Lawmaker Killed in Kenya's Rift Valley

NAIROBI, Kenya. Jan. 31st. (Time) — An opposition lawmaker was gunned down by a police officer Thursday in the second fatal shooting of an opposition legislator this week amid ethnic fighting sparked by Kenya's disputed presidential election, officials said. National police chief Hussein Ali said lawmaker David Too was killed in "a crime of passion." The opposition said it was an assassination plot. Henry Kosgie, an official of the opposition Orange Democratic Movement, told a news conference that witnesses had reported seeing Too shot as he traveled by car from Nairobi to the western city of Eldoret. Angry residents of Eldoret marched on the police station after the shooting but ran away as paramilitary officers fired into the air. Within minutes of the news reaching the western town of Kisumu, an opposition stronghold, gangs of men armed themselves with machetes and set up burning barricades. Businesses shut down and workers began to flee from the town center.

The killing came as negotiators began the first day of talks to resolve the country's deadly election dispute, and the head of the African Union warned the country was turning to ethnic cleansing, and even genocide. Opposition party secretary-general Anyang Nyongo said it was "part of an evil scheme" to kill legislators and rob the opposition of its majority in parliament. An Associated Press reporter saw Too's body at a hospital in Eldoret, where Deputy Police Chief Gabriel Kuya said the traffic officer had discovered that his girlfriend was having an affair with Too, and chased the two on his motorcycle when he saw them together in a car. "He drove toward the side of the woman and shot her in the stomach twice. Her partner (legislator Too) pleaded with the officer not to kill her but he turned his pistol on him instead, hitting him four times in the head," Kuya told the AP.

At an African Union summit in neighboring Ethiopia, chairman Alpha Konare said, "Kenya is a country that was a hope for the continent. Today, if you look at Kenya you see violence on the streets. We are even talking about ethnic cleansing, We are even talking about genocide. We cannot sit with our hands folded." Kenya's President Mwai Kibaki listened from the front row. Opposition leader Raila Odinga's party rejects Kibaki's Dec. 27 re-election as flawed, tried to prevent him from attending and appealed to the 52-nation bloc not to recognize him. The international community and international and local observers agree that Kibaki's razor-thin victory came because of a rigged vote tally. In Nairobi, six negotiators — three representing Kibaki and three representing Odinga — were meeting under the mediation of former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan. "The mood is serious. They can feel the weight of the nation on their shoulders," said a spokesman for Annan, Nasser Ega-Musa. Odinga has said he wants a new election, while Kibaki has made clear he will not negotiate his position as president. Annan has said it could take a month to resolve the immediate dispute over the election and a year to map out a plan for dealing with decades-old ethnic animosities and land disputes underlying the violence.

Much of the violence has pitted other tribes, including Odinga's Luo, against Kibaki's Kikuyu people. Kikuyus, Kenya's largest ethnic group, have long been resented for their dominance of Kenya's economy and politics. Hundreds of Kikuyus have been killed, and members of the group account for more than half of the 300,000 chased from their homes, most in the Rift Valley. Human rights groups and others accuse politicians of orchestrating some of the violence. The top U.S. diplomat for Africa, Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Jendayi Frazer, said Wednesday that she believed the month of violence has descended into ethnic cleansing. Frazer said she did not consider the killings genocide.

Heidi Vogt reported from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Associated Press Writers Anita Powell in Addis Ababa, Katy Pownall in Kikuyu Town, Katharine Houreld in Kisumu, and Tom Maliti, Malkhadir M. Muhumed and Tom Odula in Nairobi contributed to this report.
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Can Kenya Avert a Bloodbath?

Witeithie, Kenya. Wed. Jan. 30th. (Time) - Walking the paths of this slum north of Nairobi, John Kimani points to all the homes that now stand unoccupied, the trash on their floors and the doors swinging wide telling the tale of a hasty exit. Almost all the ethnic Luos in Witeithie have fled in the week since local Kikuyus warned them to leave by January 31. "Failure to do That will Suffer the Consequences," warned fliers scattered in front of Luo homes. Few waited around to learn what those consequences. And that's how Kimani, who is Kikuyu, prefers it. "The Luos started it in Kisumu, and now the Luos should not stay in our neighborhood," said Kimani, referring to the city in western Kenya that has seen repeated attacks against Kikuyus in recent weeks. "Yesterday, we were chasing them from here. We don't want to see them here. They will never stay in peace again."

Attitudes like Kimani's, which seem to be increasingly shared by many ordinary Kenyans toward their neighbors, are raising fears that the ethnic violence which began as a protest against an allegedly rigged election is spiraling out of control. Kenya is no Rwanda, of course, where a 1994 ethnic genocide claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. For one thing, Kenya contains many ethnic groups — 42, as compared to two in Rwanda — and none constitutes more than about 20% of the population. And the country's political leaders are currently talking, under the mediating hand of former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, with a view to heading off the slide into catastrophe. Still, there are clear signs that the tribal conflict is now taking an increasingly organized form, which U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Africa Jendayi Frazer characterized as "clear ethnic cleansing." As in the conflicts in what was once Yugoslavia, the purpose of the increasingly organized mobs killing and threatening members of other tribes was to force all members of that tribe to leave an area. And it may take a lot more than agreement among rival political parties to bring such a conflict under control.

The violence, initially directed mostly at Kikuyus, followed the December 27 re-election of Mwai Kibaki, also a Kikuyu, in what even international observers agreed was a seriously flawed poll. Within the last week, Kikuyu have been striking back at Luos, Luhyas, Kalenjin and other supporters of opposition leader Raila Odinga. The opposition initially characterized the violence as a spontaneous upsurge of anger, but fliers scattered around Witeithie — and the findings of a Human Rights Watch investigation — indicate that activists on both sides of the political divide have fanned the flames of ethnic resentment and perhaps even planned the violence to drive their enemies away. In Eldoret, for example, some locals accused William Ruto, a leader of Odinga's Orange Democratic Movement and a Kalenjin, of hate speech in the run-up to the vote. "He's the main inciter," said a man named Benjamin, who refused to give his last name for fear of punishment. "He said that if we are not going to win as ODM, we will not accept to stay with the Kikuyus. They will have to go." In an interview with TIME, however, Ruto denied claims that he had done anything wrong. "Many people, I'm sure in the government, want to say, 'Ruto is responsible for all this,' because they think the Rift Valley voted in a way they did not want the Rift Valley to vote," Ruto said. "But the people of Rift Valley removed anything to do with Mwai Kibaki. They want to look for excuses for violence. This is not about William Ruto, my friend." But Ruto acknowledges that a sense of injustice among non-Kikuyu Kenyans was an important element of the election. "The most central issue that informed the debate in this election was about sharing of resources," said Ruto. "It's not about the Kalenjin community, it's about the people of Kenya."

