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Death toll climbs to 800 in
fresh wave of Kenya violence
Mark Tran and agencies
Monday January 28, 2008
Guardian Unlimited
Rampaging mobs torched buses in the western Kenyan town of Kisumu
today, burning a driver to death, as the death toll from
post-election violence climbed to 800.
In Naivasha, the centre of Kenya's flower industry, hundreds of
people from rival communities confronted each other.
About 1,000 people armed with machetes, clubs and rocks retreated
only when a handful of police fired live bullets into the air.
Over 70 people were killed at the weekend in the Rift Valley amid
fears that violence is escalating out of control. In the usually
peaceful Rift Valley towns, gangs from rival communities have been
fighting each other with machetes, clubs and bows and arrows.
Attacks in the immediate aftermath of President Mwai Kibaki's win
were mainly against his Kikuyu tribe - the largest and richest in
Kenya - but members of that group, including the outlawed Mungiki
gang, have begun fighting back, Kenyans say.
In Kisumu, an opposition stronghold, several thousand people took
to the streets to complain about the deaths of members of their
Luo ethnic community in the Rift Valley.
"A Molo Line bus has just been burnt, the road linking Kisumu to
Kakamega is blocked, almost the whole of Kisumu is up in smoke,"
Eric Odhiambo, a motorcycle-taxi driver told Reuters. "People are
mad at killings of Luo in Naivasha yesterday. The police are
firing teargas and shooting in the sky ... But there are so many
rioters, the police cannot handle them."
Kofi Annan, the former UN secretary general who is trying to
mediate between the government and the opposition, visited
troublespots in the Rift Valley over the weekend. He said the
crisis had gone well beyond an electoral dispute and denounced "gross
and systematic" human rights abuses.
Negotiators led by Annan have told the rival camps of Kibaki and
the opposition leader, Raila Odinga, to select four
representatives each and study a blueprint for further talks in
the next 24 hours, an official involved in the mediation said.
But residents in Naivasha harboured little faith in negotiations.
"Those people shouting for Raila, they don't want peace. They have
been killing our people, burning our houses," said David Gitonga,
a Naivasha resident who had been manning a roadblock until the
army cleared it away.
"Now it's our turn to have justice."
The Daily Nation newspaper called on the two political rivals to
compromise quickly to halt the bloodshed that has badly tarnished
Kenya's reputation for stability.
"They must quickly agree to resolve the political stalemate by
eschewing their hardline positions. What more must happen to
convince the two principals at the heart of the poll dispute that
the country is collapsing and that they stand to lose everything
they are haggling over so fiercely?" the paper said in an
editorial.
While public anger was sparked initially by the presidential vote,
which local and foreign observers said was flawed, rivalries over
land, business and power dating back to Kenya's 1963 independence
have fuelled the violence.
Analysts say colonial Britain's divide-and-rule policies among
different communities created wounds that have festered ever since,
worsened by unfair post-independence land policies.
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