Monday, Jan. 7, 2008

Hope and betrayal in Kenya.

By GWYNNE DYER as picked up on The Japan Times.

LONDON — More than two years ago, when Kenya’s current opposition leader, Raila Odinga, quit President Mwai Kibaki’s government, I (that is Gwynne Dwyer) wrote the following: “The trick will be to get Kibaki out without triggering a wave of violence that would do the country grave and permanent damage. . . . Bad times are coming to Kenya.”

The bad times have arrived, but the violence that has swept Kenya since the stolen election Dec. 27 is not just African “tribalism.” Kikuyus have been the main target of popular wrath and non-Kikuyu protesters have been the principal victims of the security forces, but this confrontation is about trust betrayed, hopes dashed, and patience strained to the breaking point.

Nobody wants a civil war in Kenya, but it’s easy to see why Raila Odinga rejects calls from abroad to accept the figures for the national vote that were announced last Dec. 30. If Odinga enters a “government of national unity” under Kibaki, as the African Union and the United States want, then he’s back in the untenable situation that he was in until 2005, and Kibaki will run Kenya for another five years.

If Odinga leaves it to Kenya’s courts to settle, the result will be the same: There have been no verdicts yet on disputed results that went to the courts after the 2002 election. So when the opposition leader was asked by the BBC if he would urge his supporters to calm down, he replied: “I refuse to be asked to give the Kenyan people an anesthetic so that they can be raped.”

Despite the ugly scenes of recent days, Kenya is not an ethnic tinderbox where people automatically back their own tribe and hate everyone else. For example, it is clear that more than half the people who voted Mwai Kibaki into the presidency in the 2002 election were not of his own Kikuyu tribe, because the Kikuyu, although they are the biggest tribe, only account for 22 percent of the population.

Kibaki’s appeal was the promise of honest government after 24 years of oppressive rule, rigged elections and massive corruption under the former president, Daniel arap Moi. If he had been just another thug in a suit, most Kenyans would have put up with Kibaki’s subsequent behavior in the same old cynical way, but his victory was seen as the dawn of a new Kenya where the bad old ways no longer reigned. It is his abuse of their high hopes that makes the current situation so emotional.

By 2005, Kibaki’s dependence on an inner circle of fellow Kikuyu politicians was almost total and the corruption was almost as bad as it had been under Moi.

British ambassador Sir Edward Clay accused Kibaki’s ministers of arrogance and greed that led them to “eat like gluttons” and “vomit on the shoes” of foreign donors and the Kenyan people. The biggest foreign donors, the U.S., Britain and Germany, suspended their aid to the country in protest against the corruption.

Most of the leading reformers quit Kibaki’s government in 2005, and in the weeks before last month’s election their main political vehicle, the Orange Democratic Movement, had a clear lead in the polls. That lead was confirmed in the parliamentary vote Dec. 27, which saw half of Kibaki’s Cabinet ministers lose their seats and give the opposition a clear majority in Parliament.

The presidential vote was another matter. Raila Odinga won an easy majority in six of Kenya’s eight provinces, but in Central, the Kikuyu heartland, the results were withheld until long after the vote had been announced for more remote regions. Observers were banned from the counting stations in Central and the central tallying room in Nairobi, and on Dec. 30 Samuel Kivuitu, the chairman of the electoral commission, declared that Kibaki had won the national vote by just 232,000 votes in a nation of 34 million.

It stank to high heaven. Ridiculously high turnouts were claimed for polling stations in Central — larger than the total of eligible voters, in some cases — and 97.3 percent of the votes there allegedly went to Kibaki. It was an operation designed to return Kibaki to office while preserving a facade of democratic credibility, but no foreign government except the U.S. congratulated Kibaki on his “victory” — not even African ones — and local people were not fooled.

Within two days Samuel Kivuitu retracted his declaration of a Kibaki victory, saying the electoral commission had come under unbearable pressure from the government: “I do not know who won the election. . . . We are culprits as a commission. We have to leave it to an independent group to investigate what actually went wrong.”

But Kibaki is digging in, and innocent Kikuyus — many of whom did NOT vote for Kibaki, despite the announced results — are being attacked by furious people from other tribes.

Meanwhile, the police and army obey Kibaki’s orders and attack non-Kikuyu protesters. It is not Odinga who needs to accept the “result” in order to save Kenya from calamity; it is Kibaki who needs to step down.

He probably won’t, in which case violence may claim yet another African country. But don’t blame it on mere “tribalism.” Kenyans are not fools, and they know they have been betrayed.

Gwynne Dyer is a London-based journalist.

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The Way The UN Reported on the Kenya Event in Its Official Daily News:

UN DAILY NEWS from the
UNITED NATIONS NEWS SERVICE
4 January, 2008 =========================================================================

250,000 KENYANS DISPLACED BY POST-ELECTORAL VIOLENCE, UN ESTIMATES.

Some 250,000 Kenyans are now estimated to have been displaced by post-electoral violence, United Nations humanitarian officials reported today, as the world body’s independent human rights experts voiced deep concern at the ethnic dimension of the conflict.

Overall, between 400,000 and 500,000 people have been affected by the conflict.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon spoke by telephone today with both President Mwai Kibaki and opposition leader Raila Odinga, and called on them to resolve their issues through dialogue. The violence, which has reportedly claimed more than 300 lives, erupted after Mr. Kibaki was declared the winner of last week’s poll. Mr. Ban also spoke with Ghanaian President John Kufuor, current chairman of the African Union.

Meanwhile, the UN World Food Programme (WFP) reported that virtually all movement of food for both western Kenya and the entire region, including Uganda, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), was frozen for days due to the insecurity.

