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U.N.'s Ban throws weight behind
Kenya peace drive
Fri Feb 1, 2008 12:58am GMT
By Nick Tattersall
NAIROBI (Reuters) - U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon throws his
heavyweight diplomatic clout on Friday behind efforts to end
Kenya's month-long violent political standoff in which at least
850 people have been killed.
African leaders at a summit in neighbouring Ethiopia attended by
the U.N. head have called for urgent action to stop the
bloodletting, which has turned one of the continent's more stable
nations into its most pressing crisis.
Ban would fly to Kenya to meet predecessor Kofi Annan, who has
been spearheading mediation efforts in Nairobi, as well as
opposition leader Raila Odinga and civil society representatives
during a visit of a few hours, U.N. officials said.
He told the 53-nation African Union summit on Thursday the
violence in Kenya threatened to "escalate to catastrophic levels"
and called on President Mwai Kibaki and Odinga to do everything
possible to resolve the crisis.
"The aim of the visit is to offer support to the Annan-led panel
and be briefed by the U.N. country team on the humanitarian crisis,"
a U.N. official in Nairobi said.
South Africa said influential business tycoon Cyril Ramaphosa
would also join the mediation efforts on Friday. Ramaphosa was
chief negotiator for the African National Congress in talks that
produced a peaceful end to apartheid in 1994.
Kenya descended into a spiral of political and ethnic killing
after Kibaki's disputed re-election on December 27. Odinga says
Kibaki stole the vote, while international observers said the
count was so chaotic it was impossible to tell who won.
TRIBAL DIVISIONS
The unrest has taken the lid off decades-old divisions between
tribal groupings over land, wealth and power, dating from British
colonial rule and stoked by Kenyan politicians during 44 years of
independence.
The United States and European countries have pledged their
support for Annan's mediation efforts. Donors have said aid
programmes to Kenya are under review.
A group of mostly European donors has suspended future payments on
a good governance and law enforcement programme in light of the
current crisis, Denmark's ambassador to Kenya Bo Jensen said.
Many in the country fear what will happen if Annan fails to clinch
some sort of power-sharing deal.
Fresh protests, in which witnesses said at least two people were
killed, broke out on Thursday after a police officer in the Rift
Valley town of Eldoret shot dead an opposition legislator, the
second killed in a week.
Police have said they are treating the killing as a "crime of
passion" rather than a political act, but Odinga condemned it as a
deliberate assassination.
Soldiers fired into the air to disperse angry mobs in Eldoret
after the MP's killing. Protests also erupted in the
pro-opposition western town of Kisumu, where youths burned tyres
and blocked roads with piles of rocks.
Kibaki has said the security forces are under strict orders to
take firm action against anyone inciting violence. Odinga has
accused him of ordering a shoot-to-kill policy.
(Additional reporting by Patrick Worsnip in New York and Lesley
Wroughton in Addis Ababa)
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