Kenya: An Overview

Published February 5, 2008

By Alexander Pinto

Nobody is safe in Kenya. After more than a month of constant violence stemming from the controversial presidential elections of December 27, the conflict has shifted and purely political backlash has been combined with ethnic combat.

President Mwai Kibaki was re-elected in the December election by a margin so large that opposition leaders, particularly Raila Odinga, leader of the popular Orange Democratic Movement (ODM), are convinced the votes were tampered with. Indeed, on elections held the same day, Odinga’s ODM received twice as many seats in parliament as Kibaki’s Party of National Unity (PNU).

Protests began almost immediately after the election. They were broken up by police, sometimes violently, and they quickly became rioting and looting. To date, over 800 people have been killed in varying attacks and battles and 250,000 displaced from their homes, many fleeing to neighboring Uganda.

The primary reason for the unusually high level of violence is the alleged state sponsorship. Many Western analysts believe it is clear that the ODM is encouraging rioting and violence, much of which is focused on the Kikuyu tribe for their support of their own Kibaki-in turn, police, while showing proper restraint at times, have had marked lapses as well, firing live rounds on unarmed protestors. Odinga’s tribe is the Luo, and direct fighting between Kikuyus and Luos has proliferated, especially recently. The words “ethnic cleansing” have been applied to the violence between the tribes by the senior U.S. official in Africa, Jendayi Frazer. Fighting is not limited to those tribes, however. There are more than 10 tribes in Kenya, and neighboring communities of tribes have begun sparring, dismantling swaths of the country by making their areas a war zone.

Mediation efforts have been turned over to former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who successfully negotiated a “four point peace plan”, which will implement measures in 15 days to end violence and improve relief efforts, and will also sort out the political quagmire over the next year. Both Kibaki and Odinga have agreed to these measures and have been vocally backing it by calling for an end to violence by their followers.

For now, one can only hope that the four point plan can be effective. Since the fighting has gone to a community level, it could be hard to make sweeping changes, especially since the police force has been part of the problem thus far, and their authority is next to nil (policemen were recently killed by a mob of protesters).

The press has been painting a grim picture in Kenya, and while western analysts largely eschew whispers of a possible repeat of Rwanda, a near-apocalyptic gloom is the prevailing attitude for those displaced from their homes or in the midst of the constant violence. In Kenya, diplomatic precision is a necessity, and change must be immediate.

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