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Diplomacy falters as Kenya burns
By Paul Reynolds
World affairs correspondent, BBC News
4 January 2008
Diplomatic efforts to try to stop the violence and encourage
political reconciliation in Kenya faltered on Thursday.
Ghana's President John Kufuor was unable to get to Kenya to launch
a mission on behalf of the African Union because he did not
receive an invitation from the Kenyan government. He continues to
hope for one.
Many governments, including the British, have promoted this
mission as the best hope for progress.
Meanwhile the United States has sent its Assistant Secretary
Jendayi Frazer, an influential figure in Africa.
The State Department spokesman said she intended "to meet with
both of the political leaders, as well as others in Kenyan civil
society, to see what ideas they might generate in order to find a
way out of this political crisis".
Jendayi Frazer's intervention might unlock what had been a stalled
process. Diplomats said that the Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki has
been "playing hard to get".
His policy seems to be to stand fast and hope that in due course
the violence dies down and his position will be strengthened.
The problem is that Mr Kibaki does not see why he should make
major concessions as he was declared the winner. He says he will
talk but only when things calm down.
For his part, Mr Odinga has been unwilling to give up his major
weapon, street protests, and wants Mr Kibaki to acknowledge that
the election result was false.
On the other hand, diplomats also think that the street protests
are not going to deliver the result that Mr Odinga wants.
So the diplomatic policy now is that political dialogue is the way
forward.
Diplomatic disarray
How far the US will press that dialogue remains unclear.
The US and UK, which issued a joint statement on 2 January calling
for a "spirit of compromise", are now differing in how far they
will go in publicly proposing solutions.
The British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has openly called for a
government of national unity in Kenya, but the United States will
go no further than calling for talks and reconciliation.
The US and the
European Union, which has got into the diplomatic process
rather late because of the end-of-the-year holiday and a
change in the EU presidency, have even got into a dispute.
The EU has swung behind the idea of the national unity
government (the British government will have been influential
in this stance) and claimed that this was agreed in a call
between the EU foreign policy representative Javier Solana and
the US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. |
"Britain and the US do seem to
agree that it is unrealistic at this stage to expect a
recount."
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However, the State Department later
indicated that it would not "dictate the outcome of any
discussions between the two parties".
Britain and the US do seem to agree that it is unrealistic at this
stage to expect a recount. Nobody knows how far the Kenyan
Attorney General Amos Wako's call for an independent inquiry into
the result will get.
The diplomatic efforts will continue, because Kenya has been a
model for political development in Africa, and everyone wants that
model to be saved. But the model is cracking and diplomacy is not
proving easy.
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