas. But often those fleets stay for shorter durations and without the same promises of responsible fishing and local development.
In fact, little development has taken place since the European Union signed its first fish deal with a West African nation in 1979. The huge economic benefits that come from processing and exporting the catch remain firmly in European hands.
African governments either misspent or diverted the funds earmarked for development to more pressing needs, while the Europeans sometimes made only token efforts on promised projects. Nouadhibou harbor, for instance, remains littered with 107 wrecked fishing trawlers eight years after the European Union promised to clear them to help develop the port.
In their defense, European officials say they moved to reform their fishing agreements in 2003 to address criticism that ship operators were overfishing and were undercutting local fishermen. Fabrizio Donatella, who heads the European Union unit that negotiates fishing deals, says the new agreements are models of responsible fishing and transparency.
“One cannot say we are not fishing the surplus or that we have not respected scientific recommendations,” he said. Ultimately, African governments must protect and manage their own resources, he said.
Examples of mismanagement abound. The number of pirogues in six northwest African countries exploded from 3,000 to 19,000 in the last half-century, but Senegal and other nations have only recently begun to license them.
Guinea-Bissau, a nation of 1.4 million people, is a prime example of how not to run a fishery. According to Vladimir Kacyznski, a marine scientist with the University of Washington, no one has comprehensively studied the nation’s coastal waters for at least 20 years.
For two years, Sanji Fati was in charge of enforcing Guinea-Bissau’s fishing rules. When he took the job in 2005, he said, his agency did not have a single working patrol boat to monitor hundreds of pirogues and dozens of industrial trawlers, most of them foreign. An estimated 40 percent of fish were caught without licenses or in violation of regulations, and vessel operators routinely lied about their haul. Government observers were mostly illiterate, underpaid and easily bought off.
Mr. Fati tightened enforcement, but said he still felt as if he was waging a one-man war. A few months ago, he left in frustration.
That bleak picture did not stop Guinea-Bissau and the European Union from agreeing last May to allow European boats to fish its waters for shrimp, fish, octopus and tuna. Over the next four years, the agreement will pump $42 million into a government that is months behind in paying salaries and still emerging from civil war.
Daniel Gomes, Guinea-Bissau’s 12th fishing minister in eight years, said he had tried to be conservative in how much access to grant foreigners, despite paltry scientific data and severe economic pressures.
Still, asked whether his nation would end up with empty waters, he replied: “This prospect is not out of the question. This could happen.”
Empty Seas
Europe Takes Africa’s Fish, and Boatloads of Migrants Follow
By SHARON LAFRANIERE
KAYAR, Senegal — Ale Nodye, the son and grandson of fishermen in this northern Senegalese village, said that for the past six years he netted barely enough fish to buy fuel for his boat. So he jumped at the chance for a new beginning. He volunteered to captain a wooden canoe full of 87 Africans to the Canary Islands in the hopes of making their way illegally to Europe.
The 2006 voyage ended badly. He and his passengers were arrested and deported. His cousin died on a similar mission not long afterward.
Nonetheless, Mr. Nodye, 27, said he intended to try again.
“I could be a fisherman there,” he said. “Life is better there. There are no fish in the sea here anymore.”
Many scientists agree. A vast flotilla of industrial trawlers from the European Union, China, Russia and elsewhere, together with an abundance of local boats, have so thoroughly scoured northwest Africa’s ocean floor that major fish populations are collapsing.
That has crippled coastal economies and added to the surge of illegal migrants who brave the high seas in wooden pirogues hoping to reach Europe. While reasons for immigration are as varied as fish species, Europe’s lure has clearly intensified as northwest Africa’s fish population has dwindled.
Last year roughly 31,000 Africans tried to reach the Canary Islands, a prime transit point to Europe, in more than 900 boats. About 6,000 died or disappeared, according to one estimate cited by the United Nations.
The region’s governments bear much of the blame for their fisheries’ decline. Many have allowed a desire for money from foreign fleets to override concern about the long-term health of their fisheries. Illegal fishermen are notoriously common; efforts to control fishing, rare.
But in the view of West African fishermen, Europe is having its fish and eating them, too. Their own waters largely fished out, European nations have steered their heavily subsidized fleets to Africa.
“As Europe has sought to manage its fisheries and to limit its fishing, what we’ve done is to export the overfishing problem elsewhere, particularly to Africa,” said Steve Trent, executive director of the Environmental Justice Foundation, a London-based research group.
European Union officials insist that their bloc, which has negotiated fishing deals with Africa since 1979, is a scapegoat for Africa’s management failures and the misdeeds of other foreign fleets. They argue that African officials oversell fishing rights, inflate potential catches and allow pirate vessels and local boats free rein in breeding grounds.
Pierre Chavance, a scientist with the French Institute for Research and Development, said both foreign fleets and African governments allowed financial considerations to trump concerns for fish or local fishermen.
“One side has a big interest to sell, and the other side has a big interest to buy,” he said. “The negotiations are based upon what people want to hear, not the reality.”
Overfishing is hardly limited to African waters. Worldwide, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that 75 percent of fish stocks are overfished or fished to their maximum. But in a poor region like northwest Africa, the consequences are particularly stark.
Fish are the main source of protein for much of the region, but some species are now so scarce that the poor can no longer afford them, said Pierre Failler, senior research fellow for the British Center for Economics and Management of Aquatic Resources.
The coastal stock of bottom-dwelling fish is just a quarter of what it was 25 years ago, studies show. Already, scientists say, the sea’s ecological balance has shifted as species lower on the food chain replace some above them.
In Mauritania, lobsters vanished years ago. The catch of octopus — now the most valuable species — is four-fifths of what it should be if it were not overexploited. A 2002 report by the European Commission found that the most marketable fish species off the coast of Senegal were close to collapse — essentially sliding toward extinction.
“The sea is being emptied,” said Moctar Ba, a consultant who once led scientific research programs for Mauritania and West Africa.
In a region where at least 200,000 people depend on the sea for their livelihoods, local investments in fishing industries are drying up with the fish stocks. In Guinea-Bissau, fishermen who were buying more boats less than a decade ago now complain they are in debt and looking to get out of the business.
“Before, my whole family could live on what we caught in one pirogue,” said Niadye Diouf, 28, whose Senegalese family sold their pirogue for $500 to pay for an illegal — and ultimately unsuccessful — voyage to Spain. “Now even five pirogues would not be enough.”
Fishermen like Mr. Diouf argue that Africans should have first priority in their own waters — an idea enshrined in a 1994 United Nations treaty on the seas that acknowledges the right of local governments to sell foreigners fishing rights only to their surplus stocks.
But that rule has been repeatedly violated along northwest Africa’s nearly 2,000-mile coast.
Studies dating to 1991 indicated that Senegal’s fishery was in trouble. In 2002, a scientific report commissioned by the European Union stated that the biomass of important species had declined by three-fourths in 15 years — a finding the authors said should “cause significant alarm.”
But the week the report was issued, European Union officials signed a new four-year fishing deal with Senegal, agreeing to pay $16 million a year to fish for bottom-dwelling species and tuna.
Four years later, Mauritania followed suit. Despite reports that octopus were overfished by nearly a third, in 2006 Mauritania’s government sold six more years’ access to 43 European Union vessels for $146 million a year — the equivalent of nearly a fifth of Mauritania’s government budget.
“I don’t know a government in the region that can say no,” said Mr. Chavance, the French scientist. “This is good money, and they need it.”
Sid-Ahmed Ould-Abeid, who leads a Mauritanian association of small fishermen, said: “The E.U. has the money, so it has the power. It is easier to sacrifice the local fishermen.”
Those sacrifices are multiplying in Mauritania. One of the few countries with a private industrial fleet, most of it jointly owned with the Chinese, it has lost one-third of roughly 150 trawlers since 1996.
Ahmed and Mohamed Cherif, whose family owns P.C.A., a fish exporting firm in Nouadhibou, say they have lost money for two years running. Their two new orange trawlers spend weeks docked in Nouadhibou’s rough-hewn harbor.
“We can’t compete with the European Union,” Ahmed Cherif said as he strolled past row after row of idle pirogues. “The government should have kept this resource for Mauritanians. Let these people work.”
Europe is just one foreign contributor to fish declines. Countries from Asia and the former Soviet Union also dispatched ships to ply northwest Africa’s seas. But often those fleets stay for shorter durations and without the same promises of responsible fishing and local development.
In fact, little development has taken place since the European Union signed its first fish deal with a West African nation in 1979. The huge economic benefits that come from processing and exporting the catch remain firmly in European hands.
African governments either misspent or diverted the funds earmarked for development to more pressing needs, while the Europeans sometimes made only token efforts on promised projects. Nouadhibou harbor, for instance, remains littered with 107 wrecked fishing trawlers eight years after the European Union promised to clear them to help develop the port.
In their defense, European officials say they moved to reform their fishing agreements in 2003 to address criticism that ship operators were overfishing and were undercutting local fishermen. Fabrizio Donatella, who heads the European Union unit that negotiates fishing deals, says the new agreements are models of responsible fishing and transparency.
“One cannot say we are not fishing the surplus or that we have not respected scientific recommendations,” he said. Ultimately, African governments must protect and manage their own resources, he said.
Examples of mismanagement abound. The number of pirogues in six northwest African countries exploded from 3,000 to 19,000 in the last half-century, but Senegal and other nations have only recently begun to license them.
Guinea-Bissau, a nation of 1.4 million people, is a prime example of how not to run a fishery. According to Vladimir Kacyznski, a marine scientist with the University of Washington, no one has comprehensively studied the nation’s coastal waters for at least 20 years.