The ethnic clashes have certainly exposed deep grievances over land and other resources. Much of the worst violence has occurred in the Rift Valley, where land ownership has always been politically sensitive. In the colonial era, the region's fertile farmland was reserved for British settlers. Britain sold it off to the newly independent government, which in turn parceled it out to members of the Kikuyu tribe, setting off a pattern of ethnic conflict in the Rift Valley that has persisted for much of Kenya's independent history. Many Kalenjins and others who had once lived there believed — rightly or wrongly — that an Odinga victory would restore their control of the coveted Rift Valley. Although Kenya analysts believe the country remains a long way from descending into the horrors of Rwanda, they warn that the ethnic violence that has already killed more than 850 people cannot be allowed to fester. Regardless of what started the violence, or whether it was planned, there are worrying signs that the killings have created their own momentum and a cycle of vengeance that threatens to defy control by politicians. "The Kikuyu are going to find themselves as a single ethnic group very isolated if Kibaki refuses to go for a recount or some sort of power-sharing arrangement," said Binaifer Nowrojee, director of the Open Society Initiative for East Africa. "As long as there is international attention, there will be restraint. The day the international community is taken by other crises on the globe, Kenya will be left to stew in its own juices and it will get worse. This is the kind of situation if it's not resolved now it will blow up later, and that's where we parallel into Rwanda."

Back in Witeithie, some Luos are still packing up with less than 24 hours before the deadline set by the fliers. Others were still debating whether to leave. One woman, Eunice Owour, said her husband was recovering in the hospital from machete wounds suffered in an attack by Kikuyus. She did not want to go. Walking away from the scene, Kimani, the Kikuyu, smiled and shook his head. "We will be coming back here at night," he said. "The best option for her is to leave."
By Nick Wadhams, Witeithie, Kenya
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In Greece, Female Sex Victims Become Recruiters

ATHENS, Greece: Jan. 29th. (Int. Herald Tribune)- Sex traffickers in Greece have found a way to increase their illegal trade while avoiding detection: They are using their female victims as predators to find new recruits in the Balkans, Russia and former Soviet states. "We are seeing more and more victims turn into perpetrators," said Evangelia Vamvakaki, head of the Greek police's sex-trafficking unit. "It's a recent, and escalating, phenomenon." The unit detained 39 female trafficking suspects last year, a 24 percent increase from 2006, compared with 83 male suspects, a 53 percent drop. The female suspects are almost exclusively former prostitutes and chiefly from Russia, Bulgaria and Ukraine.

Three years ago female suspects were so rare that they were not distinguished in Greek police statistics. Now they account for 30 percent of suspects. In Italy, which has a similar problem with sex trafficking, the anti-organized-crime national directorate said 19 percent of suspected traffickers currently under investigation were women but could not say what proportion were former victims. In Greece, the emergence of more women as trafficking suspects is the result of a change in strategy by organized crime, migrant protection groups say. "Traffickers are always one step ahead of the police - their latest trick is to use their victims for recruitment," said Daniel Esdras, director of the Athens office of the International Organization of Migration. As the tactic relies on psychological exploitation rather than violence, it is perversely referred to as "happy trafficking," Esdras said. Women are offered incentives: a way out of the sex trade, a visit to their homeland - but always at a price. "The traffickers say, 'O.K., go home but come back with a new girl,' " said Vera Gracheva, an expert on former Soviet states at the countertrafficking office of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, based in Vienna. "They do it - they are scared of what will happen if they don't." Well-dressed and with full wallets, they return to their hometowns to lure girls - usually poor and desperate - with promises of easy cash. "There are many cases they even approach relatives," said Mariana Yevsyukova of La Strada, a support group for trafficking victims in Ukraine. She said only a fraction of cases reach police attention as women rarely testify. Once the recruits have been convinced, forged documents are issued and travel arrangements made with the help of local ring members.

The recruitment drive appears to be working. "The turnover in the bars where these women work is higher than ever. We are seeing new faces appear and old ones disappear every month," said Constantinos Kampourakis of Act Up, a group of doctors and lawyers based that offers free aid to trafficked women. The number of trafficking victims identified by the authorities (and accommodated in hostels) last year rose 20 percent to 100, but still accounts for only a fraction of the estimated 15,000 foreign sex workers in Greece. In Italy, which has relatively advanced legislation to support trafficked women, some 11,500 victims entered a state-supported protection program from 2000 to 2006. There is no such program in Greece. Unlike Italy, Greece requires that victims testify against suspected traffickers before they receive protection. Most women are reluctant to do this for fear of reprisals. "Many victims start identifying with their aggressors and even seeing them as potential saviors," said Stavros Boufidis, who runs a hostel for former trafficking victims in the northern port of Thessaloniki. Amnesty International, which reported a 10-fold increase in sex trafficking in Greece over the past decade, says the system keeps victims trapped. "Greece denies trafficked women their rights by failing to identify them as victims and by making their protection conditional upon cooperation with authorities," said Lucy Miles of Amnesty's London office. Miles also condemned the Greek penal system, which convicts only a fraction of traffickers. This is another reason women won't speak out, she said.
By Niki Kitsantonis
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Kenya Police Deny Shoot-to-Kill Order

NAIROBI, Kenya: Jan. 29th. (CNN) -- Kenyan police say that -- despite political disputes that have plunged this once stable country into chaos -- its officers have not been given shoot to kill orders. Some media organizations reported that the order had been issued to stem the tide of violence that has swept over the East African country since the disputed December 27 election -- and one that shows no signs of abating. But police spokesman Eric Kiraithe told CNN Wednesday his department had not issued a shoot-to-kill order but rather it had instructed officers "as much as possible to disable to effect detention" rather than kill. The law, Kiraithe said, allows an officer to fire his gun if armed men do not comply with orders to lay down their weapons. Kiraithe said that law enforcement received fresh instructions on when they can legally kill because the government wants to ensure the officers are neither accused of standing by or charged with homicide during violent confrontations. The government, Kiraithe said, wants "trouble makers" to understand they cannot act with impunity, attacking, burning and killing, that they cannot hide behind political parties.

