Today's Headlines - Fri 3/28/2008

Former UN Chief Intervenes Again in Kenyan Political Crisis

By VOA News 28 March 2008

Kofi Annan (file photo)Former United Nations chief Kofi Annan is appealing to Kenya's president and prime minister-designate to resolve their differences over the country's new Cabinet.

U.N. officials and Kenyan politicians say Mr. Annan called from New York this week to urge President Mwai Kibaki and opposition leader Raila Odinga to end their stalemate.

The two men have failed to agree on the size of the Cabinet or who should head key ministries.

Mr. Annan helped broker a deal between the rivals last month to end deadly violence that followed Kenya's disputed presidential election.

The violence erupted after Mr. Odinga's Orange Democratic Movement accused Mr. Kibaki of rigging the December 27 vote.

The rivals have since agreed to form a power-sharing government with Mr. Odinga as prime minister. They also agreed to split the Cabinet evenly between their parties.

Some information for this report was provided by AFP and Reuters.


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Today's headlines - Wed 3/26/2008

BBC News
Kenyan president, would-be PM to visit conflict refugees
AFP - 4 hours ago
NAIROBI (AFP) — Kenya's president and his main opposition rival will this week visit displaced people in the Rift Valley region in a show of unity after the ...

Kenyan president, would-be PM to visit conflict refugees

7 hours ago

NAIROBI (AFP) — Kenya's president and his main opposition rival will this week visit displaced people in the Rift Valley region in a show of unity after the post-election violence, officials said Wednesday.

The visit to the internally displaced people (IDPs) will the the first joint tour by President Mwai Kibaki and opposition rival Raila Odinga, who is bidding for the prime minister's post.

"The tour will be relevant to the IDPs because the entire government machinery will also move there to assess their needs," Vice President Kalonzo Musyoka told parliament late Tuesday.

The visit aimed to assure the people that calm had returned, that they could go home, and that they would receive receive government help to do so, he added.

The trip is seen as cementing the two leaders' signing of a power-sharing accord in February that halted the tribal fighting and revenge killings that had claimed at least 1,500 lives and displaced hundreds of thousands of people.

It was not clear when and what part of the Rift Valley the two leaders would tour.

Agriculturalists have warned that the country faces a grain shortage in the coming months because food reserves were destroyed and insecurity has blocked farming in the breadbasket area. This has resulted to increased food shortage.

Standard newspaper said resettling the displaced is urgent.

"Apart from the squalor in IDP camps, increasing the risk of disease outbreaks, many are concerned that planting season activities such as tilling of land have not begun in many areas," the Standard's editorial said.

Odinga accused Kibaki of rigging the December 27 presidential elections, touching off a wave of violence, prompting former UN chief Kofi Annan to step in and mediate a power-sharing accord that was reached on February 28.

Kenya is still recovering from what was one of its worst crises since independence from Britain in 1963, which affected the key tourism and agricultural sectors.

The two leaders have been holding a series of talks for dividing up cabinet posts nearly a week after parliament enacted laws entrenching the coalition government in the constitution.

Kenyan newspapers pressed the pair to finalise the talks and name a coalition cabinet, in which Odinga is expected to be prime minister.

"What may have appeared as a clear-cut deal is proving rather tricky," said the mass circulation Daily Nation in its editorial.

"Apparently, there are many vested interests that are making it extremely difficult for the two main players to make a quick decision."

Meanwhile, Kenyan security forces combed the country's western region in search of members of the Sabaot Land Defence Force (SLDF), a militia which has been fighting against the government over land claims.

Government troops backed by helicopters have been sweeping the restive area in an operation that has claimed at least eight lives. The militia's activities have claimed hundreds of lives and displaced tens of thousands since last year.

"Most of the SLDF leaders are hiding, but we will not stop the operation until all the criminals are apprehended and stability is restored in the area," police spokesman Eric Kiraithe told AFP.

Kiraithe said stability has been restored in most parts of the country, home to 35 million people.


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Today's headlines - Tues 3/25/2008

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Despite Kenya peace deal, ethnic tensions simmer
Reuters South Africa, South Africa - 6 hours ago
By Andrew Cawthorne ELDORET, Kenya, March 25
(Reuters) - Nearly three months after the worst massacre of Kenya's post-election violence, children's shoes ...

Ethnic tensions simmer despite Kenya peace deal

Tue 25 Mar 2008, 10:10 GMT
[-] Text [+]
By Andrew Cawthorne

ELDORET, Kenya (Reuters) - Nearly three months after the worst massacre of Kenya's post-election violence, children's shoes and charred clothes remain in the ashes of a rural church where about 30 people were burned to death.

