Kenya Rival Is Cautiously Optimistic

NAIROBI, Kenya: Mar. 4th. (NY Times) — Raila Odinga is a happy man. On Sunday, he went to the beach and was pictured on the front page of Kenya’s leading newspaper, The Daily Nation, lounging by the waves, wearing shorts and argyle socks. On Monday, as he polished off a bowl of vegetable soup and sautéed fish at the Nairobi Club, Mr. Odinga seemed relaxed, chatty and upbeat — for the first time in weeks. “Better half a loaf than no bread,” Mr. Odinga said of a power-sharing agreement struck on Thursday that marries his political party to his rivals in the Kenyan government. Mr. Odinga, 63, is Kenya’s top opposition leader, and his decision to drop his claim to Kenya’s presidency — which he says he rightly won — and to accept the newly created position of prime minister has helped pull this country back from the brink of chaos.

Last week, the governing party agreed to form a coalition government with Mr. Odinga’s party, a breakthrough in a dangerous political crisis that erupted in December with a flawed presidential election. The incumbent, Mwai Kibaki, was declared the winner, despite widespread evidence of vote rigging. The election set off weeks of bloodshed, destruction and ethnic balkanization, which for a moment put Kenya’s entire future in doubt. The political violence has mostly calmed down, though on Sunday night more than 10 people were killed in western Kenya in clashes over contested land. Mr. Odinga, in an interview on Monday, credited the unstinting pressure by the EU and the United States government with forcing Mr. Kibaki to compromise. “They knew the game was up,” Mr. Odinga said, referring to Mr. Kibaki’s side, which had insisted for weeks that it would not share power with the opposition, but finally conceded to just about all of Mr. Odinga’s demands except for the presidency. Mr. Odinga said that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had been especially influential — and tough. She visited Kenya last month, and by the accounts of Mr. Odinga and others with knowledge of her meetings, she gave Kenya’s president a serious tongue-lashing and told him that his plan to prevent Mr. Odinga’s team from getting any real power was “unacceptable.”

People close to Mr. Kibaki have conceded that the foreign pressure had played a role in Mr. Kibaki’s about-face, especially from donor nations like the United States, which has provided Kenya with more than half a billion dollars of aid each year. And, Mr. Odinga says, that pressure must continue. “We’re still at a very critical stage,” he said. The next step is for Parliament to ratify the political agreement signed by Mr. Odinga and Mr. Kibaki. There are many questions to sort through, like how the government will function with essentially two bosses and what will happen to the vice president, a position that now seems to be eclipsed by that of the prime minister. Parliament is scheduled to meet Thursday. But the biggest question seems to be how Mr. Odinga and Mr. Kibaki will get along. The two had teamed up in 2002, when Mr. Kibaki won his first term as president. But they soon had a bitter falling-out. Mr. Odinga said he had no problem working with Mr. Kibaki. He said his only potential problem was “the clique around him.” He said this clique could persuade some Parliament members to skip the vote on the power-sharing agreement. The agreement needs a two-thirds majority to be put into Kenya’s Constitution through an amendment. So far, Mr. Kibaki’s political allies have said that they would support the agreement, though some have continued to grumble about its ramifications.

Mr. Odinga seems to be cautiously optimistic. He spoke Monday of the ministries his party wanted to take over, including finance and internal security, and how he planned to provide better housing to improve conditions in Kenya’s slums, which had been incubators of violence during the election crisis. He also said he was excited about the American presidential race, and was rooting for Barack Obama, who is half Kenyan and whose father was a Luo, Mr. Odinga’s ethnic group. Luos have felt marginalized for years. There is an old joke in Kenya that has gotten a lot of chuckles lately, that a Luo will be president of the United States before being president of Kenya. “We beat them to it,” Mr. Odinga said, laughing so hard that his eyes watered. “I just wasn’t sworn in.”
by Jeffrey Gettleman
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Israeli Ground Forces Pull Out of Gaza Strip

Palestinians sat amid the rubble of their destroyed home in Jabalia after Israeli troops pulled out of the northern Gaza Strip on Monday. (Abid Katib/Getty Images)
GAZA CITY, Palestine: Mar. 4th. (NY Times) — As israel withdrew its forces from the northern Gaza Strip after a two-day assault on Hamas militants on Monday and Palestinians emerged from their houses to inspect the damage, Hamas leaders seemed to be following the playbook of their Lebanese ally, Hezbollah, in its 2006 war with Israel. Fawzi Barhoum, a spokesman for Hamas in Gaza, said that Hamas has “gone from the stone to the rocket. What we learned from Hezbollah,” he said, “is that resistance is a choice that can work.”