The spasm of political violence that has crippled Kenya erupted soon after the December elections, when the opposition Orange Democratic Party accused President Mwai Kibaki of rigging the vote to win re-election in a race against its leader Raila Odinga. It soon took on ethnic overtones. More than 860 people have been killed and more than 200,000 displaced in the turmoil, the Red Cross said. The Red Cross has put the number at 863. There was no fresh violence reported in Kenya Wednesday. The United States has said it will consider imposing sanctions against members of the Kenyan government and opposition figures who are instigating the violence. Earlier Wednesday, an American diplomat described the violence in Kenya's Rift Valley as "clear ethnic cleansing" aimed at chasing out members of the Kikuyu tribe who are loyal to President Kibaki. However, U.S. envoy Jendayi Frazer, who made the comments at an African Union summit in Addis Ababa, said she did not believe the ethnic clashes that have brought Kenya to its knees following disputed elections last month could be classed as genocide. "The aim originally was not to kill, it was to cleanse, it was to push them out of the region," she said, according to The Associated Press.

Asked about Frazer's comments, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said they did not represent Washington's official position. He stressed that the State Department's Office of War Crimes Issues continues to closely monitor the post-election violence between Kenya's ethnic groups for "any incidence of atrocities" and is documenting all cases being brought to its attention. He described the violence in Kenya as a "very serious situation, if not a crisis." He noted that "a very significant amount of people" have been displaced, some of them forced out of certain areas and others fleeing the violence. Former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan on Tuesday pleaded with Kenya's government to take "extraordinary measures" to protect civilians hours after an opposition lawmaker was killed outside his home. "Kenya, which has long been a stable and peaceful country, today is in turmoil with innocent men, women and children being hounded and killed," Annan told Kenya's National Assembly before heading into talks with Kibaki and Odinga.
CNN's Elise Labott, Saeed Ahmed, Stephanie Halasz & Zain Verjee contributed to this report.
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Would-Be Peacemaker Killed in Kenya

NAIROBI, Kenya, Jan. 30th. (NY Times) - Melitus Mugabe Were, a freshman member of Parliament, could have been one of the keys to unlocking Kenya’s crisis, but he never got the chance. He was a moderate opposition politician, a self-made businessman who grew up in a slum, and he bridged the ethnic divide. His wife is from another ethnic group, and as Kenya slid into chaos this past month after a disputed election, he shuttled between different communities and tried to organize a peace march. On Tuesday morning, as he pulled up to the gate of his home, Mr. Were was dragged out of his car and shot to death. “Whoever did this,” said Elizabeth Mwangi, a friend, “has killed the dreams of many.” The details are still sketchy, but the shooting appears to have been a planned murder, not a robbery. Word spread fast and led to violence, with opposition supporters rioting across Nairobi, the capital.

The unrest seems to be escalating, and Kenyans are now literally ripping parts of their country apart, uprooting miles of railroad tracks, chopping down telephone poles, burning government offices and looting schools. Militias from opposing ethnic groups are battling in several towns, and Kenyan Army helicopters fired warning shots on Tuesday to disperse them. There have been reports of forced circumcisions and beheadings. The economy is paralyzed. More than 800 people have been killed since the election on Dec. 27th. United Nations officials are saying the government has failed to protect civilians, including girls who have been raped at camps for the displaced. Many Kenyans fear that their country is tumbling toward disaster. “The police are not in control,” said Maina Kiai, chairman of the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights. “Actually, nobody is in control.” Mr. Kiai said he was especially concerned about Mr. Were’s killing because he and other prominent Kenyans, including several newspaper editors, had recently received death threats. “None of us are safe,” Mr. Kiai said.

According to Mr. Were’s guard and family members, Mr. Were had just pulled up to his gate after midnight and was waiting in his Mercedes for the gate to open when a car drew alongside him. “I heard a beep,” said Mr. Were’s wife, Agnes. “And then two loud shots. I ran out and saw my husband bleeding and people were yelling to me, ‘He’s still breathing! He’s still breathing!’ but when I got him to the hospital he was dead.” Mr. Were, 39, whose campaign posters show him smiling with street children, had been shot in the heart and in the eye. The guard at his house, who was unarmed, said two men had yanked Mr. Were out of the car, shot him and drove off, without taking a thing. Family members said he was followed by suspicious cars several weeks before. Opposition supporters immediately called the killing a political assassination, intended to intimidate their movement, which is challenging the election in December that Kenya’s president, Mwai Kibaki, narrowly won, against the top opposition leader, Raila Odinga. “We suspect the foul hand of our adversaries in this,” Mr. Odinga said. Police officials say they are investigating closely and ruling nothing out. Some of Mr. Were’s friends said the culprits might have been connected to the other contenders for his Parliament seat, who recently filed a petition to challenge the results. Mr. Were, a successful home builder, was known as a bright spot in a gritty place. He ran an orphanage, had a footbridge and soccer stadium built in the slum where he grew up and sponsored teenage mothers to go to college. On Tuesday morning, a huge crowd of mourners streamed into his ranch house. The grief soon turned to outrage, and by midmorning the tears had dried and the roadblocks were going up. Mourners set tires aflame and hauled huge stones into the road. It was the first time that riots had reached a middle-class neighborhood in Nairobi, and it was not just rowdy unemployed youths from the slums who were wreaking havoc. “This is how we express our outrage,” explained Evans Muremi, a social worker, who stacked tires to burn while wearing a jacket and tie.

The election controversy seems to have brought out the worst in Kenya. While the country has been considered one of the most stable and promising in Africa, it has long been a violent place, with carjackings and muggings all too common, and mobs routinely stoning to death people suspected of crimes. Likewise, ethnic tensions have always existed in Kenya, but have never exploded as widely as they have in the past few weeks. Ethnically driven clashes, fueled by grievances over land and power, have flared in just about every corner of the country.

