By Daniel Wallis and Katie Nguyen
Wednesday, January 02, 2008
"Supporters of Raila Odinga are involved in ethnic cleansing," said spokesman Alfred Mutua as the death toll from four days of clashes rose to about 250. "We don't want this to tarnish Odinga, to be seen to be conducting ethnic cleansing."
Odinga's supporters, drawn mainly from his Luo tribe, have made similar charges against Kibaki, whose Kikuyu have dominated political and business life in East Africa's biggest economy.
As young men armed with machetes manned roadblocks in rural areas, a trickle of office workers in the capital Nairobi made it through police cordons to begin the new working year.
The opening of the local foreign exchange market was delayed by two hours to 0800 GMT.
"They call this democracy," said a central bank worker, delayed by police as he tried to get to work. "They should stop instilling fear in us and let us go back to our work," he said, asking not to be named.
On Tuesday, about 30 Kikuyus were burned alive when a mob set fire to a church they had fled to in the western town of Eldoret -- reviving memories of the slaughter in churches of hundreds of thousands in Rwanda's 1994 genocide.
The Eldoret attack was one the worst episodes of violence that has uprooted tens of thousands of Kenyans, many of them fleeing across the border to Uganda.
Adding to the chaos, Kenya's electoral commission head Samuel Kivuitu was quoted as saying: "I do not know whether Kibaki won the election." The comment by Kivuitu, who pronounced Kibaki the victor on Sunday, could not be immediately verified.
Western powers have called for calm and warned citizens against visiting a popular tourist destination that was regarded as one of the most stable democracies on a volatile continent.
African Union chairman John Kufuor was due in Kenya on Wednesday to try and start what British Prime Minister Gordon Brown called a process of dialogue and reconciliation.
"MADNESS"
Pictures of the Eldoret area filmed from a helicopter by the Red Cross showed plumes of white smoke billowing from dozens of blazing homesteads on Tuesday. Young men with machetes, rocks and bows and arrows could be seen manning crude checkpoints.
There was early calm in Nairobi's slums on Wednesday but residents said the Mungiki, a gang with roots in traditional Kikuyu rituals, had dropped leaflets warning of reprisals against Luos.
Britain has called on the African Union and Commonwealth to try to reconcile Kibaki and Odinga whose parties both accuse the other of vote-rigging during the December 27 election.
Kibaki was sworn in on Sunday after official election results showed he had narrowly beaten Odinga. The EU's observer mission said the poll had "fallen short of key international and regional standards for democratic elections".
The United States first congratulated Kibaki, then switched to expressing "concerns about irregularities".
In remarks in the Standard newspaper, Kivuitu said he was pressured by Odinga and Kibaki's party colleagues to announce the poll results immediately.
Delays announcing the final outcome had prompted allegations of rigging from Odinga's team. Four members of Kivuitu's team have said they would call for a judicial review.
Vincent Ochieng nursed a gaping head wound after Mungiki raided an ethnically mixed shanty town on Tuesday. "First it was protests, then it got violent, now this is revenge," he said.
The Daily Nation newspaper called for an end to the "madness" in a front-page editorial on Wednesday.
If no urgent step was taken to stop the killings, Kenya was "bound to sink into the abyss" and join the ranks of other African nations scarred by genocide, it said.
Source: Reuters, Jan 02, 2007