Wreaths of dried-out flowers lie where a mob set fire to the Assemblies of God building with 100 or so terrified villagers cowering inside. A cow nibbles grass around a fallen yellow tape reading: "Crime Scene, Do Not Cross."

All around the church, torched and trashed homes litter countryside outside the western town of Eldoret, one of the epicentres of violence that killed at least 1,200 people and uprooted 300,000 others after Kenya's December 27 election.

President Mwai Kibaki and his main challenger, Raila Odinga, have since made their peace, burying their dispute over who won in a power-sharing agreement. They have taken tea and even watched golf together at a colonial-era country club.

But on the ground, wounds from the worst bloodletting in the east African nation since independence in 1963 remain sore and many fear violence could erupt again if the deeper roots of the troubles are not tackled.

Communities are suspicious of one another. Tens of thousands of people still live as refugees. And there has been a massive population shift as Kenyans from different tribes return to the safety of their ancestral heartlands.

Less than a mile from the burnt church in Kiambaa village, police are building a new base to prevent repetitions of the attacks by Kalenjins -- who are in the majority in the Eldoret area -- on Kikuyus, members of Kibaki's ethnic group.

"We will hold the peace, and we will catch the perpetrators," one policeman said, nailing planks to new huts.

NERVOUS
A few nervous-looking Kikuyus are back to check their plots.

"Some fear to return, some want to sell their land, some might come back and re-settle here if there is peace," said Francis Waweru, 23. His sister scorched her arm escaping from the church and has gone far away to the Kikuyu town of Limuru.

"It is hard to forget," he said, standing next to the church and describing how hundreds of Kalenjin warriors barred the refugees inside before burning the building and hacking those who tried to escape with machetes.

Down the road, locals have daubed a new name in their tribal language -- Kipnyiket -- over the Kikuyu word Kiambaa. Authorities say the perpetrators are among hundreds they have arrested nationwide. They plan a memorial at the church site.

On another side of Eldoret, scores of houses and shops are reduced to blackened rubble in scenes more reminiscent of war-riven neighbours Somalia and Sudan.

Huge boulders beside the highway also bear witness to the gangs who took over the area in January. Armed with machetes and bows-and-arrows, they had set up roadblocks to hunt Kikuyus.

"Of course we were angry. They stole the election in front of our eyes," one jobless 28-year-old Kalenjin man said.

"Now power is supposed to be shared 50-50 but they are not willing to share really," he added, echoing a widespread accusation among Kenya's non-Kikuyus that Kibaki's community has monopolised power and wealth.

Another Kalenjin man chided a visiting reporter, saying the media -- like Kibaki and the police -- had focused on deaths of Kikuyus around Eldoret, but not the killing of members of other communities elsewhere around Kenya.

"What about the house burned in Naivasha with 15 people inside? You don't talk about what the Kikuyus did," he said.

"There are no Kikuyus living round here any more. If they come back, it will depend on the 50-50 deal, if it works. Then if they return and are friendly with us, it will be OK."

UNDERLYING PROBLEMS
According to the power-sharing deal, Odinga is set to become prime minister although wrangling remains over other posts.

Further down the line, Kenya's politicians will also have to overhaul the constitution and discuss underlying problems such as land and inequality that were laid bare by the dispute over Kibaki's re-election last December.

At Eldoret showground, 15,000 refugees -- almost all Kikuyus -- live in tents crammed together on the field.

They are either too scared to return home, have nothing to go back to, or are waiting for some way of travelling to their community's heartland in central Kenya.

"Power-sharing has brought peace to the people above, but not to us," said pastor Gideon Mwangi, whose house in Eldoret was torched and whose family fled to Naivasha.

"We are willing to go back, but only when there is real peace. There are still threats going on in the villages."

Refugee leaders are petitioning for compensation for destroyed properties, stolen livestock and lost crops.

Some Kikuyus in the Eldoret area have, however, returned to their former lives. In the centre of town, several dozen stick together for security in streets where they work as mechanics and labourers fixing minibuses.

Joseph Gitau, 23, was born in the area, saw his father killed with a poisoned arrow during inter-ethnic fighting in 1997, and admits taking up a machete to face Kalenjin gangs in January. One day, he saw seven fellow Kikuyus decapitated.

Yet he has returned to work to help feed his mother, and ten brothers and sisters. And he has no intention of returning to a tribal homeland he does not know.

"There, I have no job, no land, nothing. What could I do?"

(Editing by Daniel Wallis)

(For full Reuters Africa coverage and to have your say on the top issues, visit: http://africa.reuters.com/)

© Reuters 2008. All Rights Reserved.