The 14 human rights experts, covering issues ranging from racism to sexual violence to freedom of belief, deplored the growing inter-ethnic conflict, citing the deaths of dozens of civilians, including children and women, after a mob set fire to a church where they had taken sanctuary.

“We are profoundly alarmed by the reports of incitement to racial hatred and the growing frictions between the different ethnic groups,” they said in a statement calling on the authorities, political, ethnic and religious leaders to put an end “to what may become the dynamics of inter-ethnic killings… in the light of historical precedents in the region.”

Rwanda, to the west of Kenya, was the scene of genocide in 1994, when ethnic Hutu extremists massacred some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus. Ethnic conflict between Hutus and Tutsis has also killed hundreds of thousands of people over the past four decades in Burundi, Rwanda’s southern neighbour.

In a litany of “great concern,” the experts said the massive displacement, especially in the Rift Valley, threatened the right to food, health, housing and education. They also cited reports of gang rapes and the attendant likelihood of HIV infection and reported curbs on free expression, in particular a ban on live coverage of events.

“While we recognize the prerogative and duty of the Kenyan authorities to maintain public order, we are, however, alarmed by reported instances of use of excessive force by Kenyan security forces against demonstrators and other civilians,” they added.

“We urge the incumbent Kenyan authorities to take all necessary steps and measures to bring an end to the present situation, including by addressing appropriately questions raised with regard to the latest election results. We also call upon the leaders of political parties to show restraint and control over their followers and supporters.”

WFP will shortly provide food through the Kenya Red Cross for 100,000 people displaced in the Northern Rift Valley, but it said: “The biggest problem is the difficulty for trucks carrying WFP food to reach areas in western Kenya.”

Some 200 trucks were loaded with WFP food in the Kenyan port of Mombasa from a ship that arrived over Christmas carrying 30,000 metric tons – enough to feed 1.5 million people for a month – for Uganda, southern Sudan, Somalia and the eastern DRC. The food for Somalia will be sent by sea, but the rest has to go by land, WFP said.

Some trucks left Mombasa but then were stranded due to insecurity on main roads and checkpoints set up by vigilantes in western Kenya. Fifteen trucks are stranded in or near Nairobi, 60 in Mombasa and others in Eldoret, near the site of the church massacre. Each truck carries 34 tons of food. “WFP is holding urgent talks to resolve this issue and get food to those who need it in Kenya and elsewhere,” the agency said.

Kenyan security forces recently escorted 20 WFP trucks carrying food for north-western Kenya, southern Sudan, Uganda and the DRC, but the insecurity and roadblocks are still hampering humanitarian access.

The UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) is trying to establish so-called “safe spaces” for displaced mothers and children, provide water and sanitation to over 100,000 people, and distribute family kits to supply up to 100,000 people with blankets, plastic sheeting, cooking sets, soap and jerry cans.

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The Dwyer article just validates our previous posting on the Kenya and of the UN problems.

Kenya will not be helped from the outside as long as the UN does not recognize the fact that the Head of State they deal with - Kenya’s President is the culprit. People will get killed because of this UN lack of honesty. Saying that this is like Rwanda, as we already wrote, is simply dodging the reality that Kibaki must be told he has to go - like Musharraf must be told he has to go. The UN was never able to take such positions and to make such statements - so it will be unfair to claim that it is because of the Libyan Presidency of the Security Council. Will Mr. Ban Ki-moon take steps in private that can be helpful, or his private contacts are no different from those stated words.

Time will tell - but according to other news we picked up in the media, the Western town of Kisumu, a town of 500,000, third largest in Kenya, is being ravaged. This is a town where the main Street is called after Mr Odinga’s father - Oginga Odinga - and people here got furious when they realized that the election was stolen by the President.

In effect the platform of Raila  Odinga’s “Orange Democratic Movement” is nothing else then a revival of the party that won the 2002 elections for Mr. Kibaki - only to see that once elected he forgot its multi-tribal composition that was intended to create a Kenyan National image, and for all practical purpose turned the country over to his Kikuyu tribe.

Odinga, and others, left the government in 2005 and prepared for the new elections in 2007. They thought they won on the basis of returns from all regions except the Central region where the Kikuyus live. Kibaki delayed the release of the votes from that region, and furtively swore himself in for another 5 years. Hell broke lose, and most probably now, besides having to get Mr. Kibaki to let in foreign observers to supervise new elections, it will also be needed to write a new Constitution that gives more power to the tribes and the regions - this in order to answer some of the needs created by the last 5 years of Kibaki’s rule in Kenya. Kenya attempted to become a real State that was going to be above tribalism, but the Kikuyus destroyed this by the attempt to rule alone - think of the Sunnis in Iraq! This sort of behavior does not succeed when you are an absolute minority, and now there will have to be made an attempt to go back to some sort of Federal System that can take away the thorns that Kibaki will leave behind.

And the UN? As long as the UN presence continues in Nairobi, there will be the need for the UN to voice suggestions for a  positive approach to move the country from the present rot. Actually, December 2006 people at the UN in Nairobi saw things coming - so why was no attempt made to Show Kibaki that he is mounting a hill of problems by giving all to just those that belong to his tribe, the main tribe that resides in the area of the Capital. The UN could have informed him that similar situations caused disaster in other post-colonial States in Africa. The US sent to Kenya Ms. Jendayi E. Frazer, the US Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, that will have to bring the two contenders for leadership into the same room and have them negotiate a settlement. To shuttle between them will just prolong the killings. It is important to realize that the problem is still political, and yet not really a full blown ethnic conflict and it better be tackled before it gets worse.