The problems have laid bare the shortcomings of Kenya’s poorly paid security forces, who often respond either too harshly or too feebly. Nearly two weeks ago, they shot an unarmed protester at point-blank range in front of television cameras. On Tuesday, they drove past a crowd of young men pulling down a telephone pole in front of Mr. Were’s house and did nothing. There is also a crisis of leadership. Kenya’s top politicians have been arguing about who is to blame for the violence more than they have been working together to stop it. Mr. Kibaki, considered aloof even before the election, has made few public appearances since his country began to unravel. Western diplomats say he is surrounded by hard-liners bent on staying in power. On Tuesday, he began formal negotiations with Mr. Odinga. Kofi Annan, the former United Nations secretary general, has been in Kenya for a week trying to bring the two sides together. So far, neither has budged. Mr. Odinga says the election was rigged and is demanding a new vote. Mr. Kibaki has refused. Western observers have said the election was so flawed there was no telling who really won.

According to friends and family, Mr. Were grew up in a Nairobi slum called Dandora. He was friendly and sharp and caught the eye of some Italian missionaries, who helped put him through school. He lived in Italy for a time and then came back to Kenya to start his construction company. Five years ago he became a councilman for Dandora. Mr. Were was from the Luhya ethnic group and his wife is Kikuyu. But that did not seem to matter. “He was one of the least tribal people I knew,” said Wycliffe McKenzie, a friend. He seemed to be more moderate than other opposition leaders and avoided their often belligerent talk. He told supporters not to join protests, which have often become violent and destructive. Many people remember him as exceedingly generous. Ms. Mwangi, his friend, said she went to him when she was 19 and the mother of two and needed money to finish high school. Mr. Were stayed in touch with her through the ups and downs of single motherhood and the pressures of school. “He told me to hang in there,” Ms. Mwangi said, as she stared blankly at the metal gate where he was shot. “He said one day you’ll be my personal doctor. He told me never to give up.”
Jeffrey Gettleman

From Catholic Information Service for Africa
A Catholic opposition politician was shot dead in Nairobi on Monday night, triggering angry protests in the city and in parts of the country

Melitus Mugabe Were, 40, was the new Member of Parliament for Embakasi on an Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) ticket. He was shot and killed by unknown people outside his gate shortly after midnight, police said. A former student at Kiserian Seminary in Nairobi, Were was one of the young men who helped Comboni missionary Fr Adelmo Spagnolo found the National Catholic Youth Centre in the capital in December 1988. He later studied social communications at the Gregorian University in Rome and worked with disadvantaged youth in Dandora, a suburb in Nairobi, where he was elected councilor in 2002.

Described by a close friend as an intelligent and hardworking mobilizer who defended Catholic teaching, Were, however, made political enemies in the course of his activism. He even received death threats. He becomes the first member of the 10th Parliament to die. Police moved in to quell protests in Nairobi and in some towns in the ODM stronghold of western Kenya following the death. President Mwai Kibaki condemned the killing of Were, terming it a heinous crime. He ordered police to immediately and expeditiously launch investigations into the killing and ensure that the culprits are apprehended. ODM leader Raila Odinga said the death was political assassination.

Meanwhile, clashes between police and gangs targeting non-Kikuyu people continued in Naivasha on Tuesday. Nakuru remained calm but tense. People are still camped at police stations, the showground and in parish compounds. Tension was also reported in Maralal after rumour went round Monday night that members of the dreaded Mungiki movement had been transported to the town. Most businesses remain closed and police are on patrol. At the same time, formal talks between the government and ODM were expected to kick off Tuesday afternoon led by former United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan. President Kibaki and Odinga were required to recognize the Annan team as mediators and to commit themselves to the arbitration process and its outcome. Source: CISA
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Ethnic Cleansing or Death, Kenya's Kikuyu Tribe Vows

NAIVASHA, Kenya. Jan 29th. (Toronto Star) –A thick black pillar of smoke billowed up from a neighbourhood in the ordinarily quiet town of Naivasha, surrounded by lush green mountains and dotted with flower farms. Young men carrying anything from wooden table legs, to stones and machetes cheered on as the fire rose and what once was a house turned into smouldering ashes. As the violence triggered by disputed polls has spread east, Kikuyus, the tribe that has borne the brunt of the chaos, are taking revenge on rival Luos with an ultimatum: ethnic cleansing or death. Several hundred Kikuyu men and women faced off against an equal number of displaced Luos, the tribe of defeated presidential candidate Raila Odinga in Naivasha and Nakuru, Rift Valley's provincial capital some 70 kilometres northwest. "Exactly what is being done to our own people is now being done to them," said Jack Kinyanjui, 30. "We are for peace and they are not. Either they leave, or they die."

The spreading violence has reached a point that neither President Mwai Kibaki, a Kikuyu, nor Odinga, a Luo, may be able to stop it, said an official from Kenya's state-funded human rights panel. "I don't think the politicians can stop it any more, it's out of hand," Linda Ochiel, program director at the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights, said yesterday in a telephone interview from Nairobi. "Yesterday we watched on television as people with machetes were hacking people to death and the army was looking on." Kenya's Rift Valley province has been the epicentre of the violence that has convulsed the nation. After the Dec. 27 election results were announced, the region's dominant tribe, the Kalenjin, began attacking their Kikuyu neighbours, who are the same tribe as Kibaki. But since Sunday, the tables have turned. In Naivasha, some 80 kilometres northwest of Nairobi, dozens have been killed as Kikuyu gangs burned through the town. In the western city of Kisumu, however, thousands of machete-wielding youths hunted down Kikuyu members, torching homes and buses and clashing with police. Witnesses yesterday described seeing two people pulled from cars and stoned to death, while another was burned alive in a minibus. Naivasha drew throngs of Kikuyus from the central highlands in controversial resettlement plans by the first post-independence government in the 1960s, ousting the indigenous Kalenjin and Masai from the area and spurring the start of years of resentment. Over the decades, several tribes descended on the town to find work in the flower industry, a major export, and Naivasha became a melting pot of different tribes.