For two years, Sanji Fati was in charge of enforcing Guinea-Bissau’s fishing rules. When he took the job in 2005, he said, his agency did not have a single working patrol boat to monitor hundreds of pirogues and dozens of industrial trawlers, most of them foreign. An estimated 40 percent of fish were caught without licenses or in violation of regulations, and vessel operators routinely lied about their haul. Government observers were mostly illiterate, underpaid and easily bought off.
Mr. Fati tightened enforcement, but said he still felt as if he was waging a one-man war. A few months ago, he left in frustration.
That bleak picture did not stop Guinea-Bissau and the European Union from agreeing last May to allow European boats to fish its waters for shrimp, fish, octopus and tuna. Over the next four years, the agreement will pump $42 million into a government that is months behind in paying salaries and still emerging from civil war.
Daniel Gomes, Guinea-Bissau’s 12th fishing minister in eight years, said he had tried to be conservative in how much access to grant foreigners, despite paltry scientific data and severe economic pressures.
Still, asked whether his nation would end up with empty waters, he replied: “This prospect is not out of the question. This could happen.”
January 16, 2008
Kenyan Opposition Wins a Skirmish
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
NAIROBI, Kenya — Judging from the opening session of Parliament on Tuesday, it looks like it is going to be a long political year in Kenya.
Parliament members, meeting for the first time since Kenya’s election crisis erupted last month, shouted at each other for an hour and a half over how to vote for a new speaker — whether it should be in secret or not — and then shouted some more when it came time to decide where to put the ballot box.
In the end, opposition leaders prevailed in the first political skirmish since the disputed election, installing their candidate in the influential position of the next parliamentary speaker.
It took three heated hours. Both sides hurled bitter accusations, with opposition leaders jumping out of their seats to accuse the party of President Mwai Kibaki of rigging the vote from the Dec. 27 election, and the president’s party yelling back that the opposition had instigated the burst of ethnically-driven violence that followed it. Red Cross officials on Tuesday said the nationwide death toll had risen to at least 612.
“You went into the elections with secret ballots and you stole the vote,” shouted William Ruto, one of the more vocal opposition leaders.
“Genocide!” members of the president’s party hissed back at him.
“Can we now proceed, please?” an exasperated clerk asked.
The session seemed a mix of theatrics, stubbornness, genuine outrage and good old fashioned partisan politics with Parliament members split right down the middle, half supporting the president and half supporting the opposition. The president’s party, the Party of National Unity, wanted to select the speaker via secret ballots, while the opposition insisted they had the right to show their colleagues who they voted for.
The opposition eventually backed down before Kenneth Marende, a lawyer and member of the leading opposition party, the Orange Democratic Movement, won the job of speaker by a vote of 105 to 101, defeating an ally of the president.
The speaker is essentially the referee of the parliament, controlling the flow of debate and setting the agenda, though the parliament here historically has been weak compared to the sweeping powers of the presidency.
The posturing in the scarlet-carpeted, wood-paneled Parliament chamber laid bare the political crisis that has shaken Kenya, which until last month was considered one of the most stable countries on the continent. Neither side has been willing to give an inch, with both Mr. Kibaki and Raila Odinga, the top opposition leader, claiming to have won the presidency. Despite pleas from Western leaders and people across Kenya, the two men have refused to meet.
Indeed, Tuesday’s session of Parliament may have been the first time they were in the same room since the election. Many people here believe the tensions – and violence – will continue until the two men sit down with each other and agree on a durable political solution.
Kofi Annan, the former secretary general of the United Nations, was expected to arrive in Kenya on Tuesday to help mediate but reports on Kenyan television on Tuesday night said that he had fallen ill and was postponing his trip.
Meanwhile, opposition leaders vowed to press ahead with their plans to hold protests across the country on Wednesday, which many Kenyans feared would degenerate into bloodshed and destruction. The last set of rallies ignited fighting in the slums between ethnic groups loyal to the opposition and those loyal to the president.
But the opposition’s victory in the contest for speaker may cool things down. It showed for the first time that the opposition controls Parliament, which could provide an outlet for the frustrations that have been building among opposition supporters. Mr. Odinga’s party has 99 seats out of the 210 elected positions, the most of any party, while the president’s party has less than 45. On Tuesday opposition leaders succeeded in getting members of the smaller, independent parties to vote with them, which proved the crucial difference. Each opposition member wore an orange handkerchief, a small square of defiance.
At the end of the session, Mr. Marende, the speaker, resisted calls by members of his party to change the swearing-in oath by cutting out any mention of the president. Mr. Kibaki sat at the front of the chamber, statue-still and silent, for the entire session, which ran for more than 8 hours.
Kenyan Opposition Wins a Skirmish
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
NAIROBI, Kenya — Judging from the opening session of Parliament on Tuesday, it looks like it is going to be a long political year in Kenya.
Parliament members, meeting for the first time since Kenya’s election crisis erupted last month, shouted at each other for an hour and a half over how to vote for a new speaker — whether it should be in secret or not — and then shouted some more when it came time to decide where to put the ballot box.
In the end, opposition leaders prevailed in the first political skirmish since the disputed election, installing their candidate in the influential position of the next parliamentary speaker.
It took three heated hours. Both sides hurled bitter accusations, with opposition leaders jumping out of their seats to accuse the party of President Mwai Kibaki of rigging the vote from the Dec. 27 election, and the president’s party yelling back that the opposition had instigated the burst of ethnically-driven violence that followed it. Red Cross officials on Tuesday said the nationwide death toll had risen to at least 612.
“You went into the elections with secret ballots and you stole the vote,” shouted William Ruto, one of the more vocal opposition leaders.
“Genocide!” members of the president’s party hissed back at him.
“Can we now proceed, please?” an exasperated clerk asked.
The session seemed a mix of theatrics, stubbornness, genuine outrage and good old fashioned partisan politics with Parliament members split right down the middle, half supporting the president and half supporting the opposition. The president’s party, the Party of National Unity, wanted to select the speaker via secret ballots, while the opposition insisted they had the right to show their colleagues who they voted for.
The opposition eventually backed down before Kenneth Marende, a lawyer and member of the leading opposition party, the Orange Democratic Movement, won the job of speaker by a vote of 105 to 101, defeating an ally of the president.
The speaker is essentially the referee of the parliament, controlling the flow of debate and setting the agenda, though the parliament here historically has been weak compared to the sweeping powers of the presidency.
The posturing in the scarlet-carpeted, wood-paneled Parliament chamber laid bare the political crisis that has shaken Kenya, which until last month was considered one of the most stable countries on the continent. Neither side has been willing to give an inch, with both Mr. Kibaki and Raila Odinga, the top opposition leader, claiming to have won the presidency. Despite pleas from Western leaders and people across Kenya, the two men have refused to meet.
Indeed, Tuesday’s session of Parliament may have been the first time they were in the same room since the election. Many people here believe the tensions – and violence – will continue until the two men sit down with each other and agree on a durable political solution.
Kofi Annan, the former secretary general of the United Nations, was expected to arrive in Kenya on Tuesday to help mediate but reports on Kenyan television on Tuesday night said that he had fallen ill and was postponing his trip.
Meanwhile, opposition leaders vowed to press ahead with their plans to hold protests across the country on Wednesday, which many Kenyans feared would degenerate into bloodshed and destruction. The last set of rallies ignited fighting in the slums between ethnic groups loyal to the opposition and those loyal to the president.
But the opposition’s victory in the contest for speaker may cool things down. It showed for the first time that the opposition controls Parliament, which could provide an outlet for the frustrations that have been building among opposition supporters. Mr. Odinga’s party has 99 seats out of the 210 elected positions, the most of any party, while the president’s party has less than 45. On Tuesday opposition leaders succeeded in getting members of the smaller, independent parties to vote with them, which proved the crucial difference. Each opposition member wore an orange handkerchief, a small square of defiance.
At the end of the session, Mr. Marende, the speaker, resisted calls by members of his party to change the swearing-in oath by cutting out any mention of the president. Mr. Kibaki sat at the front of the chamber, statue-still and silent, for the entire session, which ran for more than 8 hours.
There is a related multimedia linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/17/world ... ?th&emc=th
January 17, 2008
Protests Bring New Violence in Kenya
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
NAIROBI, Kenya — Opposition protests resumed in Kenya on Wednesday, and as many people here feared, violence erupted across the country once again.
The worst clashes were in Kisumu, Kenya’s third largest city and an opposition stronghold, where mobs of furious young men hurled stones at police officers, who responded by charging into the crowds and firing their guns.
One of Kenya’s television stations broadcast images of a police officer in Kisumu shooting an unarmed protester who was dancing in the street and making faces at security agents. After the protester fell to the ground, the officer ran up to him and kicked him several times. Witnesses said the protester later died.
“There’s been war since the morning,” said Eric Otieno, a mechanic in Kisumu. “The police are whipping women, children, everyone. We were just trying to demonstrate peacefully.”
Eric Kiraithe, a spokesman for the Kenyan police, said the only people wounded by police officers were hooligans destroying property and robbing people.
“What we are seeing are teams of young men trying to commit crimes,” Mr. Kiraithe said. “You cannot call this a demonstration.”
Opposition leaders have vowed to carry on protests for two more days, and it seems that Kenya’s security forces, which have deemed all protests illegal, are cracking down harshly. On Wednesday afternoon, police officers in padded suits sealed off downtown Nairobi, the capital, and ordered everyone out, sending wave after wave of bewildered office workers trudging down the roads leading to the suburbs.
Fourteen of Kenya’s leading donors, including the United States, issued a statement this week warning the Kenyan government that they were reviewing foreign aid in light of the crisis. The United States gives the country more than $600 million in aid each year.
It seems that Kenya has been unable to get back to normal after a flawed election on Dec. 27 ignited unrest and violence that has already claimed more than 600 lives. Mwai Kibaki, the incumbent president, was declared the winner over Raila Odinga, a top opposition leader, but several election observers said the government rigged the tallying of the results to give the president a slim, 11th-hour victory.
