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Second Opposition Legislator
Killed in Kenya
By Stephanie McCrummen
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, January 31, 2008
NAIROBI, Jan. 31 - A second opposition lawmaker was shot dead in
Kenya on Thursday in the western town of Eldoret in the volatile
Rift Valley region, where tens of thousands of people from
President Mwai Kibaki's Kikuyu community have been chased from
their homes.
The exact circumstances remained unclear, though early reports
were that lawmaker David Kimutai Too was shot by a
policeman whose wife was having an affair with him.
But opposition leader Raila Odinga, who has accused Kibaki of
stealing this country's Dec. 27 presidential elections,
immediately cast the killing as a political assassination aimed at
weakening his party's majority in parliament.
"The death of the second member of parliament is part of the plot
to reduce the Orange Democratic Movement majority," Odinga said in
a statement issued within an hour of Too's death.
Odinga's supporters began pouring into the streets in the western
town of Kisumu, lighting bonfires, blocking roads and engaging the
police in running battles, according to a reporter there. Odinga's
spokesman, Salim Lone, said that if there is evidence that Too's
killing was indeed part of a love triangle, the Kenyan government
should present it immediately to avoid the wave of riots and
killings that erupted following the murder of opposition lawmaker
Mugabe Were on Tuesday.
Police are still investigating whether Were's killing was a
robbery or politically motivated, but opposition leaders cast it
as an assassination.
Given how combustible Kenya is at the moment, it was unclear
whether the exact circumstances mattered.
"Unless evidence is presented to the contrary, Kenyans will
believe that the execution of two MPs within a few days is
politically motivated," Lone said, noting that no lawmaker has
been killed in Kenya since the turbulent early 1990s.
Too's killing comes as former United Nations Secretary General
Kofi Annan is mediating talks between Kibaki and Odinga in what
observers believe is Kenya's last hope at a peaceful resolution.
"This shows how critically urgent these talks are," said Lone. "But
it also shows that Kenya cannot await the outcome of these talks
before security is restored to this country. Some major actions
need to be taken to protect people from the mayhem that is
destroying their lives."
The top U.S. diplomat for Africa said Wednesday that the
post-election violence in Kenya amounted to "ethnic cleansing" and
that both Kibaki and Odinga should be doing more to calm tensions.
Jendayi Frazer, assistant secretary of state for African affairs,
said she had met with Kenyans who described being chased from
their homes by organized groups that were "trying to get other
ethnic groups to leave certain areas."
"That sounds like ethnic cleansing to me," Frazer told reporters
in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, where she is attending an
African Union summit.
In Washington, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack backed
off the remarks, saying the department was still compiling
information on the violence and had not drawn any conclusions.
The term "ethnic cleansing" has no strict legal definition but
generally refers to violently forcing people out of an area to
separate them from another group.
The disputed presidential election touched off a chain reaction of
politically and ethnically charged violence and plunged this East
African country into its worst crisis since independence from
Britain in 1963.
Nearly 300,000 people have been forced to flee Nairobi's poorest
neighborhoods and cities, towns and villages stretching from the
lush tea farms of central Kenya to the explosive Rift Valley
region in the west of the country.
In that area, people from Kibaki's Kikuyu tribe and others living
on Kikuyu land have been targeted by local tribal militias loyal
to Odinga that appear to be using the crisis to settle old scores
about land.
In recent days, thousands of Kikuyus have begun exacting revenge,
attacking and dislodging several thousand people from Odinga's Luo
tribe and other ethnic groups presumed to have backed him in the
western towns of Nakuru and Naivasha.
On Tuesday, a high-ranking Kenyan diplomat described the violence
as well organized, saying it was "an open secret" that scores of
young, unemployed Kikuyu men were recruited from several Nairobi
slums, paid money and bused to the two towns to launch attacks
with machetes and clubs.
"They even raised money in public," said the diplomat, who spoke
on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the
situation.
More than 800 people have been killed since Odinga accused Kibaki
of stealing the election. International election observers have
said the tally was so flawed it is impossible to know who won. The
victims have included hundreds of protesters who opposition
leaders say were gunned down by police.
Former U.N. secretary general Kofi Annan is mediating between the
two sides, and the European Union and several countries have
threatened to cut aid to Kibaki's government if he does not reach
a compromise with Odinga.
The U.S. State Department initially congratulated Kibaki but later
expressed doubts about the vote tally. More recently, Ambassador
Michael E. Ranneberger said it was premature to discuss
withholding any U.S. aid for Kenya, though Frazer said Tuesday
that officials would revisit the issue. The aid package is
expected to total more than $540 million this year.
Although the Bush administration has stated that promoting
democracy is a key foreign policy goal, the United States has
continued to increase aid to and maintain relationships with
several countries that held seriously flawed elections in recent
years. The list includes Nigeria, Uganda and Ethiopia -- a key
partner in the administration's counterterrorism efforts whose
government gunned down opposition protesters after disputed
elections in 2005.
"If the international community responded constructively and
forcefully to obvious electoral abuses, you might not see what we
have in Kenya today," said Ted Dagne, an African affairs
specialist with the Congressional Research Service in Washington.
"In each of those cases where we witnessed electoral and human
rights abuses, the response from Washington was mute or limited."
Special correspondent Kassahun Addis in Addis Ababa contributed
to this report.
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