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Clashes, tension "routine" in
troubled Molo
MOLO, 10 February 2008 (IRIN) - In Kenya's Rift Valley town of
Molo, about 200km from Nairobi, displacement by conflict has
become a recurrent feature of life, and not only at election times.
Some of the destitute families sheltering in makeshift camps in
church and government compounds in Molo told IRIN that this was
the fifth time that they had been chased from their homes in the
last two decades.
"In Molo, this has been a routine. Elections are only one of the
trigger events. We have other things that trigger clashes, like a
lady has been raped by a certain community or a certain community
were drinking in a bar and one person decides to beat the other
until they kill them, and it becomes a community thing.
"These things have been happening with small trigger events and
then they flare up. It's only this time round the problem is
bigger because it was a national problem and not a Molo problem,"
said the Molo coordinator for the Kenya Red Cross Society (KRCS),
Msallam Ahmed.
Hard-hit Rift Valley Province
In the latest cycle, violence began in the Rift Valley almost a
month before Kenya's December 27 elections as minority communities,
mainly Kikuyus and Kisiis, started being hounded out of their
houses by rival ethnic groups.
Rift Valley Province had been most affected by the post-election
violence with more than 400 people killed, 250,000 displaced and
80,000 houses torched, according to Rift Valley Provincial
Commissioner Hassan Noor Hassan.
In Molo district alone, there were 60 sites hosting the displaced,
16 in Molo town itself.
One of the camps was in the grounds of a government office, the
Pyrethrum Board. The first 20 displaced people arrived here on 20
December, a week before the elections. By early February, it was
home to 415 people.
As sacks of maize were unloaded for distribution, a volunteer
teacher wielding a stick tried to entertain a scruffy crowd of
about 50 children sitting in the dirt. A fight broke out between
two boys and the mob surged after one of them. Ahmed intervened
and grabbed hold of the fleeing child.
"These children have seen mob justice. They get scared," he said,
hugging the tearful boy.
Parents "get angry fast"
He said the greatest need in the camps was to get displaced
children back to school, particularly because they were
traumatised by their experiences and the atmosphere was tense.
"Children are beaten by their own parents because of small
mistakes they make, sometimes because of the trauma of their
parents, the psychological state they are in. They get angry fast
and beat their children terribly," he said.
Humanitarian workers had set up a group to give psychosocial
support to children. Ahmed also wanted to see paralegal services
being provided in the camps to tackle cases of abuse.
Humanitarian role for local groups
Ahmed also wanted to see local organisations, such as youth and
women's groups, doing more to help with emergency relief efforts.
"We have small, local organisations that can do very well. The
problem is they are shying away because they are seeing big
organisations coming up and they feel their role might not be
needed but their role is needed," said Ahmed.
"We need a big number of these smaller groups to come up and help.
. . They have the expertise of the local community. It makes the
work easier. We're using youth groups who are already experts in
the theatre field to reach out with skits. That is a support. It
doesn't have to be in cash," he explained.
Beth Wanjiku - living in Molo since 1963
The story of 72-year-old widow Beth Wanjiku was typical, showing
how far back the roots of the ethnic conflict in Molo district go.
As a young married woman, Wanjiku moved to Kumbi, 10 km from Molo,
with her husband soon after independence in 1963. She and her
husband bought a two-acre plot in Kumbi, as part of the government
settlement scheme which returned land sold by departing colonial
settlers to landless Africans.
As Kikuyus, her family were periodically targeted as outsiders in
the Rift Valley. Eight of her 12 children had been killed during
the 1992 and 1997 clashes related to Kenya's first two multiparty
elections. Her husband, also badly injured during the 1997 ethnic
clashes, had died two years ago. Since then, she had been living
alone on her farm.
Speaking to IRIN in the Kikuyu language, she recalled how a gang
of 200 young men, armed with bows and arrows, machetes and sticks,
came to her house at around 8pm one night in early December. They
pushed her down on the floor, kicking and beating her. They then
chased her out of her house and stole her six cows and cash worth
about $120.
It was a cold night. She covered her head with her jacket and
tried to sleep in the fields, she said. The next morning, she
slowly made her way to Molo with her walking stick.
Wanjiku said she was too scared to return home but had no idea
where she would go when the camp closed. One of her children was
still alive, a 35-year-old man, but he too had been displaced
during the recent violence and was living in another internally
displaced people's (IDP) camp in Molo.
Root causes
Visiting Wanjiku's camp, John Holmes, the United Nations' most
senior humanitarian official and Emergency Relief Coordinator,
said the historical roots of the conflict must be addressed.
"There are hatreds there, which have been there for some time.
They're not new. They're related to land. They're related to
divisions of the past. I think it requires an enormous effort to
bring the elders of these groups together to say everybody loses
when this happens.It's not easy. It's a long-term process. But I
don't think we should regard it as impossible," he said.
Political leaders remain in mediated talks to seek a political
solution to the crisis in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi.
Holmes said this in itself would not solve the problem.
"No one can guarantee that a political deal in Nairobi will solve
all these problems. Clearly it won't. There's some very hard, deep
work that needs to be done on reconciling communities with each
other so that we don't go back through this cycle again. That's no
easy task," he said.
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