American diplomats in Kenya recently finished their own analysis of the voting results and concluded that the election was so flawed it was impossible to tell who really won.
Outraged opposition supporters have attacked members of the president’s ethnic group, with many people killed by machete-wielding mobs. Most of the ethnic violence has diminished, though it has left more than 200,000 people displaced.
On Wednesday, many protesters said that they would continue to wreak havoc until Mr. Kibaki stepped down. Judging by the amount of live ammunition and tear gas that was fired at demonstrators or near them, police officials seem increasingly determined to show that they will not back down. Opposition leaders are not budging either.
“Nothing will stop us from mounting these rallies,” Mr. Odinga said.
Kenya’s economy, which powers trade and industry across a large part of eastern Africa, is taking a beating from all this. Tourists, drawn by wildlife and white-sand beaches, are canceling trips in droves, leaving some of the biggest hotels in the country only 20 percent occupied, which could lead to layoffs.
On Wednesday morning, protesters fought with the police in the streets of Mombasa, Kenya’s biggest port and a main artery to the rest of East Africa. Witnesses said that hundreds of demonstrators, many of them Muslims, tried to block traffic circles in the city center but that police officers in riot gear chased them away with tear gas.
Previous unrest in Mombasa seriously disrupted food and fuel supplies, forcing several neighboring countries, like Uganda and Rwanda, to ration gasoline. Many Muslims in Kenya support the opposition because they believe that the Kenyan government, a close American ally, has persecuted members of their religion during counterterrorism operations.
Many Kenyans are getting tired of the violence and disruptions and the cloud of uncertainty that hangs over the country. They had hoped that tensions would now decrease because the opposition had demonstrated that it could influence the government through its numbers in Parliament and did not necessarily need to take its grievances to the streets.
On Tuesday night, the opposition party, which won more seats in Parliament than the president’s party in the December elections, used its muscle to install one of its own members as speaker, which could mean serious gridlock in Kenya’s government for the foreseeable future.
Kennedy Abwao contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/17/world ... ?th&emc=th
January 17, 2008
Protests Bring New Violence in Kenya
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
NAIROBI, Kenya — Opposition protests resumed in Kenya on Wednesday, and as many people here feared, violence erupted across the country once again.
The worst clashes were in Kisumu, Kenya’s third largest city and an opposition stronghold, where mobs of furious young men hurled stones at police officers, who responded by charging into the crowds and firing their guns.
One of Kenya’s television stations broadcast images of a police officer in Kisumu shooting an unarmed protester who was dancing in the street and making faces at security agents. After the protester fell to the ground, the officer ran up to him and kicked him several times. Witnesses said the protester later died.
“There’s been war since the morning,” said Eric Otieno, a mechanic in Kisumu. “The police are whipping women, children, everyone. We were just trying to demonstrate peacefully.”
Eric Kiraithe, a spokesman for the Kenyan police, said the only people wounded by police officers were hooligans destroying property and robbing people.
“What we are seeing are teams of young men trying to commit crimes,” Mr. Kiraithe said. “You cannot call this a demonstration.”
Opposition leaders have vowed to carry on protests for two more days, and it seems that Kenya’s security forces, which have deemed all protests illegal, are cracking down harshly. On Wednesday afternoon, police officers in padded suits sealed off downtown Nairobi, the capital, and ordered everyone out, sending wave after wave of bewildered office workers trudging down the roads leading to the suburbs.
Fourteen of Kenya’s leading donors, including the United States, issued a statement this week warning the Kenyan government that they were reviewing foreign aid in light of the crisis. The United States gives the country more than $600 million in aid each year.
It seems that Kenya has been unable to get back to normal after a flawed election on Dec. 27 ignited unrest and violence that has already claimed more than 600 lives. Mwai Kibaki, the incumbent president, was declared the winner over Raila Odinga, a top opposition leader, but several election observers said the government rigged the tallying of the results to give the president a slim, 11th-hour victory.
American diplomats in Kenya recently finished their own analysis of the voting results and concluded that the election was so flawed it was impossible to tell who really won.
Outraged opposition supporters have attacked members of the president’s ethnic group, with many people killed by machete-wielding mobs. Most of the ethnic violence has diminished, though it has left more than 200,000 people displaced.
On Wednesday, many protesters said that they would continue to wreak havoc until Mr. Kibaki stepped down. Judging by the amount of live ammunition and tear gas that was fired at demonstrators or near them, police officials seem increasingly determined to show that they will not back down. Opposition leaders are not budging either.
“Nothing will stop us from mounting these rallies,” Mr. Odinga said.
Kenya’s economy, which powers trade and industry across a large part of eastern Africa, is taking a beating from all this. Tourists, drawn by wildlife and white-sand beaches, are canceling trips in droves, leaving some of the biggest hotels in the country only 20 percent occupied, which could lead to layoffs.
On Wednesday morning, protesters fought with the police in the streets of Mombasa, Kenya’s biggest port and a main artery to the rest of East Africa. Witnesses said that hundreds of demonstrators, many of them Muslims, tried to block traffic circles in the city center but that police officers in riot gear chased them away with tear gas.
Previous unrest in Mombasa seriously disrupted food and fuel supplies, forcing several neighboring countries, like Uganda and Rwanda, to ration gasoline. Many Muslims in Kenya support the opposition because they believe that the Kenyan government, a close American ally, has persecuted members of their religion during counterterrorism operations.
Many Kenyans are getting tired of the violence and disruptions and the cloud of uncertainty that hangs over the country. They had hoped that tensions would now decrease because the opposition had demonstrated that it could influence the government through its numbers in Parliament and did not necessarily need to take its grievances to the streets.
On Tuesday night, the opposition party, which won more seats in Parliament than the president’s party in the December elections, used its muscle to install one of its own members as speaker, which could mean serious gridlock in Kenya’s government for the foreseeable future.
Kennedy Abwao contributed reporting.
There is a related multimedia linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/18/world ... ref=slogin
January 18, 2008
Protesters Clash With Police in Kenya and Loot Train
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN and KENNEDY ABWAO
NAIROBI, Kenya — Law and order seem to be steadily deteriorating in some parts of Kenya, like the Kibera slum here in Nairobi, where on Thursday protesters hijacked and looted a freight train bound for Uganda.
Police officers responded by storming the area, and witnesses said officers shot several unarmed civilians.
Residents of Kibera said they had blocked the train tracks, which snake between rows of iron shanties, because nearly three weeks of postelection turbulence had left them with closed stores and dwindling supplies.
“The people are scared,” said Joseph Owira, a barber in Kibera. “There is no food.”
On the second day of a new round of nationwide protests, the situation in Kenya seemed as gloomy as ever, with opposition supporters fighting the police in several cities and Kenya’s political leaders still miles apart. The opposition is protesting the Dec. 27 election, in which President Mwai Kibaki was declared the winner of a new term by a wafer-thin margin over Raila Odinga, the top opposition leader, who says the election was rigged.
On Thursday, Mr. Odinga held a news conference deploring the tactics used by the police to break up demonstrations, which the government has deemed illegal. Mr. Odinga had called on supporters to hold protests on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday of this week. “Police are executing innocent citizens at will while the world watches and talks about dialogue,” Mr. Odinga said. “How do you dialogue with killers?”
Police officials said the only people harmed had been hooligans bent on robbing and looting.
“The Kenyan police are acting strictly within the laws of this country and with a lot of extra restraint,” said Eric Kiraithe, a police spokesman.
The Kenyan authorities appear to be steadily ratcheting up the pressure. On Thursday, officers in Kisumu, in western Kenya, briefly detained several journalists who were taking pictures of street clashes.
The day before, a Kenyan television crew filmed a police officer in Kisumu shooting an unarmed demonstrator who was making faces at security agents. The demonstrator died, and after the disturbing scene was shown, many opposition supporters vowed to take revenge.
More than 600 people have been killed in the mayhem since the election. Much of the violence has been ethnically driven, with groups who support the opposition venting their frustrations at the president’s ethnic group, the Kikuyu, and at the Kamba, who tend to support Kenya’s vice president, Kalonzo Musyoka. On Thursday night, men with machetes attacked several Kamba residents of Kibera.
As the crisis grinds on, countries that provide aid to Kenya are becoming increasingly critical. On Thursday, the European Parliament threatened to freeze aid to Kenya’s government if a political solution was not found.
But Alfred Mutua, a Kenyan government spokesman, brushed this aside.
“The government of Kenya will not be blackmailed,” he said. “We are able to support ourselves.”
It is difficult to tell if the protests will fade out because of fatigue — many Kenyans have said they simply want to go back to work — or intensify. The number of protesters seems to be decreasing, but those engaged seem more determined. Slings to hurl rocks are now a common sight in Nairobi’s slums. So are phalanxes of police officers crouching behind plastic shields and firing guns.
Kennedy Abwao contributed reporting from Nairobi.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/18/world ... ref=slogin
January 18, 2008
Protesters Clash With Police in Kenya and Loot Train
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN and KENNEDY ABWAO
NAIROBI, Kenya — Law and order seem to be steadily deteriorating in some parts of Kenya, like the Kibera slum here in Nairobi, where on Thursday protesters hijacked and looted a freight train bound for Uganda.
Police officers responded by storming the area, and witnesses said officers shot several unarmed civilians.
Residents of Kibera said they had blocked the train tracks, which snake between rows of iron shanties, because nearly three weeks of postelection turbulence had left them with closed stores and dwindling supplies.
“The people are scared,” said Joseph Owira, a barber in Kibera. “There is no food.”
On the second day of a new round of nationwide protests, the situation in Kenya seemed as gloomy as ever, with opposition supporters fighting the police in several cities and Kenya’s political leaders still miles apart. The opposition is protesting the Dec. 27 election, in which President Mwai Kibaki was declared the winner of a new term by a wafer-thin margin over Raila Odinga, the top opposition leader, who says the election was rigged.
