Things Getting Ugly In Kenya
The Financial Times notes just how potentially ugly things are getting in Kenya - a country that was almost a model in Africa up until these past few years. They see great danger there -but interestingly, they are not making the usual calls on the usual suspect to do something. They are blatantly NOT calling for the United Nations to step in.
There are no easy answers to stopping the violence and reconciling the embittered rival factions. Mwai Kibaki, sworn in with unnatural haste for a second term as Kenyan president, was not freely and fairly elected. All the advance polls suggested he would lose. The simultaneous parliamentary elections saw his ruling party decimated, with 20 members of his cabinet, including the vice-president, defeated. He won only 35 out of 210 seats, against at least 100 for Raila Odinga’s Orange Democratic Movement. In the presidential vote, however, amid evidence of ballot stuffing and falsification of the figures, Mr Kibaki suddenly emerged the victor. It was both blatant and incompetent.
In profiting from rigging, Mr Kibaki has inflamed resentment in the country against his Kikuyu tribe, to which some 22 per cent of the population belongs. They refused to share the spoils of economic growth. Having fought the 2002 election promising to unify the country and root out corruption, Mr Kibaki has failed on both counts.
Without outside pressure, neither Mr Kibaki nor Mr Odinga is likely to seek a settlement. Each is persuaded of his own righteousness. But they must be induced to meet if only to defuse the violence.
The African Union should certainly attempt to bring them together, but most African leaders are guilty of rigging elections as blatantly as in Kenya, so they may have little moral authority. They need to act in conjunction with the US, the UK and its European Union partners. They should exert pressure on both sides to annul the results of the elections and create some sort of government of national unity pending a new poll.
The situation in Kenya certainly looks bleak at the moment. Riot police have begun busting heads there and opposition rallies are being banned.
NAIROBI, Kenya - Riot police fired tear gas and water cannons Thursday to beat back crowds heading for a banned rally to protest Kenya's disputed presidential election, and the attorney general called for an independent body to verify the vote tally.
Kenya's electoral commission said President Mwai Kibaki had won the Dec. 27 vote, but rival candidate Raila Odinga alleged the vote was rigged. The dispute has triggered ethnic violence across the country that killed 300 people and displaced 100,000 others.
Smoke from burning tires and debris rose from barricaded streets, not just around the city's huge slums where hundreds of thousands of Odinga's supporters live, but on main roads leading into suburbs that are home to upper class Kenyans and expatriates.
In the Mathare slum, rival groups of angry men hurled rocks at each other. Black smoke billowed from a burning gas station, and several charred cars sat along roadside. The corpse of at least one man lay face down on a muddy path, and a wailing wife pulled her battered husband from the dark waters of the Nairobi River, where he had been dumped and left for dead.
The US, UK and EU better step up here before Kenya really unravels. Calling for the UN is a waste of time, as even the FT tacitly acknowledges. Kenya can't afford to be turned into another Rwanda by the UN.
World news | Gaius Thursday, 3 January , 2008
By martian, Thursday, 3 January , 2008 @ 2:59 pm
What we need to get across to the people in Kenya and the rest of Africa and the rest of the world for that matter is that Tribalism and Democracy are mutually exclusive. I know of no country in the world where democracy is a stable and working form of government where Tribalism exists. The mere fact that anyone refers to the president’s tribe (Mr Kibaki has inflamed resentment in the country against his Kikuyu tribe, to which some 22 per cent of the population belongs) tells you what is going wrong with democracy in that nation. I don’t recall who said it first but it’s a truism nonetheless - no man can serve two masters. A democracy can only work when all of the people recognize that they must give their loyalty to their nation and their democratically elected government - not to individual tribes.
I’m not pinning this just on the Kenyans or just on Africans. Tribalism is causing problems for the democracies in Afghanistan and Pakistan and, to a lesser extent because religious sectarianism is also in play, in Iraq. If any nation is going to be strong AS A NATION then they must recognize that Tribalism is a relic of the pre-indistrial and less civilized past - not a modern concept.