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NEWS
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Turmoil Grows in Kenya, With More Than 100 Dead
December 31, 2007
NAIROBI, Kenya — The post-election turbulence continued to spread in Kenya on
Monday as a curfew was imposed in Kisumu, the nation’s third-largest city;
ethnic fighting intensified; and more than 100 people were killed.
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 savanna. Many people are furious that Kenya’s 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, with trucks of soldiers rumbling through a wasteland of burned cars
and abandoned homes, their tires crunching over broken glass. Gangs of young men
have built roadblocks between the neighborhoods of the Kikuyus, Mr. Kibaki’s
tribe, and those of the Luos, the tribe of Raila Odinga, the top opposition
leader, who narrowly lost the election. The nomad’s land between them is often a
single lane of potholed asphalt, patrolled by thugs with huge rocks in their
hands.
The election has uncorked dangerous resentment toward Kikuyus, the privileged
ethnic group of Kenya, who have dominated business and politics since
independence in 1963. In some areas, witnesses said that mobs were stopping
cars, pulling out passengers and demanding identification cards to determine
whether they were Kikuyu (one can often tell by the name). If so, they were
killed.
On Monday, Agence France-Presse reported that six Kikuyu people were hacked to
death in Mombasa, on Kenya’s eastern coast.
The most intense fighting, though, is in western Kenya, Mr. Odinga’s stronghold,
where a mix of hooliganism, political protest and ethnic violence has claimed
dozens of lives. The police have responded by shooting looters on sight and
forbidding people in Kisumu to leave home at night or walk around during the day
in groups larger than two.
Nationwide, the Kenyan internal security minister has outlawed live television
broadcasts because, he said, the news 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 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 made a fuss about until just 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!”
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 a deeply disputed contest, held on Thursday, has thrown the country
into a crisis, without an obvious solution. Western diplomats said that there
was undeniable evidence of fraud in counting the ballots, but that election
officials had refused to recount them because they wanted to keep the government
in power.
Mr. Kibaki now faces trouble not just on the streets, but in the Kenyan
Parliament as well. More than half of his cabinet was voted out of office in a
wave of seeming dissatisfaction with his government, and his party won about 35
seats in Parliament, while the opposition took nearly 100 seats.
Before the election, Mr. Kibaki, 76, was considered a courtly gentleman who
stirred few passions. Now mobs of outraged voters are burning pictures of him
and calling him a cheater.
It is not clear what opposition leaders will do. On Monday, they had planned to
hold their own inauguration and crown 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 event 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,” Mr.
Odinga said Monday, without specifying the means.
Western officials have become increasingly critical of the elections, and two of
Kenya’s biggest 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.”
The Canadian government deplored the news blackout and said that “Canada is 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 because they were frightened of driving in the dark. Many
of the roads to town were blocked by soldiers who warned drivers that if they
entered the city, their cars would be burned.
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Source: All Africa
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