On Thursday, Mr. Odinga held a news conference deploring the tactics used by the police to break up demonstrations, which the government has deemed illegal. Mr. Odinga had called on supporters to hold protests on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday of this week. “Police are executing innocent citizens at will while the world watches and talks about dialogue,” Mr. Odinga said. “How do you dialogue with killers?”
Police officials said the only people harmed had been hooligans bent on robbing and looting.
“The Kenyan police are acting strictly within the laws of this country and with a lot of extra restraint,” said Eric Kiraithe, a police spokesman.
The Kenyan authorities appear to be steadily ratcheting up the pressure. On Thursday, officers in Kisumu, in western Kenya, briefly detained several journalists who were taking pictures of street clashes.
The day before, a Kenyan television crew filmed a police officer in Kisumu shooting an unarmed demonstrator who was making faces at security agents. The demonstrator died, and after the disturbing scene was shown, many opposition supporters vowed to take revenge.
More than 600 people have been killed in the mayhem since the election. Much of the violence has been ethnically driven, with groups who support the opposition venting their frustrations at the president’s ethnic group, the Kikuyu, and at the Kamba, who tend to support Kenya’s vice president, Kalonzo Musyoka. On Thursday night, men with machetes attacked several Kamba residents of Kibera.
As the crisis grinds on, countries that provide aid to Kenya are becoming increasingly critical. On Thursday, the European Parliament threatened to freeze aid to Kenya’s government if a political solution was not found.
But Alfred Mutua, a Kenyan government spokesman, brushed this aside.
“The government of Kenya will not be blackmailed,” he said. “We are able to support ourselves.”
It is difficult to tell if the protests will fade out because of fatigue — many Kenyans have said they simply want to go back to work — or intensify. The number of protesters seems to be decreasing, but those engaged seem more determined. Slings to hurl rocks are now a common sight in Nairobi’s slums. So are phalanxes of police officers crouching behind plastic shields and firing guns.
Kennedy Abwao contributed reporting from Nairobi.
January 19, 2008
Kenya’s Opposition Switches Its Tactics From Street Protests to Business Boycotts
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
NAIROBI, Kenya — Protests cooled in Kenya on Friday as opposition leaders, still furious about last month’s presidential election, announced that they were switching tactics from street demonstrations to boycotts.
After three days of nationwide rallies that degenerated into battles with police officers, the country was mostly calm, save for a few flash points. Witnesses said police officers shot and killed at least two people in Kibera, a huge slum on the outskirts of Nairobi, the capital. Earlier in the day, vandals uprooted a length of train tracks running through Kibera, where a freight train was looted Thursday.
In Narok, a town near the Masai Mara game reserve, ethnic clashes erupted with men battling in the streets, using bows and arrows and machetes. Witnesses said at least five people were killed, and a Kenyan television network showed images of men dancing around a body in Narok’s downtown.
In Mombasa, Kenya’s second-largest city and a major port for East Africa, hundreds of protesters emerged from mosques to call for a new election. Police officers responded with tear gas and gunshots. Witnesses said at least one person was killed, bringing the deaths from the week’s disturbances to more than 20, including several children.
The zero-tolerance policy of the Kenyan police is drawing increasing criticism. Western diplomats in Nairobi have urged the government to allow peaceful rallies —currently banned — and to stop using lethal force against unarmed demonstrators.
Opposition leaders and their supporters have been protesting the elections in December in which Mwai Kibaki, Kenya’s president, was declared the winner by a narrow margin over Raila Odinga, the top opposition leader, amid widespread evidence that election officials had tampered with results.
On Friday, a consortium of Kenyan election monitors and human rights groups announced that there had been so many glaring irregularities in the balloting that it was impossible to tell who had really won, a position echoed by American diplomats who have done their own analysis. The consortium issued a report called “Countdown to Deception: 30 Hours That Destroyed Kenya.”
David Ndii, a researcher for the anticorruption group Transparency International, said that election officials had siphoned away votes for Mr. Odinga and increased the number of votes for Mr. Kibaki during the tallying process. “The suspicious votes are sufficient to alter the outcome of the presidential elections,” Mr. Ndii said.
It is unclear how much impact this will have because Mr. Kibaki and his tight circle of advisers have insisted that the president won the election fairly and that there will be no rerun.
As for the boycotts, Salim Lone, a spokesman for Mr. Odinga, said the plan was to focus on businesses owned by Mr. Kibaki’s allies, like one of Kenya’s biggest dairies and a bus company in Nairobi. “The strategy is to weaken those who are hard-liners and using their wealth to undermine democracy,” he said.
The government has said that Kenya’s economy, which up until last month was the dynamo of East Africa, has been hurt enough. Tourists are leaving, much trade has been blocked and the currency is weakening. “Let us please leave private businesses out of politics,” was the message that Alfred Mutua, a government spokesman, sent via cellphones on Friday.
Police officials on Friday arrested three foreign journalists, including a filmmaker following Mr. Odinga, on charges of terrorism after accusing them of filming vital installations.
Kennedy Abwao contributed reporting.
***
Police kill 13 Kenyans in clash
Protesters in shantytown die in 'massacre'
Nick Tattersall and Barry Moody
Reuters
Saturday, January 19, 2008
CREDIT: Mike Hutchings, Reuters
A policeman dismantles a burning barricade during a protest in Mombasa, Kenya, on Friday. At least 13 people were killed during protests against the re-election of President Mwai Kibaki.
At least 13 people were killed in Kenya on Friday when police opened fire in a Nairobi slum and ethnic groups clashed during protests against the disputed re-election of President Mwai Kibaki.
The worst bloodshed was in the huge Kibera shantytown, an opposition stronghold, where at least seven people were killed and a dozen wounded by police automatic gunfire. International medical charity MSF called it a "massacre."
Police also opened fire and lobbed tear gas in the port of Mombasa, where one person was killed in protests after Muslim prayers Friday, and the southern town of Narok.
The deaths were the worst toll from three days of protests called by opposition leader Raila Odinga's Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) against Kibaki's re-election.
At least 21 people have been killed in the demonstrations, which were due to end. About 650 people have been killed since the disputed Dec. 27 election.
The opposition and human rights groups accuse the police of using excessive force and firing indiscriminately at unarmed protesters. Police say they only shoot at rioters and looters.
"By firing live ammunition into crowds, the police have far exceeded what is acceptable use of force," said Erwin van der Borght, head of Amnesty International's Africa program.
Reuters journalists counted seven bodies from the Kibera shooting, including a man with the back of his head blown off, and 15-year-old girl Rosina Otieno.
Otieno's aunt, Martha Mtishi, told Reuters: "If they can kill a little girl, let them kill us all."
At least 11 wounded people were brought to the hospital. "We need more doctors because . . . we cannot handle an emergency of this magnitude," said hospital administrator Joe Momanyi.
Outside, a crowd shouted: "Murderers and killers!"
A Reuters reporter saw police shooting protesters in Kibera. One man in a red baseball cap and black T-shirt dropped to the ground, blood gushing from his knee.
Protesters built a burning barricade in the slum, and boys hiding in shacks and firing stones from slingshots played a cat-and-mouse game with police.
In southwest Kenya, officials said five people were killed on Friday in clashes between Kibaki's Kikuyu tribe and Maasai anti-government protesters in Narok town.
Maasai and Kikuyu had been fighting in the area since Thursday with homes and shops burned and at least 23 wounded, the police said.
Riot police had to be sent in to clear barricades erected by Maasais, a Reuters journalist said.
Kenya's swift slide into crisis has dented its democratic credentials, horrified world powers and hurt one of Africa's most promising economies.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
Kenya’s Opposition Switches Its Tactics From Street Protests to Business Boycotts
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
NAIROBI, Kenya — Protests cooled in Kenya on Friday as opposition leaders, still furious about last month’s presidential election, announced that they were switching tactics from street demonstrations to boycotts.
After three days of nationwide rallies that degenerated into battles with police officers, the country was mostly calm, save for a few flash points. Witnesses said police officers shot and killed at least two people in Kibera, a huge slum on the outskirts of Nairobi, the capital. Earlier in the day, vandals uprooted a length of train tracks running through Kibera, where a freight train was looted Thursday.
In Narok, a town near the Masai Mara game reserve, ethnic clashes erupted with men battling in the streets, using bows and arrows and machetes. Witnesses said at least five people were killed, and a Kenyan television network showed images of men dancing around a body in Narok’s downtown.
In Mombasa, Kenya’s second-largest city and a major port for East Africa, hundreds of protesters emerged from mosques to call for a new election. Police officers responded with tear gas and gunshots. Witnesses said at least one person was killed, bringing the deaths from the week’s disturbances to more than 20, including several children.
The zero-tolerance policy of the Kenyan police is drawing increasing criticism. Western diplomats in Nairobi have urged the government to allow peaceful rallies —currently banned — and to stop using lethal force against unarmed demonstrators.
Opposition leaders and their supporters have been protesting the elections in December in which Mwai Kibaki, Kenya’s president, was declared the winner by a narrow margin over Raila Odinga, the top opposition leader, amid widespread evidence that election officials had tampered with results.
On Friday, a consortium of Kenyan election monitors and human rights groups announced that there had been so many glaring irregularities in the balloting that it was impossible to tell who had really won, a position echoed by American diplomats who have done their own analysis. The consortium issued a report called “Countdown to Deception: 30 Hours That Destroyed Kenya.”
David Ndii, a researcher for the anticorruption group Transparency International, said that election officials had siphoned away votes for Mr. Odinga and increased the number of votes for Mr. Kibaki during the tallying process. “The suspicious votes are sufficient to alter the outcome of the presidential elections,” Mr. Ndii said.
