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Kenya's ethnic violence
escalates
Press Association
27.01.2008
Gangs armed with machetes and bows and arrows burned and hacked to
death members of a rival tribe in western Kenya as police stood by
helplessly.
The fighting in the town of Naivasha was the latest flashpoint of
violence over President Mwai Kibaki's re-election.
Groups from Kibaki's Kikuyu tribe set ablaze the homes of Luo
rivals in the centre of the town, about 90 kilometres (55 miles)
north-west of Nairobi. Police did not intervene.
A reporter counted bodies of seven victims hacked to death or
burned alive in their homes. On Saturday, a Luo couple were
slashed to death with machetes in Naivasha.
More than 700 people have died in ethnic violence and clashes with
police since Kibaki was declared that winner of the December 27
balloting in which observers say the counting was flawed. Some
255,000 people have been forced from their homes.
The eruption of violence in Naivasha appeared to have spread from
Nakuru, Kenya's fourth-largest town some 80 kilometres (50 miles)
away, where at least 60 people were killed.
In Nakuru, rival ethnic groups armed with home-made guns, machetes
and bows and arrows fought pitched battles while mobs torched
hundreds of homes.
But Kibaki and opposition leader Raila Odinga, who claims he won
the election, remain far apart on how to resolve the crisis, the
worst the country has suffered since its 1963 independence from
Britain.
Kibaki has said he is open to direct talks with Odinga, but that
his position as president is not negotiable. Odinga says Kibaki
must step down and new elections are the only way to bring peace.
Odinga was meeting with former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan,
the latest international mediator attempting to bring the two
sides together. Annan toured trouble spots in the western Rift
Valley, which includes Naivasha, and alluded to underlying causes
of the conflict, including decades-old resentment of Kikuyus'
domination of politics and the economy, and old grudges over land
between different ethnic groups.
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