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Today's Headlines - Fri 3/21/2008

One Reuters story on concerns over how Kenya army is handling Mt Elgon violence, four news summaries with links from IRIN news service (United Nations), followed by many links from Google News:

Kenyans protest at army terror in mountain offensive - Reuters

Fri Mar 21, 2008 4:52am EDT
By Andrew Cawthorne

MOUNT ELGON, Kenya (Reuters) - Church leader Wycliffe Masibo describes seeing an elderly member of his flock whipped to death during a Kenyan army search for militiamen in his remote mountain village.

Having made all the men lie on the floor, soldiers kicked and hit them, demanding they tell them where guns were kept and suspects were hiding, he and others from Chongoywo village on the slopes of Mount Elgon told a visiting reporter.

"They wanted the brother of Isaac Chele, one of my church members, who is about 60, but the brother had fled," Masibo said. "They asked him questions, but didn't care about the answers. They kept hitting him. He died from the whip, I saw."

Authorities deny mistreating locals in a two-week-old military offensive to flush out members of the illegal Sabaot Defence Land Force (SDLF) militia from the caves, forests and villages around Mount Elgon in western Kenya.

But the Kenya Red Cross has treated 1,800 people for injuries -- mostly bruising and swelling -- since it started.

Asked what the cause of those injuries were, Red Cross head Abbas Gullet said he could not go into detail, then added: "It is obvious, my friend."

Refugees fleeing the area give identical accounts of bombardments from the air and truckloads of soldiers rolling into villages and beating them en masse.

The Mount Elgon conflict pre-dates the violence in Kenya after President Mwai Kibaki's disputed December re-election.

But it shares some of the root causes -- land disputes, ethnic tensions, marginalization of remote areas -- and is something of a microcosm of the deep historical problems bedeviling the east African nation.

Since the SDLF took up arms in mid-2006 to fight for land it says was illegally taken from the local Soy community, more than 500 people have been killed and 60,000 displaced.

Many locals are unsympathetic, saying the militia quickly turned into a criminal band, emerging from the forest to loot and kill. The SDLF demands protection money and, at one point, punished drunkenness by slicing ear-lobes, they say.

"They slashed and killed my father, I had to run away," farmer David Nyongeza, 52, said at a charity's food distribution point just outside the military operation zone.

"So I support the operation. It is a good thing."

"WAVE OF TERROR"
Local leaders and rights activists, however, say the army has gone too far, inflicting yet more suffering on a traumatized and impoverished local population.

Hassan Omar Hassan, a commissioner with the government-funded Kenya National Human Rights Commission, said
everyone knew in advance when the army offensive was to begin.

"So the militia fled. And based on the frustration of failure, the soldiers just hit at everyone," he said. "They missed their original target then created a wave of terror."

Local member of parliament Fred Kapondi and Mount Elgon county council chairman Benson Chesikak accuse the army of using torture on many of the more than 1,000 suspects held in the first round of arrests.

They, and relatives of those taken into custody, spoke of techniques like making suspects lie face up in the sun all day, walk on their knees, and step on barbed wire.

They also say there have been "tens" of deaths.

Regional police boss Abdul Mwasserah denied that.

"We have not killed anybody. We have not tortured anybody. The security forces are there to help the community, to rid them of the criminals," he said. "Those who are complaining are not representative. Most appreciate what we are doing."

Mwasserah said the offensive had yielded 31 AK-47 rifles and 300 arrests, and would go on as long as necessary. "We are not in a hurry to pull out," he told Reuters.

A dusk-to-dawn curfew has been imposed, and roadblocks bar journalists from the zone of operations. But Red Cross vehicles go in and out on dusty, winding tracks across the slopes of the picturesque mountain in fertile land near the Ugandan border.

Among the refugees, women also allege harassment.

Ruth Chebed, 27, said scores of soldiers swarmed into her village, Chelebe, at the end of last week. Some demanded the women show where the men kept guns.

"I didn't know, so they beat me here," she said, touching her ribs. "They took my brother. I don't know where he is."
(Editing by Daniel Wallis and Tim Pearce)

(For full Reuters Africa coverage and to have your say on the top issues, visit: africa.reuters.com/)

© Reuters 2007. All rights reserved.

==============================

Four IRIN summaries with links:

1 - KENYA: State failed to protect citizens during unrest - UN report

Kenyan authorities failed in their responsibility to protect citizens when violence erupted after disputed presidential elections in December 2007, according to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).

"The scale of the violence and destruction indicates the failure of the Kenyan State to protect its citizens' right to life, security and property during these events," a report by an OHCHR fact-finding mission stated.