It is unclear how much impact this will have because Mr. Kibaki and his tight circle of advisers have insisted that the president won the election fairly and that there will be no rerun.
As for the boycotts, Salim Lone, a spokesman for Mr. Odinga, said the plan was to focus on businesses owned by Mr. Kibaki’s allies, like one of Kenya’s biggest dairies and a bus company in Nairobi. “The strategy is to weaken those who are hard-liners and using their wealth to undermine democracy,” he said.
The government has said that Kenya’s economy, which up until last month was the dynamo of East Africa, has been hurt enough. Tourists are leaving, much trade has been blocked and the currency is weakening. “Let us please leave private businesses out of politics,” was the message that Alfred Mutua, a government spokesman, sent via cellphones on Friday.
Police officials on Friday arrested three foreign journalists, including a filmmaker following Mr. Odinga, on charges of terrorism after accusing them of filming vital installations.
Kennedy Abwao contributed reporting.
***
Police kill 13 Kenyans in clash
Protesters in shantytown die in 'massacre'
Nick Tattersall and Barry Moody
Reuters
Saturday, January 19, 2008
CREDIT: Mike Hutchings, Reuters
A policeman dismantles a burning barricade during a protest in Mombasa, Kenya, on Friday. At least 13 people were killed during protests against the re-election of President Mwai Kibaki.
At least 13 people were killed in Kenya on Friday when police opened fire in a Nairobi slum and ethnic groups clashed during protests against the disputed re-election of President Mwai Kibaki.
The worst bloodshed was in the huge Kibera shantytown, an opposition stronghold, where at least seven people were killed and a dozen wounded by police automatic gunfire. International medical charity MSF called it a "massacre."
Police also opened fire and lobbed tear gas in the port of Mombasa, where one person was killed in protests after Muslim prayers Friday, and the southern town of Narok.
The deaths were the worst toll from three days of protests called by opposition leader Raila Odinga's Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) against Kibaki's re-election.
At least 21 people have been killed in the demonstrations, which were due to end. About 650 people have been killed since the disputed Dec. 27 election.
The opposition and human rights groups accuse the police of using excessive force and firing indiscriminately at unarmed protesters. Police say they only shoot at rioters and looters.
"By firing live ammunition into crowds, the police have far exceeded what is acceptable use of force," said Erwin van der Borght, head of Amnesty International's Africa program.
Reuters journalists counted seven bodies from the Kibera shooting, including a man with the back of his head blown off, and 15-year-old girl Rosina Otieno.
Otieno's aunt, Martha Mtishi, told Reuters: "If they can kill a little girl, let them kill us all."
At least 11 wounded people were brought to the hospital. "We need more doctors because . . . we cannot handle an emergency of this magnitude," said hospital administrator Joe Momanyi.
Outside, a crowd shouted: "Murderers and killers!"
A Reuters reporter saw police shooting protesters in Kibera. One man in a red baseball cap and black T-shirt dropped to the ground, blood gushing from his knee.
Protesters built a burning barricade in the slum, and boys hiding in shacks and firing stones from slingshots played a cat-and-mouse game with police.
In southwest Kenya, officials said five people were killed on Friday in clashes between Kibaki's Kikuyu tribe and Maasai anti-government protesters in Narok town.
Maasai and Kikuyu had been fighting in the area since Thursday with homes and shops burned and at least 23 wounded, the police said.
Riot police had to be sent in to clear barricades erected by Maasais, a Reuters journalist said.
Kenya's swift slide into crisis has dented its democratic credentials, horrified world powers and hurt one of Africa's most promising economies.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
January 24, 2008
U.S. Envoy Wants Political Pact in Kenya
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
NAIROBI, Kenya — The American ambassador to Kenya said Wednesday that his deepest worries about the postelection crisis here were not about Kenyans rampaging in the streets or killing one another because of ethnic hatreds, both of which have claimed hundreds of lives.
Possibly even more dangerous, he said, were the deep rifts among the country’s opposing politicians, who seem “entrenched” and surrounded by “hard-liners.”
“You can never underestimate the ability of just a couple of people to tear a place apart,” said Michael E. Ranneberger, the ambassador, during an interview at his home in Nairobi, the capital.
He said his chief concern was whether Mwai Kibaki, the president, and Raila Odinga, the top opposition leader, were “prepared to rise above themselves and put the interests of the nation ahead of their own personal or their group’s political interest.”
“That is still an unanswered question,” he said.
The politicians need to sit down and compromise, the ambassador added, because “we’re in the middle of a very serious crisis.”
It has been four weeks since Kenyans went to the polls in record numbers, and the country is still reeling from the aftershocks of a disputed tally in which Mr. Kibaki was declared the winner over Mr. Odinga, despite widespread evidence of vote rigging. The Kenyan government has said that more than 650 people have been killed, though Western diplomats and aid workers say the death toll is several hundred higher.
On Wednesday, Kofi Annan, the former United Nations secretary general, met with Mr. Odinga and persuaded him to call off another round of protests that had been scheduled for Thursday. Mr. Annan was also supposed to meet with Mr. Kibaki, but the president postponed the get-together until Thursday and chose instead to meet with Yoweri Museveni, Uganda’s president and a close political ally who is pushing his own peace plan.
So far, Mr. Kibaki and Mr. Odinga have said they are willing to negotiate, but neither has offered substantial concessions, despite pleas from Kenyans and other African dignitaries. The two men have yet to talk face to face.
Mr. Annan, who arrived on Tuesday, seems to have created more buzz and hope than any visitors involved in the previous mediation efforts.
“I think everybody knows that if this mission fails, there are no others in the offing,” said Salim Lone, a spokesman for the opposition. The stakes are clearly high. Killings driven by ethnic strife continue in the Rift Valley, one of Kenya’s most scenic provinces but also the most violent because of historic tensions over land that have been ignited by the election controversy. On Wednesday, two more people were killed there by poison arrows.
In Nairobi, street clashes are becoming the norm. A funeral on Wednesday degenerated into a riot. Opposition protesters pelted cars with stones and set a government building on fire. Last week, protesters sabotaged a crucial railway line running to Uganda. It is still out of commission.
The violence has been a mix of ethnically driven killings, fighting in Nairobi’s slums and battles between the police and protesters. Mr. Ranneberger, who has been ambassador here for about a year and a half, said he was “outraged” when he saw television reports last week showing what appeared to be a police officer shooting an unarmed demonstrator. The protester had been dancing in the street and making faces when one officer leveled an assault rifle and shot him at close range. The officer, who is under investigation, was then shown on television kicking the protester, who later died.
Mr. Ranneberger said the fighting, even in the Rift Valley, was not purely ethnic but “politically, economically and socially motivated,” stemming from tensions over land and the perception that Mr. Kibaki’s ethnic group, the Kikuyu, had marginalized others. He said the violence in the Rift Valley after the election appeared to have been organized because of the involvement of large numbers of heavily armed men who seemed to strike just minutes after the disputed results were announced.
Mr. Ranneberger said the American government, which gives more than $600 million in aid to Kenya annually, was frustrated at the political impasse but was not at the stage where it was ready to cut assistance.
“It’s counterproductive,” he said. “And it’s way too premature to talk about anything punitive.”
The way forward, he said, was for the Kenyan government to be more inclusive and to address the long-simmering grievances over economic and political inequality. He also said officials should investigate the postelection violence and fix Kenya’s election system, which has been badly discredited by the balloting on Dec. 27.
“I really am fundamentally optimistic about the future of the country,” he said, citing Kenya’s strong middle class, its high literacy rates and its independent media. “There are all sorts of reasons why Kenya can overcome this.”
U.S. Envoy Wants Political Pact in Kenya
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
NAIROBI, Kenya — The American ambassador to Kenya said Wednesday that his deepest worries about the postelection crisis here were not about Kenyans rampaging in the streets or killing one another because of ethnic hatreds, both of which have claimed hundreds of lives.
Possibly even more dangerous, he said, were the deep rifts among the country’s opposing politicians, who seem “entrenched” and surrounded by “hard-liners.”
“You can never underestimate the ability of just a couple of people to tear a place apart,” said Michael E. Ranneberger, the ambassador, during an interview at his home in Nairobi, the capital.
He said his chief concern was whether Mwai Kibaki, the president, and Raila Odinga, the top opposition leader, were “prepared to rise above themselves and put the interests of the nation ahead of their own personal or their group’s political interest.”
“That is still an unanswered question,” he said.
The politicians need to sit down and compromise, the ambassador added, because “we’re in the middle of a very serious crisis.”
It has been four weeks since Kenyans went to the polls in record numbers, and the country is still reeling from the aftershocks of a disputed tally in which Mr. Kibaki was declared the winner over Mr. Odinga, despite widespread evidence of vote rigging. The Kenyan government has said that more than 650 people have been killed, though Western diplomats and aid workers say the death toll is several hundred higher.
On Wednesday, Kofi Annan, the former United Nations secretary general, met with Mr. Odinga and persuaded him to call off another round of protests that had been scheduled for Thursday. Mr. Annan was also supposed to meet with Mr. Kibaki, but the president postponed the get-together until Thursday and chose instead to meet with Yoweri Museveni, Uganda’s president and a close political ally who is pushing his own peace plan.
So far, Mr. Kibaki and Mr. Odinga have said they are willing to negotiate, but neither has offered substantial concessions, despite pleas from Kenyans and other African dignitaries. The two men have yet to talk face to face.
Mr. Annan, who arrived on Tuesday, seems to have created more buzz and hope than any visitors involved in the previous mediation efforts.
“I think everybody knows that if this mission fails, there are no others in the offing,” said Salim Lone, a spokesman for the opposition. The stakes are clearly high. Killings driven by ethnic strife continue in the Rift Valley, one of Kenya’s most scenic provinces but also the most violent because of historic tensions over land that have been ignited by the election controversy. On Wednesday, two more people were killed there by poison arrows.