The clearest example of echoing Hezbollah came on Monday when thousands attended a so-called victory rally , and Mahmoud Zahar, an influential Hamas leader, briefly came out of hiding to tell the celebrants that his organization would rebuild any house that had been damaged by the Israeli strikes. Holding up his group as the source of reconstruction as well as resistance is precisely the message that brought Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, local and regional acclaim when his organization faced down Israeli attacks in the summer of 2006 through rocket barrages on Israel. The latest surge in hostilities between Israel and militants in the Gaza Strip left 116 Palestinians dead, according to Dr. Moawiya Hassanain of the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza, the deadliest fighting in Gaza in a year. Two Israeli soldiers were killed in the fighting in northern Gaza on Saturday, and one Israeli civilian was killed last Wednesday by rocket fire in the border town of Sderot.

But more than 200 rockets have been fired at Israel since Wednesday, according to Israeli military officials, including at least 21 longer-range Katyusha-style rockets that are manufactured outside Gaza and brought into the strip — another illustration of what Palestinians and Israelis see as the growing similarity between Hamas and Hezbollah. “We are very concerned that the role model for Hamas in Gaza is the Lebanese Hezbollah,” said Mark Regev, a spokesman for Israel’s prime minister, Ehud Olmert, when asked about parallels between this conflict and the one with Hezbollah. “I have no doubt that the people who built Hezbollah’s military machine are now building the military machine of Hamas,” Mr. Regev added. He named Iran, where Israeli security officials say the longer-range rockets used by both Hezbollah and Hamas were made. Israeli officials say that Hezbollah is not only a model for Hamas, but also provides it with training and logistical support. They add that Hamas has also adopted other Hezbollah tactics, operating out of civilian areas and in some cases storing weapons in homes, creating similar dilemmas for the army that it faced in its war in Lebanon in 2006. Soon after the forces left northern Gaza on Monday, two more of the imported rockets that Israelis refer to as Grads struck Ashkelon, a large Israeli coastal city about 10 miles north of the strip. One hit an apartment block causing damage but no serious injuries.

Hamas, the militant Islamic organization that controls Gaza, has claimed responsibility for most of the rocket fire. Hamas took over Gaza last June after routing forces loyal to President Mahmoud Abbas, of Fatah. Mr. Abbas, who is now based in the West Bank, suspended peace talks with Israel as the death toll rose in Gaza, and called on all sides to agree to a cease-fire and to allow him to act as a mediator, a day before Secretary of State Condoleza was expected to arrive in the area for talks. There was a second day of unrest in the West Bank on Monday, with Palestinians protesting the Israeli actions in Gaza and throwing stones at soldiers and Israeli cars in various locations. An Israeli settler shot dead a Palestinian youth, 17, on a road west of Ramallah. According to Israel Radio, the settler said he had gone out for a walk and was confronted by a group of Palestinians, some masked, who threw stones. In an apparent bid to remain relevant in Gaza, and in an echo of the actions of the Lebanese government in southern Beirut last summer, Mr. Abbas, who is now based in the West Bank, also instructed his government on Monday to allocate $5 million to compensate Gaza residents whose properties were damaged in the Israeli campaign. Israel says its ground and air forces have only been targeting rocket squads and weapons storage and production facilities in Gaza. Israel’s army chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, and head of military intelligence, Maj. Gen. Amos Yadlin, both described 90 percent of those killed in Gaza in the last few days as terrorists.

But that figure is challenged by medical officials in Gaza, who say about half of those killed were civilians, including several young children. The Israeli human rights organization Btselem also issued a statement on Monday saying that by its count at least 54 of the dead did not take part in the hostilities. Mr. Olmert was quoted as telling the Parliament’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee on Monday that the recent military campaign, that started with concerted air strikes on Wednesday and the ground incursion early Saturday, was “not a one-time event. We are in the midst of a combat action,” he said, adding that “the objective is reducing the rocket fire and weakening Hamas.” On Monday evening, the Israeli air force struck another rocket-launching squad and the wagon in which they were transporting rockets in northern Gaza, an Army spokeswoman said. Palestinian officials said one militant was killed. Israel is mulling a much broader and longer ground operation in Gaza, the defense minister, Ehud Baruk, said in recent days. But both Israeli government and military officials say they are wary of such a campaign because of the inevitably high cost in lives on both sides and uncertainty about what might be achieved.

