Kenya: Tribal rifts over disputed elections deepen

(SomaliNet) In what is said to have complicated efforts by former UN boss Kofi Annan to mediate a month-long crisis, protests erupted in west Kenya on Monday over a weekend of ethnic violence in the Rift Valley that left dozens dead.

A source said in the usually peaceful Rift Valley towns of Nakuru and Naivasha, gangs from rival communities have been fighting each other with machetes, clubs and bows and arrows.

Eight people were burned to death locked inside a house.

Violence since Kenya\'s December 27 election has now gathered a momentum of its own - linked to decades-old land disputes, wealth inequities and past British colonial rule - and taken the death toll to approximately 800 people.

The number of 250 000 refugees looked likely to swell as thousands more fled the chaos in Naivasha and Nakuru.
In the pro-opposition western town of Kisumu, police fired teargas and bullets in the air as several thousand people took to the streets on Monday to complain about the deaths of members of their Luo ethnic community in the Rift Valley.

\"A Molo Line bus has just been burnt, the road linking Kisumu to Kakamega is blocked, almost the whole of Kisumu is up in smoke,\" said Eric Odhiambo, a motorcycle taxi-driver.

\"People are mad at killings of Luo in Naivasha yesterday. The police are firing teargas and shooting in the sky ... But there are so many rioters, the police cannot handle them.\"


The dispute over President Mwai Kibaki\'s re-election - which the opposition says was rigged - has plunged Kenya into a spiral of violence, battering its image as an east African trade and tourism hub and one of the continent\'s more stable nations.

While the initial focus of protests was the tallying of the presidential vote, which local and foreign observers said was flawed, rivalries over land, business and power dating back to Kenya\'s 1963 independence have now come to the fore.

Analysts say colonial Britain\'s divide-and-rule policies among different communities created wounds that have festered ever since, worsened by unfair post-independence land policies.

Attacks in the immediate aftermath of Kibaki\'s win were mainly against his Kikuyu tribe - the largest and richest in Kenya - but members of that group, including the outlawed Mungiki gang, have begun fighting back, Kenyans say.

\"We want these Luos to go back home. They chased and killed our people. Now we want the same thing to happen to them. Let them go back to Kisumu,\" said Kikuyu protester Joseph Maina, holding a plank of wood in a mob taunting police in Naivasha.

His group of about 1 000 was held back from reaching a rival Luo gang of about 300 by a thin line of police.

Reporters verified at least 19 deaths in Naivasha on Sunday, and 27 around Nakuru since Thursday.

A reporter in Naivasha heard screams late into the night.

Mobs stopped cars on the main highway and demanded passengers\' identity cards. One man was beaten before being kicked under the wheels of a minibus as it sped to safety.

Negotiators led by Annan have told the rival camps of Kibaki, and opposition leader Raila Odinga, to select four representatives each and study a blueprint for further talks in the next 24 hours, an official involved in the mediation said.

But residents in Naivasha, a major producer of flowers for Europe, appeared to put little faith in negotiations.

\"Those people shouting for Raila, they don\'t want peace. They have been killing our people, burning our houses,\" said David Gitonga, a Naivasha resident who had been manning a roadblock until the army cleared it away.

\"Now it\'s our turn to have justice.\"

Odinga put the death toll in Naivasha at 30 and blamed the government for trying to divert the attention of the mediation team away from the original electoral dispute.

Annan visited trouble-spots over the weekend and said the crisis in Kenya had gone well beyond an electoral dispute. He denounced \"gross and systematic\" human rights abuses. - Reuters