But after the month-long orgy of violence, angry Kikuyus now want their co-workers and neighbours out and threaten that if they don't leave by the end of the month, more chaos will be unleashed. Already some 800 people have been killed since the election and 250,000 displaced. Naivasha, like other tourist towns nationwide, has seen a virtual halt in visitors and the crisis has caused $1 billion in damage to Kenya's economy. Kibaki and Odinga blame each other for the violence, trading accusations of "ethnic cleansing." Human rights groups and officials charge it has become organized. "What is so alarming about the last few days is ... there's evidently hidden hands organizing it now," said Britain's visiting minister for Africa, Mark Malloch-Brown. He spoke after meetings with Odinga, Kibaki and their mediator, former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan. Kibaki has said he is open to direct talks with Odinga, but that his position as president is not negotiable. Odinga says Kibaki must step down and only new elections will bring peace.
by Tia Goldenberg
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Myanmar Stepping up Arrests, Human Rights Group says

SOLO, Indonesia, Jan. 27th. (Int. Herald tribune) - Four months after a violent crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators, the government of Myanmar has stepped up arrests of dissenters, breaking a promise to the United Nations, according to the human rights group Amnesty International. "Rather than stop its unlawful arrests, the Myanmar government has actually accelerated them," the group, based in London, said in a report Friday. It said the junta had arrested 96 people since November, when it assured a UN envoy that it would bring the detentions to a halt. Instead of bowing to demands for moderation from around the world, the group said, "the government's chief priority is to silence its citizens who would hold them to account."

The demonstrations, touched off in August by a sudden rise in fuel prices, swelled to mass pro-democracy street protests led by monks before the military cracked down in late September. The government has acknowledged the deaths of a dozen people. The United Nations says that it has confirmed at least 31 deaths and that 74 people remain missing. In another show of defiance, the country's military junta has also postponed an invitation to the special UN envoy to whom it made the promise in November to end the arrests. The envoy, Ibrahim Gambari, was appointed to represent the demands of members of the United Nations, who had expressed outrage at the televised scenes of violence against the demonstrators. Gambari has visited twice and was promised a third visit soon, as part of what Myanmar, which was formerly known as Burma, said was a policy of cooperation with the United Nations. But the junta now says it will not be convenient for him to come until April. "This is business as usual for them," said U Aung Zaw, the editor of Irrawaddy Magazine, an exile magazine published in Thailand. "When they are under siege, they always create such a smoke screen to keep away international pressure," he said. "They postpone, they say they are restoring normalcy, they keep arresting people."

As the months have passed, the world's attention has moved elsewhere, talk of sanctions has faded and diplomats and exile groups say the junta has tightened its grip on its citizens. "People should realize they are being fooled," Aung Zaw said. The UN Security Council criticized Myanmar in mid-January for delaying the release of political prisoners and moving slowly on a promised dialogue with the pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who has been under house arrest for 12 of the past 18 years. Responding to earlier demands from the United Nations, the junta appointed a middle-level official to be its liaison with her. He is reported to have met with her only four times, and there has been no public word of any substantive result.

Amnesty International said 1,850 political prisoners were being held, including at least 700 people arrested during and after the protests. The group said more than 80 people were unaccounted for "and are likely the victims of enforced disappearance." It said at least 15 of the detained protesters and their supporters had been sentenced to prison terms since Gambari's last visit. In December, the junta asserted that only 80 prisoners remained of 3,000 people who were rounded up during and after the crackdown. One of the most recent arrests was of a prominent poet, U Saw Wai, who published a Valentine's Day poem in a weekly magazine that carried a hidden message about the leader of the junta. The first letters of its lines spelled out "Senior General Than Shwe is power-crazy."
by Seth Mydans
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French Aid Workers Sentenced

Paris, France, Jan. 28th. (Time) - A court near Paris has ruled that six French aid workers convicted in Chad and sentenced to an eight-year prison for attempted kidnapping will serve that full jail term in France — though with no hard labor, which under French law is banned. The ruling brings the bizarre, at times tawdry saga of humanitarian assistance group Zoé's Ark to its legal conclusion, but emotions still run high: as the judgment was read out, relatives and friends of the six shook the courtroom with cries of protest and claims of political manipulation. Tasked only with rendering the Chadian punishment compatible with French law, the Créteil court in Paris pointed out in a statement that it wasn't mandated to reexamine the case evidence or the guilty verdict handed down in Chad's capital, N'Djamena. That controversial judgment, issued on December 26, convicted the six Zoé's Ark's workers of attempted kidnapping in their efforts to secretly fly 103 children they claimed were orphans from war-torn Darfur out of eastern Chad to France for urgent care. Later investigations concluded that virtually all the children were in fact relatively healthy Chadian nationals with at least one living parent, and elsewhere uncovered a range of troubling details surrounding Zoe's Ark and its mission

All six members have consistently maintained their innocence, and claimed they'd become scapegoats of the Chadian government's attempts to take advantage of the humanitarian crisis created by the violence in Darfur. But despite a considerable public relations push by supporters to cast the aid workers as victims, French public opinion has failed to warm to their cause. Before and during their trial in Chad, certain members of the group righteously justified their at times extra-legal efforts to tend to the children as legitimate given the urgency of the situation. Since their December 28 return to France under Franco-Chadian judicial accords, several members of the operation have reportedly fallen out with their leaders of its illegal aspects. Lawyers and families of those support staffers had hoped the tribunal would consider evidence in their conviction of the subordinate roles they assumed, and lighten their sentences as accomplices rather — a distinction not made by the Chadian court.

French government officials insist that even before the group's arrest by Chadian police on October 25, they cautioned Zoé's Ark against pursuing certain of their more audacious humanitarian projects in Chad, particularly what appeared to be clandestine adoption arrangements with families back in France. Because of that, it came as little surprise to many observers earlier this month when a French investigating magistrate named several members in the group as defendants in his case for "complicity in the illegal residence of foreign minors in France," "illegally exercising the role as intermediary towards adoption" and "fraud." With any eventual convictions on those charges be pronounced by a French law based on violation of national laws, any prison sentences arising from them would be added to the eight year jail terms the Chad court handed down for kidnapping.