In terms of strength, Hamas is still far from Hezbollah. But if Israel does not act, Mr. Regev said, it will wake up one day to a much more dangerous situation in the south with a large part of the Israeli population within range of Hamas rocket fire. In the Gaza town of Jabalia, the focus of the Israeli ground operation, residents emerged from their houses to inspect the destruction left by the Israeli tanks and to bury more of the dead. Ahmad Darabeh, 37, a teacher and father of six, described how soldiers blew open the door of his house without warning before dawn on Saturday and took up sniper positions inside. The whole family was confined to one room, only allowed out to visit the bathroom once every 10 hours, Mr. Darabeh said. Mr. Darabeh said that one of his female relatives, Nihad Daher, 22, who lives nearby, was killed on Saturday by shrapnel when an Israeli Apache helicopter fired a missile at an armed group somewhere outside the house. Mr. Darabeh said he was impressed by the organization of the members of the Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas. “It was striking to see their performance this time,” he said, adding that if the Israeli ground forces had not been backed up from the air, “Hamas could have beaten them.” The Qassam Brigades say that 37 of its members were killed since Wednesday, and other militant groups say they lost another 15. Many Palestinians in Gaza also expressed reservations about the Hamas celebrations, given the number of people who have died. Sitting outside her partially destroyed house in Jabalia, Aisha Abd Rabbo, 85, said she did not care about Mr. Zahar’s offer of compensation. “All I want is the return of those who were killed,” she said.
by Taghreed El-Khodary and Isabel Kershner. Steven Erlanger contributed from Jerusalem.
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Americans Fire Missiles Into Somalia

Nairobi, Kenya: Mar. 4th. (NY Times) — American naval forces fired missiles into southern Somalia on Monday, aiming at what the Defense Department called terrorist targets. Residents reached by telephone said the only casualties were three wounded civilians, three dead cows, one dead donkey and a partly destroyed house. Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman in Washington, said the target was a “known Al Qaeda terrorist.” The missile strike was aimed at Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, a Kenyan born in 1979 who is wanted by the FBI for questioning in the nearly simultaneous attacks on a hotel in Mombasa, Kenya, and on an Israeli airliner taking off from there, in 2002, said three American officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly on the strike or its details. One American military official said the naval attack on Monday was carried out with at least two Tomahawk cruise missiles fired from a submarine. The official said the missiles were believed to have hit their targets. Witnesses on the ground, though, described the attack differently. “I did not know from where they were launched, but what I know is that they hit a house in this town,” said Muhammad Amin Abdullahi Osman, a resident of Dhobley, a small town in southern Somalia near the Kenyan border. Mr. Muhammad said two missiles slammed into the house around 3:30 a.m.

In the attacks to which Mr. Nabhan is linked, three suicide bombers drove up to the Paradise Hotel in Mombasa on Nov. 28, 2002, and blew themselves up, killing three Israeli tourists and 10 Kenyans, many of them young people in a welcoming party in the lobby. That attack took place after terrorists aimed shoulder-fired missiles at an Israeli airliner taking off from Mombasa’s airport, but missed. The Kenyan police say Mr. Nabhan bought the sport utility vehicle used in the hotel bombing. Kenyan authorities also suspect that Mr. Nabhan was involved in the bombings of the United States Embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, on Aug. 7, 1998, in which more than 200 people were killed and 5,000 wounded. Monday’s attack was not the first time that American forces had fired missiles into Somalia or used airstrikes in pursuit of what the Pentagon has called terrorist operatives in the country. They did so at least three times last year.