In Nairobi, street clashes are becoming the norm. A funeral on Wednesday degenerated into a riot. Opposition protesters pelted cars with stones and set a government building on fire. Last week, protesters sabotaged a crucial railway line running to Uganda. It is still out of commission.
The violence has been a mix of ethnically driven killings, fighting in Nairobi’s slums and battles between the police and protesters. Mr. Ranneberger, who has been ambassador here for about a year and a half, said he was “outraged” when he saw television reports last week showing what appeared to be a police officer shooting an unarmed demonstrator. The protester had been dancing in the street and making faces when one officer leveled an assault rifle and shot him at close range. The officer, who is under investigation, was then shown on television kicking the protester, who later died.
Mr. Ranneberger said the fighting, even in the Rift Valley, was not purely ethnic but “politically, economically and socially motivated,” stemming from tensions over land and the perception that Mr. Kibaki’s ethnic group, the Kikuyu, had marginalized others. He said the violence in the Rift Valley after the election appeared to have been organized because of the involvement of large numbers of heavily armed men who seemed to strike just minutes after the disputed results were announced.
Mr. Ranneberger said the American government, which gives more than $600 million in aid to Kenya annually, was frustrated at the political impasse but was not at the stage where it was ready to cut assistance.
“It’s counterproductive,” he said. “And it’s way too premature to talk about anything punitive.”
The way forward, he said, was for the Kenyan government to be more inclusive and to address the long-simmering grievances over economic and political inequality. He also said officials should investigate the postelection violence and fix Kenya’s election system, which has been badly discredited by the balloting on Dec. 27.
“I really am fundamentally optimistic about the future of the country,” he said, citing Kenya’s strong middle class, its high literacy rates and its independent media. “There are all sorts of reasons why Kenya can overcome this.”
January 26, 2008
Violence Continues in Kenya a Day After Talks
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
NAIROBI, Kenya — The political bickering continued in Kenya on Friday, and so did the violence, with young men in gangs from opposing ethnic groups killing one another in the streets with machetes and bows and arrows.
Nakuru, one of the biggest towns in the Rift Valley, seems to be the new trouble zone. Witnesses said fighting erupted there late Thursday when mobs of Kikuyus, the ethnic group of Kenya’s president, mobilized to avenge attacks suffered at the hands of other ethnic groups.
Witnesses said Kikuyu gangs built roadblocks to stop police officers from entering certain neighborhoods and then burned homes and businesses belonging to two other groups, Luos and Kalenjins. Those groups sent out their young men to confront the attackers, resulting in a riot with hundreds of homes burned, dozens of shops destroyed and at least 10 people killed. Some witnesses said dozens of corpses filled the town’s morgues.
The situation had gotten so out of hand by Friday evening that the authorities imposed a dusk-to-dawn curfew.
“It’s totally unsafe here,” Peter Geche, a taxi driver in Nakuru, said by telephone on Friday afternoon. “So many people have been killed by arrows.”
More than 650 people have been killed in Kenya since a disputed presidential election in December, and the latest clashes show how the violence has taken on a momentum of its own, which the authorities appear unable to stop.
Police officials have sent reinforcements to Nakuru, which is about 100 miles northwest of Nairobi, the capital. Officers have dismantled some of the roadblocks and fired tear gas to disperse the mobs, but witnesses said any calm that might have been achieved would be brief.
In Nairobi, politicians continued to hurl accusations about who was at fault for spoiling what could have been a breakthrough moment the day before.
Mwai Kibaki, Kenya’s president, who won re-election by a thin margin, and Raila Odinga, the top opposition leader, who says the election was rigged and that he in fact won, met Thursday for the first time since the vote. They have been under enormous pressure to negotiate. Many Kenyans were hoping they would strike a compromise and end the turmoil, which has battered the economy and threatened to reverse decades of stability.
But immediately after the meeting, Mr. Kibaki gave a short speech in which he referred to himself as Kenya’s “duly elected president,” and opposition leaders then held a news conference denouncing what he said.
On Friday, government officials accused the opposition of trying to torpedo the peace effort.
“It’s very sad,” said Alfred Mutua, a government spokesman. “We were giving them the benefit of the doubt. And for them to issue a condemning statement after the two leaders had just talked about reconciliation, that’s hypocritical.”
Salim Lone, a spokesman for the opposition, fired back that “the whole world knows who ruined the event yesterday.”
The two sides spent Friday holding separate meetings and preparing for more negotiations, which are being brokered by Kofi Annan, the former United Nations secretary general. No doubt, there is a lot of thorny ground to cover.
Mr. Odinga is insisting on a new election and to be an equal partner in a transitional government. Mr. Kibaki has scoffed at those demands and moved ahead with appointing the most powerful ministers in his government. Western diplomats have said there was such widespread cheating on both sides that it is impossible to tell who really won the vote in December.
The next step in the talks will be for the two sides to agree on a framework for discussions. But even that will be difficult. The government is saying that it will not entertain the idea of creating a special post for Mr. Odinga, or a new election, unless ordered by a court. The opposition says the flawed election must be addressed if there are to be any negotiations at all.
Violence Continues in Kenya a Day After Talks
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
NAIROBI, Kenya — The political bickering continued in Kenya on Friday, and so did the violence, with young men in gangs from opposing ethnic groups killing one another in the streets with machetes and bows and arrows.
Nakuru, one of the biggest towns in the Rift Valley, seems to be the new trouble zone. Witnesses said fighting erupted there late Thursday when mobs of Kikuyus, the ethnic group of Kenya’s president, mobilized to avenge attacks suffered at the hands of other ethnic groups.
Witnesses said Kikuyu gangs built roadblocks to stop police officers from entering certain neighborhoods and then burned homes and businesses belonging to two other groups, Luos and Kalenjins. Those groups sent out their young men to confront the attackers, resulting in a riot with hundreds of homes burned, dozens of shops destroyed and at least 10 people killed. Some witnesses said dozens of corpses filled the town’s morgues.
The situation had gotten so out of hand by Friday evening that the authorities imposed a dusk-to-dawn curfew.
“It’s totally unsafe here,” Peter Geche, a taxi driver in Nakuru, said by telephone on Friday afternoon. “So many people have been killed by arrows.”
More than 650 people have been killed in Kenya since a disputed presidential election in December, and the latest clashes show how the violence has taken on a momentum of its own, which the authorities appear unable to stop.
Police officials have sent reinforcements to Nakuru, which is about 100 miles northwest of Nairobi, the capital. Officers have dismantled some of the roadblocks and fired tear gas to disperse the mobs, but witnesses said any calm that might have been achieved would be brief.
In Nairobi, politicians continued to hurl accusations about who was at fault for spoiling what could have been a breakthrough moment the day before.
Mwai Kibaki, Kenya’s president, who won re-election by a thin margin, and Raila Odinga, the top opposition leader, who says the election was rigged and that he in fact won, met Thursday for the first time since the vote. They have been under enormous pressure to negotiate. Many Kenyans were hoping they would strike a compromise and end the turmoil, which has battered the economy and threatened to reverse decades of stability.
But immediately after the meeting, Mr. Kibaki gave a short speech in which he referred to himself as Kenya’s “duly elected president,” and opposition leaders then held a news conference denouncing what he said.
On Friday, government officials accused the opposition of trying to torpedo the peace effort.
“It’s very sad,” said Alfred Mutua, a government spokesman. “We were giving them the benefit of the doubt. And for them to issue a condemning statement after the two leaders had just talked about reconciliation, that’s hypocritical.”
Salim Lone, a spokesman for the opposition, fired back that “the whole world knows who ruined the event yesterday.”
The two sides spent Friday holding separate meetings and preparing for more negotiations, which are being brokered by Kofi Annan, the former United Nations secretary general. No doubt, there is a lot of thorny ground to cover.
Mr. Odinga is insisting on a new election and to be an equal partner in a transitional government. Mr. Kibaki has scoffed at those demands and moved ahead with appointing the most powerful ministers in his government. Western diplomats have said there was such widespread cheating on both sides that it is impossible to tell who really won the vote in December.
The next step in the talks will be for the two sides to agree on a framework for discussions. But even that will be difficult. The government is saying that it will not entertain the idea of creating a special post for Mr. Odinga, or a new election, unless ordered by a court. The opposition says the flawed election must be addressed if there are to be any negotiations at all.
January 27, 2008
Ethnic Violence in Rift Valley Is Tearing Kenya Apart
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
NAKURU, Kenya — Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, may seem calm, but anarchy reigns just two hours away.
In Nakuru, furious mobs rule the streets, burning homes, brutalizing people and expelling anyone not in their ethnic group, all with complete impunity.
On Saturday, hundreds of men prowled a section of the city with six-foot iron bars, poisoned swords, clubs, knives and crude circumcision tools. Boys carried gladiator-style shields and women strutted around with sharpened sticks.
The police were nowhere to be found. Even the residents were shocked.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” said David Macharia, a bus driver.
One month after a deeply flawed election, Kenya is tearing itself apart along ethnic lines, despite intense international pressure on its leaders to compromise and stop the killings.
Nakuru, the biggest town in the beautiful Rift Valley, is the scene of a mass migration now moving in two directions. Luos are headed west, Kikuyus are headed east, and packed buses with mattresses strapped on top pass one another in the road, with the bewildered children of the two ethnic groups staring out the windows at one another.
In the past 10 days, dozens of people have been killed in Molo, Narok, Kipkelion, Kuresoi, and now Nakuru, a tourist gateway which until a few days ago was considered safe.
In many places, Kenya seems to be sliding back toward the chaos that exploded Dec. 30, when election results were announced and the incumbent president, Mwai Kibaki, was declared the winner over Raila Odinga, the top opposition leader, despite widespread evidence of vote rigging.