Given this run up to the tribunal's ruling on their sentence Monday, there was little reason for the Zoé's Ark members or their supporters to expect French judges to upend the rulings of the Chad court. Indeed, despite accusations by supporters and lawyers for Zoé's Ark workers that the Chadian trial had been unfair, the French tribunal ruled it had met the minimal European criteria requiring defense lawyers, debate of evidence and testimony, and recourse to appeal. Given that, the judges concluded an attempt to review the Chadian case would amount to "interference in the affairs of a sovereign state," and limited their work to adapting the sentence to French law. Detractors accuse the tribunal of not wanting to be seen as protecting French nationals from a punishment meted out by a former French colony, and they contend that the ruling is colored by concerns about next month's deployment of 3,500 French-led European peacekeeping troops to eastern Chad, a foreign military presence Chadian leaders resent.

Lawyers for the six convicted aid workers said they'd file for an appeal — but legal experts believe that given the narrow ambit left to the court under the judicial accords between France and Chad, they stand virtually no chance of receiving a more favorable ruling. In fact, French appeals courts are notorious for stiffening sentences in lower court rulings, meaning the Zoé's Ark crew could see they Chadian prison jolts lengthened — and then possibly compounded by eventual conviction in the case the French state brings against them.
By Bruce Crumley
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19 Burned to Death in Violence in Kenya

NAIROBI, Kenya, Jan. 27th. (NY Times) — Ethnically driven violence intensified in Kenya on Sunday, and police officials said at least 19 people, including 11 children, were burned to death in a house by a mob. Even the Kenyan military, deployed for the first time to stop antagonists from attacking one another, has been unable to halt the wave of revenge killings. More than 100 people have been killed in the past four days, many of them shot with arrows, burned or hacked with machetes. It is some of the worst fighting since a disputed election in December ignited long-simmering tensions that have so far claimed at least 750 lives. The fighting appeared to be spreading Sunday across the Rift Valley region, a particularly picturesque part of Kenya known more for its game parks and fancy lodges.

The Kenyan government is now threatening to arrest top opposition leaders on suspicion of orchestrating the bloodshed, but opposition leaders are in turn accusing the government of backing criminal gangs. According to police officials in the Rift Valley town of Naivasha, fighting erupted Sunday morning between gangs of Kikuyus and Luos, two of Kenya’s biggest ethnic groups, who have clashed across the country since the election. Witnesses said mobs threw flaming tires and mountains of rocks into the streets to block police officers from entering some neighborhoods. The mobs then went house to house, looking for certain people. Grace Kakai, a police commander in Naivasha, said a large crowd of Kikuyus chased a group of Luos through a slum, trapped them in a house, blocked the doors and set the house afire. Police found 19 bodies huddled in one room, and Ms. Kakai said some of the children’s bodies were so badly burned that they could not be identified. “All I can say is that they were school age,” she said. The episode was similar to one on Jan. 1, when up to 50 women and children seeking shelter in a church in another Rift Valley town were burned to death by a mob. The victims in that case were mostly Kikuyus, and Kikuyus across the country seem to have been attacked more than any other group.

In the past few days, many Kikuyus have organized into militias, saying they are now ready for revenge. “The situation is very bad,” Ms. Kakai said. “People are fighting each other and trying to drive them out of the area. We have to evacuate people.”Thousands of families are streaming out of Naivasha, Nakuru, Molo, Eldoret and other towns across the Rift Valley, which has become the epicenter of Kenya’s violence. The province is home to supporters of both Mwai Kibaki, Kenya’s president, and Raila Odinga, the top opposition leader, and the site of historic land disputes between members of rival ethnic groups. Mr. Kibaki is a Kikuyu and Mr. Odinga is a Luo, and the disputed election, in which Mr. Kibaki was declared the winner by a narrow margin despite widespread evidence of vote rigging, set off the ethnically driven violence.

The Kenya of today is almost unrecognizable compared with the Kenya that until recently was celebrated as one of the most stable and promising countries on the African continent. On Sunday night, local television stations showed menacing young men waving machetes and iron bars at roadblocks along one of the country’s busiest highways. The men threw rocks at buses, with one large bus run off the road, as police officers stood by. The Kenyan Army was assigned early this month to help evacuate people from conflict zones, but on Friday, for the first time, soldiers were ordered to intervene between warring groups. That did not seem to make much of a difference, and witnesses said the soldiers had been as ineffective as the police.

A dusk-to-dawn curfew has been imposed in several Rift Valley towns, including Naivasha and Nakuru, but witnesses said violence continued to rage in the countryside, with bands of armed men burning down huts and attacking ethnic rivals. Many Kenyans have said the most distressing aspect is that the opposing politicians, instead of cooperating to stop the bloodshed, continue to bicker over who started it. That is exactly what happened on Sunday after news of the Naivasha killings spread. Salim Lone, Mr. Odinga’s spokesman, sent out a cellphone message calling the killings “ghastly” and saying that they were the work of criminal gangs backed by police officers and “part of a well orchestrated plan of terror.” “The government is doing this to try to influence mediation efforts,” the message said, referring to the continuing but so far fruitless negotiations led by Kofi Annan, the former secretary general of the United Nations. “After stealing the elections from Kenyans, Kibaki now wishes to deny them justice and peace.”

Alfred Mutua, a government spokesman, called the accusations “ridiculous". "What is really happening is a continuation of the ethnic cleansing that Raila’s people are doing to kill the president’s people,” he said. Mr. Mutua said the violence would stop “when we indict the leaders responsible for this.” “We are working on indictments,” he said Sunday night. “That will happen very soon.” Western diplomats have said there is a debate raging within Mr. Kibaki’s inner circle about the wisdom of arresting top opposition figures, with some advisers pushing for it, while others fear that the violence will only get worse if the leaders are jailed because their supporters will go on an even more intense rampage. Kenyan newspapers reflected the gloom. “For the umpteenth time, we again ask President Kibaki and Orange Democratic Movement leader Mr. Raila Odinga to work for peace, truth and justice,” said an editorial in The Sunday Standard. “Kenya has bled enough.”
By Jeffrey Gettleman
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French Activists Fight Female Genital Mutilation

National Public Radio, Jan. 26th. - Female genital mutilation is an ancient rite practiced mostly in some sub-Saharan and North African countries. Many Muslims in that part of the world wrongly believe it's dictated by Islam. In recent decades, the practice has spread to immigrant communities in Europe. Women activists in France have led the campaign in prosecuting those responsible for excisions performed on young girls, and the United Nations now considers the practice a human rights abuse.