[Full report at: http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=77360]

2 - KENYA: Census plans on track despite displacement

The political crisis in Kenya caused major population movements that may require a repeat of cartographic mapping in some areas before the 2009 census, but plans for the official count are on track, a government official told IRIN.

"We are revising our work plan and looking at areas where we might have to repeat cartographic mapping but we expect to hold the census on 25 August 2009 as planned," said Chris Omolo, the census manager and principal economist at the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS).

[Full report at: http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=77359]

3 - KENYA: Tension high as hundreds flee clash-torn Laikipia

Hundreds of civilians have fled Kenya's Rift Valley district of Laikipia, where fighting between two communities has resulted in deaths and at least 300 houses being burnt.

Police spokesman Eric Kiraithe said reinforcements and an investigating team of officers had been sent to the scene. According to him, the death toll was 14.

[Full report at: http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=77323]

4 - KENYA: Human Rights Watch urges inquiry into post-election violence

Kenyan authorities should investigate and bring to justice people suspected of instigating violence following the country's disputed presidential elections in December, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said on 17 March.

"In many cases the chief architects of post-election violence were prominent and well-known individuals," stated HRW in a report entitled Ballots to Bullets: Organized Political Violence and Kenya's Crisis of Governance.

[Full report at: http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=77321]

======================

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Today's Headlines - Thurs 3/20/2008

Kenya relieved after parliament backs power-sharing deal - AFP

17 hours ago

NAIROBI (AFP) — Kenyan media on Wednesday welcomed parliament's ratification of a deal aimed at ending deadly political turmoil while new violence rocked some regions.

A rare conciliatory mood marked Tuesday's parliamentary session in which lawmakers backed the power-sharing deal reached on February 28 but warned that land and ethnic disputes need urgent attention.

The problems were highlighted by the deaths of eight people in East Pokot district as the parliament session went ahead.

Ethnic Turkana cattle rustlers killed eight Pokot rivals and stole around 1,000 animals late Tuesday, local police commander Peter Njenga said.

"The Turkana were armed with rifles and shot six people who died on the spot, and two others shot by arrows died on their way to hospital," Njenga said.

The deaths were not directly linked to the disputed December 27 elections which set off unrest in the east African nation that has left 1,500 dead, but the political crisis has exacerbated many local feuds.

The dire economic impact of two months of tribal killings and police raids has also led to increased crime and heightened tensions between rival communities of herders and farmers.

South African Judge Johann Christiaan Kriegler arrived in Kenya on Wednesday to head a six-member independent panel to probe the disputed polls.

The team, which includes two experts from Argentina and Tanzania and four others from Kenya, will probe election officials and observers as well as analyse the whole voting exercise, officials said.

The panel will start working after a swearing-in by Kenya's chief justice on Thursday, officials added.

While negotiators for President Mwai Kibaki and opposition leader Raila Odinga have barely started hammering out the deal's fine print, parliament unanimously approved the Constitution of Kenya (Amendment) Bill and the National Accord and Reconciliation Bill.

The bill, which was signed into law by Kibaki, created the post of a prime minister -- slated for Odinga -- and two deputy prime ministers in a coalition government.

Kenyan newspapers described the parliament vote as historic, but warned of tough times when the country starts tackling deeper constitutional changes.

"The most important lesson was the realisation that the problems afflicting this country require a constitutional solution, because the current governance, economic and social structures were untenable in a multi-ethnic and multi-party state," the Daily Nation said in an editorial.

Meanwhile, security forces searched for a fugitive militia chief who called for a halt to military operations in the restive northwestern Mount Elgon region during an interview with a radio station.

Police were searching for John Kanai, commander of the Sabaot Land Defence Force (SLDF), a militia which has been fighting the government over land claims, spokesman Eric Kiraithe said.

"It is just a matter of time, we will get him.... The government is determined to restore law and order in Mount Elgon," Kiraithe said.

In an interview with West FM on Tuesday, Kanai accused the government of bombing civilians in the area, where several hundred people have been killed and 66,000 displaced by bloody clashes since December 2006.

Hundreds of troops backed by helicopters are sweeping the area in a bid to flush out the SLDF. At least eight people have been killed and hundreds arrested since the latest operation was launched on March 9.

"The security officers are looking for something they cannot find. Why are they hurting civilians?" the Standard newspaper quoted Kanai telling the radio station, based in the western town of Bungoma.

Kanai, who is on the police's most wanted list, said the operation had disrupted farming and has been followed by insecurity and inter-tribe clashes.

Police stormed the radio station after the interview in search of Kanai's telephone contact, the Standard reported.

Government forces are also tracking two other militia groups: the Political Revenge Movement (PRM) and the Moorland Defence Force, a militia formed by the Ogiek tribe to counter the SLDF.

==================

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