The tinder was all there, even before the voting started. There were historic grievances over land and deep-seated ethnic tensions, with many ethnic groups resenting the Kikuyus, Mr. Kibaki’s group, because they have been the most prosperous for years.
The disputed election essentially served as the spark, and opposition supporters across Kenya vented their rage over many issues toward the Kikuyus and other ethnic groups thought to have supported Mr. Kibaki.
In the Rift Valley, local elders organized young men to raid Kikuyu areas and kill people in a bid to drive the Kikuyus off their land. It worked, for the most part, and over the past month, tens of thousands of Kikuyus have fled.
More than 650 people, many of them Kikuyus, have been killed. Many of the attackers are widely believed to be members of the Luo and Kalenjin ethnic groups.
What is happening now in Nakuru seems to be revenge. The city is surrounded by spectacular scenery, with Lake Nakuru and its millions of flamingos drawing throngs of tourists each year. The city has a mixed population, like much of Kenya, split among several ethnic groups including Kikuyus, Luos, Luhyas and Kalenjins.
On Thursday night, witnesses and participants said, bands of Kikuyu men stormed into the streets with machetes and homemade weapons and began attacking Luos and Kalenjins.
Paul Karanja, a Kikuyu shopkeeper in Nakuru, explained it this way: “We had been so patient. For weeks we had watched all the buses and trucks taking people out of the Rift Valley, and we had seen so many of our people lose everything they owned. Enough was enough.”
In a Nakuru neighborhood called Free Area, hundreds of Kikuyu men burned down homes and businesses belonging to Luos, Mr. Odinga’s ethnic group. The Luos who refused to leave were badly beaten, and sometimes worse. According to witnesses, a Kikuyu mob forcibly circumcised one Luo man who later bled to death. Circumcision is an important rite of passage for Kikuyus but is not widely practiced among Luos.
The Luos and the Kalenjins, who have been aligned throughout the post-election period, then counterattacked, resulting in a citywide melee with hundreds wounded and as many as 50 people killed.
By Friday night, the Kenyan military was deployed for the first time to intervene. Local authorities also placed a dusk-to-dawn curfew on Nakuru, another first.
Many people in Free Area, which is now almost totally Kikuyu, say it will be difficult to make peace.
“We’re angry and they’re angry,” said John Maina, a stocky butcher, whose weapon of choice on Saturday was a three-foot table leg with exposed screws. “I don’t see us living together any time soon.”
That is the reality across much of Kenya, and it seems to be nothing short of so-called ethnic cleansing. Mobs in Eldoret, Kisumu, Kakamega, Burnt Forest and countless other areas, including some of the biggest slums in Nairobi, have driven out people from opposing ethnic groups. Many neighborhoods that used to be mixed are now ethnically homogeneous.
Kofi Annan, the former secretary general of the United Nations, visited the Rift Valley on Saturday. He called it “nerve-racking.”
“We saw people pushed from their homes and farms, grandmothers, children and families uprooted,” said Mr. Annan, who is in Kenya trying to broker negotiations between Mr. Kibaki and Mr. Odinga.
He called for the Kenyan government to investigate the attackers and increase security.
On Saturday, Kenyan soldiers in Free Area escorted Luos back to their smoldering homes and stood guard with their assault rifles as the people sifted through the ruins and salvaged whatever they could before leaving.
Many Luos said they had no choice but to go to far western Kenya, the traditional Luo homeland, just as many Kikuyus who have been displaced said they would resettle in the highlands east of Nakuru, their traditional homeland.
Mr. Macharia, the bus driver, who is Kikuyu, conceded that many Kikuyus were feeling vengeful. But he said it does not mean they actually want to fight. “I saw it myself,” he said. “The elders called ‘Charge!’ but not all the boys charged.”
Still, enough did charge that the Luos who used to live in Free Area were not taking any chances. On Saturday afternoon, hundreds of people carrying trunks on their heads and bags of blankets streamed toward a government office that was protected by a few soldiers.
Nancy Aloo, a Luo, was guiding four frightened young children.
“God made all of us,” Ms. Aloo said. “We need his help.”
Ethnic Violence in Rift Valley Is Tearing Kenya Apart
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
NAKURU, Kenya — Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, may seem calm, but anarchy reigns just two hours away.
In Nakuru, furious mobs rule the streets, burning homes, brutalizing people and expelling anyone not in their ethnic group, all with complete impunity.
On Saturday, hundreds of men prowled a section of the city with six-foot iron bars, poisoned swords, clubs, knives and crude circumcision tools. Boys carried gladiator-style shields and women strutted around with sharpened sticks.
The police were nowhere to be found. Even the residents were shocked.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” said David Macharia, a bus driver.
One month after a deeply flawed election, Kenya is tearing itself apart along ethnic lines, despite intense international pressure on its leaders to compromise and stop the killings.
Nakuru, the biggest town in the beautiful Rift Valley, is the scene of a mass migration now moving in two directions. Luos are headed west, Kikuyus are headed east, and packed buses with mattresses strapped on top pass one another in the road, with the bewildered children of the two ethnic groups staring out the windows at one another.
In the past 10 days, dozens of people have been killed in Molo, Narok, Kipkelion, Kuresoi, and now Nakuru, a tourist gateway which until a few days ago was considered safe.
In many places, Kenya seems to be sliding back toward the chaos that exploded Dec. 30, when election results were announced and the incumbent president, Mwai Kibaki, was declared the winner over Raila Odinga, the top opposition leader, despite widespread evidence of vote rigging.
The tinder was all there, even before the voting started. There were historic grievances over land and deep-seated ethnic tensions, with many ethnic groups resenting the Kikuyus, Mr. Kibaki’s group, because they have been the most prosperous for years.
The disputed election essentially served as the spark, and opposition supporters across Kenya vented their rage over many issues toward the Kikuyus and other ethnic groups thought to have supported Mr. Kibaki.
In the Rift Valley, local elders organized young men to raid Kikuyu areas and kill people in a bid to drive the Kikuyus off their land. It worked, for the most part, and over the past month, tens of thousands of Kikuyus have fled.
More than 650 people, many of them Kikuyus, have been killed. Many of the attackers are widely believed to be members of the Luo and Kalenjin ethnic groups.
What is happening now in Nakuru seems to be revenge. The city is surrounded by spectacular scenery, with Lake Nakuru and its millions of flamingos drawing throngs of tourists each year. The city has a mixed population, like much of Kenya, split among several ethnic groups including Kikuyus, Luos, Luhyas and Kalenjins.
On Thursday night, witnesses and participants said, bands of Kikuyu men stormed into the streets with machetes and homemade weapons and began attacking Luos and Kalenjins.
Paul Karanja, a Kikuyu shopkeeper in Nakuru, explained it this way: “We had been so patient. For weeks we had watched all the buses and trucks taking people out of the Rift Valley, and we had seen so many of our people lose everything they owned. Enough was enough.”
In a Nakuru neighborhood called Free Area, hundreds of Kikuyu men burned down homes and businesses belonging to Luos, Mr. Odinga’s ethnic group. The Luos who refused to leave were badly beaten, and sometimes worse. According to witnesses, a Kikuyu mob forcibly circumcised one Luo man who later bled to death. Circumcision is an important rite of passage for Kikuyus but is not widely practiced among Luos.
The Luos and the Kalenjins, who have been aligned throughout the post-election period, then counterattacked, resulting in a citywide melee with hundreds wounded and as many as 50 people killed.
By Friday night, the Kenyan military was deployed for the first time to intervene. Local authorities also placed a dusk-to-dawn curfew on Nakuru, another first.
Many people in Free Area, which is now almost totally Kikuyu, say it will be difficult to make peace.
“We’re angry and they’re angry,” said John Maina, a stocky butcher, whose weapon of choice on Saturday was a three-foot table leg with exposed screws. “I don’t see us living together any time soon.”
That is the reality across much of Kenya, and it seems to be nothing short of so-called ethnic cleansing. Mobs in Eldoret, Kisumu, Kakamega, Burnt Forest and countless other areas, including some of the biggest slums in Nairobi, have driven out people from opposing ethnic groups. Many neighborhoods that used to be mixed are now ethnically homogeneous.
Kofi Annan, the former secretary general of the United Nations, visited the Rift Valley on Saturday. He called it “nerve-racking.”
“We saw people pushed from their homes and farms, grandmothers, children and families uprooted,” said Mr. Annan, who is in Kenya trying to broker negotiations between Mr. Kibaki and Mr. Odinga.
He called for the Kenyan government to investigate the attackers and increase security.
On Saturday, Kenyan soldiers in Free Area escorted Luos back to their smoldering homes and stood guard with their assault rifles as the people sifted through the ruins and salvaged whatever they could before leaving.
Many Luos said they had no choice but to go to far western Kenya, the traditional Luo homeland, just as many Kikuyus who have been displaced said they would resettle in the highlands east of Nakuru, their traditional homeland.
Mr. Macharia, the bus driver, who is Kikuyu, conceded that many Kikuyus were feeling vengeful. But he said it does not mean they actually want to fight. “I saw it myself,” he said. “The elders called ‘Charge!’ but not all the boys charged.”
Still, enough did charge that the Luos who used to live in Free Area were not taking any chances. On Saturday afternoon, hundreds of people carrying trunks on their heads and bags of blankets streamed toward a government office that was protected by a few soldiers.
Nancy Aloo, a Luo, was guiding four frightened young children.
“God made all of us,” Ms. Aloo said. “We need his help.”
January 28, 2008
19 Burned to Death in Violence in Kenya
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
NAIROBI, Kenya — Ethnically driven violence intensified in Kenya on Sunday, and police officials said at least 19 people, including 11 children, were burned to death in a house by a mob.