GAMS, the French Women's Association for the Abolition of Sexual Mutilations, estimates that there are more than 50,000 mutilated women in France. One of them is Aissata, a young woman from Mali who has a 2-year-old daughter. "I come from a village in Mali where excisions are always practiced," she says. "My sister had a daughter and when the baby was not even 2 years old, she was mutilated. When I was four months' pregnant and my doctor told me it was a little girl, I was scared for her and ran away to France. I didn't want my daughter to undergo what they did to me when I was young." But Aissata is in France illegally. She went to GAMS to file a request for political asylum. On average, six women a day, five days a week, come seeking asylum in France to protect their daughters from being subjected to mutilation in their home countries, says GAMS worker Khadi Diallo, 53. She claims GAMS has a 99 percent asylum success rate.

Diallo was mutilated when she was 14, and the brutality of the practice is etched in her memory. "I was mutilated against my parents' will," she says. "It was during the summer visiting my father's family in a village near the capital Bamako. In Mali, it's the father's relatives who decide everything in the family." Diallo describes how several women held her down as one of them inflicted excruciating pain. Supporters of female genital mutilation say it dampens a girl's sexuality and protects her honor. Diallo says she can't even begin to list the psychological traumas she has since suffered. "They cut off my sex. It was as if they cut off my finger. They took away a piece of me," she says. "They imposed customs of a society where it's not permissible for a 14 -year-old girl to remain intact." In most cases, the excision involves the removal of the clitoris and minor labia. The most extreme form is infibulation, where the vaginal opening is stitched closed. Often, knives or razor blades are used in unsanitary conditions. The result is scar tissue that not only makes sex difficult and not pleasurable, but can also create complications for childbirth and long-term infections. "There is such a strong taboo against sex that girls often learn they were mutilated at an early age only when visiting a doctor or after their first sexual experience, when their boyfriend says, you're not normal, you're not like the others," says Diallo.

Female genital mutilation is alien to the great majority of Muslims in Europe, but GAMS claims there's a growing number of fundamentalist imams, funded by Islamist movements from abroad, who preach that removal of the clitoris is endorsed by the Koran. Women activists here have enlisted rap singer Bafing Kul to help convince poor and uneducated immigrants to stop mutilation, saying the practice is backward and harmful. One song's lyrics include: "May my ancestors forgive me. Not all traditions should be preserved. Islam does not endorse this one." The producer and distributor of Kul's CD is lawyer and human rights activist Linda Weil-Curiel. "The aim of the mutilation is to deprive the woman of her own sexuality. She is only left to be a baby-maker," Weil-Curiel says. Weil-Curiel is the person most responsible for making France the leader in tracking and prosecuting both perpetrators of female genital mutilation and the consenting parents. Representing the interests of child victims over the last 15 years, Weil-Curiel has been involved in most of the 40-some trials that have led to convictions.

She says clitorectomies have all but been eradicated in France, but the tragedy continues. Families started taking their daughters to their homelands for summer vacations. So she and other activists go to schools. It's not easy, she says, to warn children about the risks. "And we are there saying, 'Beware, be very careful, 'cause your parents are planning to send you over and this is what will happen,'" Weil-Curiel says. "And each time … You have two to three girls, we can observe tears running down their face, so we know in the family, if it is not them, it has happened." But last year the law was toughened. It's now illegal for any girl who lives in France to be sexually mutilated whether it happens in France or not, whether the girl is a citizen or not. Doctors are obligated to report cases they discover, and parents can be prosecuted for neglect, even if they say it was done somewhere else, without their knowledge.
by Sylvia Poggioli
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KENYA: Diocese Evacuates Workers as Ethnic Violence Claims More Lives

NAIROBI, Kenya, Jan. 28th. (CISA) - An operation to evacuate Catholic personnel trapped by ethnic violence was underway Monday afternoon in the Catholic Diocese of Nakuru where a priest was brutally killed Saturday. The diocese was moving to safety priests and other church workers from 10 parishes in the Kalenjin heartland where members of the Kikuyu and Kisii communities have been targeted in the ongoing post-election skirmishes. The death toll continued to rise Monday and more people were displaced as rival groups clashed in the Rift Valley, Nyanza and Western provinces. Over 800 people have been killed nationwide since the clashes broke out a month ago following the disputed re-election of President Mwai Kibaki. Suspected Kalenjin warriors on Sunday raided Burnt Forest, intending to kill displaced people camped in the town, but security personnel repulsed them, a Catholic priest told CISA. The warriors returned early on Monday and police killed seven of them, including two schoolboys. The priest expressed fears that the warriors, armed with bows, arrows, spears, machetes and petrol, were planning another attempt on the camp.

Clashes persisted in Naivasha, where, according to Kenya Broadcasting Corporation (KBC), four more people were killed Monday. Other reports say 14 more bodies were collected, bringing the toll to at least 28.Thousands of people are camped at the local police station fearing for their safety. The chaos spread to neighbouring Gigil Town, where at least two people were killed, according to a witness who spoke to us from inside a Catholic parish compound. She said houses had been torched, businesses closed down and about 800 people had fled to the parish compound. A nun who spoke to us from a religious community a few kilometers outside Gilgil said the violence had trapped the community between Gilgil and Nakuru. Fighting in Nakuru and Naivasha at the weekend triggered riots in towns in western Kenya, the stronghold of the opposition Orange Democratic Movement (ODM). Chaos erupted in Kisumu Monday morning, with thousands of angry youths barricading roads and burning tyres apparently in anger over the killing of their tribesmen. Police shot in the air to disperse the demonstrators. Skirmishes were also reported in Kakamega, Busia, Migori and Kapsabet. Fr Fred Ogambi in Kisumu said youths chased away teachers and students from schools to ensure the institutions remained closed. The Provincial Education Officer had announced that schools would open for the first term on Monday.

