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Weeks of violence cause many to
question Kenya's success
Associated Press
10. Feb. 2008
TIGONI, Kenya - More than a century ago, European colonists carved
up Africa, jamming together people who spoke different languages,
danced to different music and worshipped different gods within the
same borders.
Kenya was one of the few new nations that flourished. But now, the
once stable and prosperous country seems as flawed and fragile a
creation as many other African states. Weeks of bloodshed have
seen ethnic gangs exact revenge on rivals and people divide
themselves along tribal lines.
The spark was an election which the opposition says the president
stole, and which foreign and domestic observers agree was deeply
flawed. Former U.N. chief Kofi Annan says he hopes to have
mediated a settlement by early this week. But even if the
politicians agree, the wounds will not heal easily.
Appeals to tribe have long trumped ideology in Kenyan politics,
and ethnic strife has been common around election time since the
country made its first democratic strides in the 1990s.
But no previous violence has been so sustained or ferocious. More
than 1,000 people have been killed and 300,000 forced from their
home since the Dec. 27 vote. The economy has been gutted, and many
wonder whether the world's view of the Kenya of bountiful game
parks, shimmering beaches, thriving capital and busy port was just
an illusion.
No matter what happens at the ongoing peace talks, "there won't be
a cataclysm, that doesn't seem likely," said Gladwell Otieno of
the Africa Center for Open Governance in Nairobi, the capital.
Instead, she and others see Kenya's long-simmering problems -
crime, poverty, corruption - magnified and bereft of politicians
able to tackle them.
"Increasing balkanization, people seeking out the company of their
own, entrenched vigilante groups, entrenched gangs," Otieno
continued. "We hope it doesn't go that way, but we don't know."
In this village outside Nairobi, a postcard-perfect landscape of
hills, tea plantations and flat-topped acacia trees, an
increasingly fractious and faltering Kenya is comes into view.
Packed into the grounds of a dilapidated police station are more
than 4,000 people. They're camped out in tents, waiting in line
for baked beans, doing laundry in a pit by the latrines.
And on the edge of the camp, they're waiting for buses.
"I'm going to my homeland," said Helen Odhiambo, a 30-year-old
mother of three.
Like most people at the camp, Odhiambo is of the Luo tribe, whose
ancestral lands are in western Kenya, on the shores of Lake
Victoria. Three generations ago her family moved to the central
highlands, the territory of the Kikuyu, the largest and most
dominant of Kenya's 42 tribes.
Odhiambo has never lived in the homeland of which she speaks.
"My grandmother said we had a small homestead for the whole family."
That was decades ago.
But "I cannot stay here," she said, telling the story of the night
three weeks ago when Kikuyus, from President Mwai Kibaki's ethnic
group, went hunting for Luos, the tribe of opposition leader Raila
Odinga, who says the election was stolen from him.
"I grabbed things in my house. My children grabbed things. We left
much behind," Odhiambo said. She had heard that some of her
neighbors were killed, but didn't know anything more.
Piled all around Odhiambo were bundles of clothes, pots and pans
strung together, a soiled teddy bear. The bus, she hoped, would
come that afternoon. She couldn't say exactly where she would go.
Western Kenya was as far as she had thought it out.
Up the road, back toward Nairobi, the migration was going in other
directions. Camped out next to a church were Kikuyus driven out of
the west. George Mbugua, 47, worked in a village in the lush Rift
Valley, home to the Kalenjin people, who have long resented an
influx of Kikuyus that began with independence from Britain nearly
a half century ago and never really stopped.
"Here now, I am friendless, family-less, penniless. But I am told
we're all Kikuyu people here, that I will be helped," he said. He
didn't sound convinced.
Nobody knows how many people are moving across Kenya to seek the
safety of ethnic numbers in this country of 38 million. But it's
not just the rural poor; there are many reports of Nairobi
landlords renting only to the right ethnicity, and businesses
taking care about which staff are sent to which jobs.
For many ordinary Kenyans, the new reality is sobering.
"Sure, we all made jokes about each other, the Luos and Kikuyu,
the other people," said Victor Gitonga, a 24-year-old Kikuyu Red
Cross worker who was helping at the Luo camp.
"But that was joking. If people cannot live, work, stay in any
place in this country, than is this a country? We are finished,"
he said.
It would take a lot more to get to that point - no one's even
whispering about secession.
"Kenya is too important a country to allow to fail," U.S.
Ambassador Michael Ranneberger said in an interview.
The East African country is a key ally in the war on terror and a
hub for the U.N. and scores of aid groups working in the region.
Nearly all its neighbors rely on the deep-water port in Mombasa
and the country's extensive, if worn-down, road network - in fact,
at one point last month, Kenyan turmoil temporarily drove up
Ugandan gas prices by about 200 percent.
For now, everyone is looking to Annan, who said Friday the two
sides were "making progress."
But there's growing doubt that Kibaki, under whose rule the Kikuyu
grew more dominant and corruption worse, or Odinga, who has made a
career out of appealing to tribal loyalties, can bring Kenyans
together.
"If the real, fundamental issues behind this violence aren't
solved, there will be a massive backlash against the Kikuyu," said
Caroline Elkins, an associate professor of African studies at
Harvard University.
She already worries about the next election, in 2012, saying: "They've
got to sort this out now.."
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