Even the Kenyan military, deployed for the first time to stop antagonists from attacking one another, has been unable to halt the wave of revenge killings.
More than 100 people have been killed in the past four days, many of them shot with arrows, burned or hacked with machetes.
It is some of the worst fighting since a disputed election in December ignited long-simmering tensions that have so far claimed at least 750 lives. The fighting appeared to be spreading Sunday across the Rift Valley region, a particularly picturesque part of Kenya known more for its game parks and fancy lodges.
The Kenyan government is now threatening to arrest top opposition leaders on suspicion of orchestrating the bloodshed, but opposition leaders are in turn accusing the government of backing criminal gangs.
According to police officials in the Rift Valley town of Naivasha, fighting erupted Sunday morning between gangs of Kikuyus and Luos, two of Kenya’s biggest ethnic groups, who have clashed across the country since the election. Witnesses said mobs threw flaming tires and mountains of rocks into the streets to block police officers from entering some neighborhoods. The mobs then went house to house, looking for certain people.
Grace Kakai, a police commander in Naivasha, said a large crowd of Kikuyus chased a group of Luos through a slum, trapped them in a house, blocked the doors and set the house afire. Police found 19 bodies huddled in one room, and Ms. Kakai said some of the children’s bodies were so badly burned that they could not be identified.
“All I can say is that they were school age,” she said.
The episode was similar to one on Jan. 1, when up to 50 women and children seeking shelter in a church in another Rift Valley town were burned to death by a mob. The victims in that case were mostly Kikuyus, and Kikuyus across the country seem to have been attacked more than any other group.
In the past few days, many Kikuyus have organized into militias, saying they are now ready for revenge.
“The situation is very bad,” Ms. Kakai said. “People are fighting each other and trying to drive them out of the area. We have to evacuate people.”
Thousands of families are streaming out of Naivasha, Nakuru, Molo, Eldoret and other towns across the Rift Valley, which has become the epicenter of Kenya’s violence. The province is home to supporters of both Mwai Kibaki, Kenya’s president, and Raila Odinga, the top opposition leader, and the site of historic land disputes between members of rival ethnic groups.
Mr. Kibaki is a Kikuyu and Mr. Odinga is a Luo, and the disputed election, in which Mr. Kibaki was declared the winner by a narrow margin despite widespread evidence of vote rigging, set off the ethnically driven violence.
The Kenya of today is almost unrecognizable compared with the Kenya that until recently was celebrated as one of the most stable and promising countries on the African continent. On Sunday night, local television stations showed menacing young men waving machetes and iron bars at roadblocks along one of the country’s busiest highways. The men threw rocks at buses, with one large bus run off the road, as police officers stood by.
The Kenyan Army was assigned early this month to help evacuate people from conflict zones, but on Friday, for the first time, soldiers were ordered to intervene between warring groups. That did not seem to make much of a difference, and witnesses said the soldiers had been as ineffective as the police.
A dusk-to-dawn curfew has been imposed in several Rift Valley towns, including Naivasha and Nakuru, but witnesses said violence continued to rage in the countryside, with bands of armed men burning down huts and attacking ethnic rivals.
Many Kenyans have said the most distressing aspect is that the opposing politicians, instead of cooperating to stop the bloodshed, continue to bicker over who started it.
That is exactly what happened on Sunday after news of the Naivasha killings spread. Salim Lone, Mr. Odinga’s spokesman, sent out a cellphone message calling the killings “ghastly” and saying that they were the work of criminal gangs backed by police officers and “part of a well orchestrated plan of terror.”
“The government is doing this to try to influence mediation efforts,” the message said, referring to the continuing but so far fruitless negotiations led by Kofi Annan, the former secretary general of the United Nations. “After stealing the elections from Kenyans, Kibaki now wishes to deny them justice and peace.”
Alfred Mutua, a government spokesman, called the accusations “ridiculous.”
“What is really happening is a continuation of the ethnic cleansing that Raila’s people are doing to kill the president’s people,” he said.
Mr. Mutua said the violence would stop “when we indict the leaders responsible for this.”
“We are working on indictments,” he said Sunday night. “That will happen very soon.”
Western diplomats have said there is a debate raging within Mr. Kibaki’s inner circle about the wisdom of arresting top opposition figures, with some advisers pushing for it, while others fear that the violence will only get worse if the leaders are jailed because their supporters will go on an even more intense rampage.
Kenyan newspapers reflected the gloom. “For the umpteenth time, we again ask President Kibaki and Orange Democratic Movement leader Mr. Raila Odinga to work for peace, truth and justice,” said an editorial in The Sunday Standard. “Kenya has bled enough.”
Home
World U.S. N.Y. / Region Business Technology Science Health Sports Opinion Arts Style Travel Jobs Real Estate Automobiles Back to Top
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
Privacy Policy Search Corrections RSS First Look Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map
19 Burned to Death in Violence in Kenya
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
NAIROBI, Kenya — Ethnically driven violence intensified in Kenya on Sunday, and police officials said at least 19 people, including 11 children, were burned to death in a house by a mob.
Even the Kenyan military, deployed for the first time to stop antagonists from attacking one another, has been unable to halt the wave of revenge killings.
More than 100 people have been killed in the past four days, many of them shot with arrows, burned or hacked with machetes.
It is some of the worst fighting since a disputed election in December ignited long-simmering tensions that have so far claimed at least 750 lives. The fighting appeared to be spreading Sunday across the Rift Valley region, a particularly picturesque part of Kenya known more for its game parks and fancy lodges.
The Kenyan government is now threatening to arrest top opposition leaders on suspicion of orchestrating the bloodshed, but opposition leaders are in turn accusing the government of backing criminal gangs.
According to police officials in the Rift Valley town of Naivasha, fighting erupted Sunday morning between gangs of Kikuyus and Luos, two of Kenya’s biggest ethnic groups, who have clashed across the country since the election. Witnesses said mobs threw flaming tires and mountains of rocks into the streets to block police officers from entering some neighborhoods. The mobs then went house to house, looking for certain people.
Grace Kakai, a police commander in Naivasha, said a large crowd of Kikuyus chased a group of Luos through a slum, trapped them in a house, blocked the doors and set the house afire. Police found 19 bodies huddled in one room, and Ms. Kakai said some of the children’s bodies were so badly burned that they could not be identified.
“All I can say is that they were school age,” she said.
The episode was similar to one on Jan. 1, when up to 50 women and children seeking shelter in a church in another Rift Valley town were burned to death by a mob. The victims in that case were mostly Kikuyus, and Kikuyus across the country seem to have been attacked more than any other group.
In the past few days, many Kikuyus have organized into militias, saying they are now ready for revenge.
“The situation is very bad,” Ms. Kakai said. “People are fighting each other and trying to drive them out of the area. We have to evacuate people.”
Thousands of families are streaming out of Naivasha, Nakuru, Molo, Eldoret and other towns across the Rift Valley, which has become the epicenter of Kenya’s violence. The province is home to supporters of both Mwai Kibaki, Kenya’s president, and Raila Odinga, the top opposition leader, and the site of historic land disputes between members of rival ethnic groups.
Mr. Kibaki is a Kikuyu and Mr. Odinga is a Luo, and the disputed election, in which Mr. Kibaki was declared the winner by a narrow margin despite widespread evidence of vote rigging, set off the ethnically driven violence.
The Kenya of today is almost unrecognizable compared with the Kenya that until recently was celebrated as one of the most stable and promising countries on the African continent. On Sunday night, local television stations showed menacing young men waving machetes and iron bars at roadblocks along one of the country’s busiest highways. The men threw rocks at buses, with one large bus run off the road, as police officers stood by.
The Kenyan Army was assigned early this month to help evacuate people from conflict zones, but on Friday, for the first time, soldiers were ordered to intervene between warring groups. That did not seem to make much of a difference, and witnesses said the soldiers had been as ineffective as the police.
A dusk-to-dawn curfew has been imposed in several Rift Valley towns, including Naivasha and Nakuru, but witnesses said violence continued to rage in the countryside, with bands of armed men burning down huts and attacking ethnic rivals.
Many Kenyans have said the most distressing aspect is that the opposing politicians, instead of cooperating to stop the bloodshed, continue to bicker over who started it.
That is exactly what happened on Sunday after news of the Naivasha killings spread. Salim Lone, Mr. Odinga’s spokesman, sent out a cellphone message calling the killings “ghastly” and saying that they were the work of criminal gangs backed by police officers and “part of a well orchestrated plan of terror.”
“The government is doing this to try to influence mediation efforts,” the message said, referring to the continuing but so far fruitless negotiations led by Kofi Annan, the former secretary general of the United Nations. “After stealing the elections from Kenyans, Kibaki now wishes to deny them justice and peace.”
Alfred Mutua, a government spokesman, called the accusations “ridiculous.”
“What is really happening is a continuation of the ethnic cleansing that Raila’s people are doing to kill the president’s people,” he said.
Mr. Mutua said the violence would stop “when we indict the leaders responsible for this.”
“We are working on indictments,” he said Sunday night. “That will happen very soon.”
Western diplomats have said there is a debate raging within Mr. Kibaki’s inner circle about the wisdom of arresting top opposition figures, with some advisers pushing for it, while others fear that the violence will only get worse if the leaders are jailed because their supporters will go on an even more intense rampage.
Kenyan newspapers reflected the gloom. “For the umpteenth time, we again ask President Kibaki and Orange Democratic Movement leader Mr. Raila Odinga to work for peace, truth and justice,” said an editorial in The Sunday Standard. “Kenya has bled enough.”
Home
World U.S. N.Y. / Region Business Technology Science Health Sports Opinion Arts Style Travel Jobs Real Estate Automobiles Back to Top
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
Privacy Policy Search Corrections RSS First Look Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map