But Eldoret, scene of some of the worst violence in the immediate aftermath of the election, has been calm in recent days, except on Saturday when tensions rose after a Kalenjin man was stabbed. He had boarded a taxi and got into an exchange with the Kikuyu crew. About 13,000 displaced people camping at the Eldoret Show-ground are unlikely to leave soon for fear of being attacked again. Idleness in the camp and dismal leaving conditions have led some women to prostitution, Nixon Oira of the Eldoret Catholic Justice and Peace Commission said. In Nyahururu, “everything has returned to normal” after a brief confrontation between police and youths on Sunday, said Fr Joseph Waititu. About 50 non-Kikuyu residents have sought refuge at the local police station.
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Ethnic Violence in Rift Valley Tears Kenya Apart

NAIROBI, Kenya, Jan. 27th. (NY Times) - Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, may seem calm, but anarchy reigns just two hours away. In Nakuru, furious mobs rule the streets, burning homes, brutalizing people and expelling anyone not in their ethnic group, all with complete impunity. On Saturday, hundreds of men prowled a section of the city with six-foot iron bars, poisoned swords, clubs, knives and crude circumcision tools. Boys carried gladiator-style shields and women strutted around with sharpened sticks. The police were nowhere to be found. Even the residents were shocked. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” said David Macharia, a bus driver.

One month after a deeply flawed election, Kenya is tearing itself apart along ethnic lines, despite intense international pressure on its leaders to compromise and stop the killings. Nakuru, the biggest town in the beautiful Rift Valley, is the scene of a mass migration now moving in two directions. Luos are headed west, Kikuyus are headed east, and packed buses with mattresses strapped on top pass one another in the road, with the bewildered children of the two ethnic groups staring out the windows at one another. In the past 10 days, dozens of people have been killed in Molo, Narok, Kipkelion, Kuresoi, and now Nakuru, a tourist gateway which until a few days ago was considered safe.

In many places, Kenya seems to be sliding back toward the chaos that exploded Dec. 30, when election results were announced and the incumbent president, Mwai Kibaki, was declared the winner over Raila Odinga, the top opposition leader, despite widespread evidence of vote rigging. The tinder was all there, even before the voting started. There were historic grievances over land and deep-seated ethnic tensions, with many ethnic groups resenting the Kikuyus, Mr. Kibaki’s group, because they have been the most prosperous for years. The disputed election essentially served as the spark, and opposition supporters across Kenya vented their rage over many issues toward the Kikuyus and other ethnic groups thought to have supported Mr. Kibaki.

In the Rift Valley, local elders organized young men to raid Kikuyu areas and kill people in a bid to drive the Kikuyus off their land. It worked, for the most part, and over the past month, tens of thousands of Kikuyus have fled. More than 650 people, many of them Kikuyus, have been killed. Many of the attackers are widely believed to be members of the Luo and Kalenjin ethnic groups. What is happening now in Nakuru seems to be revenge. The city is surrounded by spectacular scenery, with Lake Nakuru and its millions of flamingos drawing throngs of tourists each year. The city has a mixed population, like much of Kenya, split among several ethnic groups including Kikuyus, Luos, Luhyas and Kalenjins. On Thursday night, witnesses and participants said, bands of Kikuyu men stormed into the streets with machetes and homemade weapons and began attacking Luos and Kalenjins. Paul Karanja, a Kikuyu shopkeeper in Nakuru, explained it this way: “We had been so patient. For weeks we had watched all the buses and trucks taking people out of the Rift Valley, and we had seen so many of our people lose everything they owned. Enough was enough.” In a Nakuru neighborhood called Free Area, hundreds of Kikuyu men burned down homes and businesses belonging to Luos, Mr. Odinga’s ethnic group. The Luos who refused to leave were badly beaten, and sometimes worse. According to witnesses, a Kikuyu mob forcibly circumcised one Luo man who later bled to death. Circumcision is an important rite of passage for Kikuyus but is not widely practiced among Luos.

The Luos and the Kalenjins, who have been aligned throughout the post-election period, then counterattacked, resulting in a citywide melee with hundreds wounded and as many as 50 people killed. By Friday night, the Kenyan military was deployed for the first time to intervene. Local authorities also placed a dusk-to-dawn curfew on Nakuru, another first. Many people in Free Area, which is now almost totally Kikuyu, say it will be difficult to make peace. “We’re angry and they’re angry,” said John Maina, a stocky butcher, whose weapon of choice on Saturday was a three-foot table leg with exposed screws. “I don’t see us living together any time soon.”

That is the reality across much of Kenya, and it seems to be nothing short of so-called ethnic cleansing. Mobs in Eldoret, Kisumu, Kakamega, Burnt Forest and countless other areas, including some of the biggest slums in Nairobi, have driven out people from opposing ethnic groups. Many neighborhoods that used to be mixed are now ethnically homogeneous. Kofi Annan, the former secretary general of the United Nations, visited the Rift Valley on Saturday. He called it “nerve-racking. We saw people pushed from their homes and farms, grandmothers, children and families uprooted,” said Mr. Annan, who is in Kenya trying to broker negotiations between Mr. Kibaki and Mr. Odinga. He called for the Kenyan government to investigate the attackers and increase security. On Saturday, Kenyan soldiers in Free Area escorted Luos back to their smoldering homes and stood guard with their assault rifles as the people sifted through the ruins and salvaged whatever they could before leaving.

Many Luos said they had no choice but to go to far western Kenya, the traditional Luo homeland, just as many Kikuyus who have been displaced said they would resettle in the highlands east of Nakuru, their traditional homeland. Mr. Macharia, the bus driver, who is Kikuyu, conceded that many Kikuyus were feeling vengeful. But he said it does not mean they actually want to fight. “I saw it myself,” he said. “The elders called ‘Charge!’ but not all the boys charged.” Still, enough did charge that the Luos who used to live in Free Area were not taking any chances. On Saturday afternoon, hundreds of people carrying trunks on their heads and bags of blankets streamed toward a government office that was protected by a few soldiers. Nancy Aloo, a Luo, was guiding four frightened young children. “God made all of us,” Ms. Aloo said. “We need his help.
by Jeffrey Gettleman
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