Dhobley lies in the growing swath of southern Somalia that seems to be falling under the control of the country’s Islamist movement once again. The Islamists rose to power in 2006 and brought a degree of law and order to Somalia for the first time since the central government collapsed in 1991. But they were driven out of Somalia in late 2006 and early 2007 by a joint Ethiopian-American offensive. The Americans and Ethiopians said Somalia’s Islamists were harboring Qaeda terrorists, including men connected to the 1998 embassy bombings. Thousands of Ethiopian troops poured across the border, backed up by American warplanes and American intelligence. The Islamist movement then went underground. But in the past several months, the Islamists seem to be making a comeback, taking over towns in southern Somalia, including Dhobley, and inflicting a steady stream of casualties on Ethiopian forces with suicide bombs and hit-and-run attacks. Efforts by foreign diplomats and the UN to broker a truce have failed, and concerns are rising that Somalia could be headed toward another war-induced famine like the one it suffered in the early 1990s.
By Jeffrey Gettleman and Eric Schmitt. Mohammed Ibrahim &Yuusuf Maxamuud contributed reporting from Mogadishu, Somalia.
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Scorched-Earth Strategy Returns to Darfur

Hawar Omar Muhammad was among the Suleia residents terrorized by the militias, known as the janjaweed, and bombs dropped by government planes. (Lynsey Addario for The New York Times)
SULEIA, Sudan: Mar. 2nd. (NY Times) — They came to this dusty town in the Darfur region of Sudan on horses and camels on market day. Almost everybody was in the bustling square. At the first clatter of automatic gunfire, everyone ran. The militiamen laid waste to the town — burning huts, pillaging shops, carrying off any loot they could find and shooting anyone who stood in their way, residents said. Asha Abdullah Abakar, wizened and twice widowed, described how she hid in a hut, praying it would not be set on fire. “I have never been so afraid,” she said. The attacks by the janjaweed, the fearsome Arab militias that came three weeks ago, accompanied by government bombers and followed by the Sudanese Army, were a return to the tactics that terrorized Darfur in the early, bloodiest stages of the conflict. Such brutal, three-pronged attacks of this scale — involving close coordination of air power, army troops and Arab militias in areas where rebel troops have been — have rarely been seen in the past few years, when the violence became more episodic and fractured. But they resemble the kinds of campaigns that first captured the world’s attention and prompted the Bush administration to call the violence in Darfur genocide. Aid workers, diplomats and analysts say the return of such attacks is an ominous sign that the fighting in Darfur, which has grown more complex and confusing as it has stretched on for five years, is entering a new and deadly phase — one in which the government is planning a scorched-earth campaign against the rebel groups fighting here as efforts to find a negotiated peace founder.

The government has carried out a series of coordinated attacks in recent weeks, using air power, ground forces and, according to witnesses and peacekeepers stationed in the area, the janjaweed, as their allied militias are known here. The offensives are aimed at retaking ground gained by a rebel group, the Justice and Equality Movement, which has been gathering strength and has close ties to the government of neighboring Chad. Government officials say that their strikes have been carefully devised to hit the rebels, not civilians, and that Arab militias were not involved. They said they had been motivated to evict the rebels in part because the rebels were hijacking aid vehicles and preventing peacekeepers from patrolling the area, events that some aid workers and peacekeepers confirmed. “We are simply trying to secure the area from the bandits that are troubling civilians in the area,” said Ali al-Sadig, a government spokesman. “There is nothing abnormal about a government doing this.” But residents of the towns said the rebels had been long gone by the time the government attacks began, leaving defenseless civilians to flee bombs and guns. In interviews, survivors of the attacks described a series of assaults that had left dozens dead, turned large sections of towns into hut-shaped circles of ash and scattered tens of thousands of fearful residents, including hundreds of children, who fled classrooms in the middle of a school day and have not been reunited with their families. “My son Ahmed, he ran, but I have not seen him since,” said a woman named Aisha as she waited for a sack of sorghum from UN workers in Sirba, one of the towns that was attacked. “I just pray he is still hiding in the bush somewhere and will come back to me.”

The United Nations estimates that the recent fighting has forced about 45,000 people to flee their homes in Darfur, which is roughly the size of Texas and has a population of about six million people. Some fled to Chad, where they have not been able to reach the safety of refugee camps because of continued bombing along the border. Others fled to Jebel Moun, a rebel stronghold to the east, and aid workers fear for the safety of about 20,000 people who are in the path of future attacks if the government presses ahead with its offensive and the rebels vow to resist. Military officials from the peacekeeping force in Darfur said in recent days that the Sudanese military had added nearly a brigade of troops to West Darfur, along with two dozen tanks and armored vehicles and many heavy weapons. “You see a buildup from both sides,” said Ameerah Haq, the senior United Nations aid official in Sudan. “Both sides must desist. We have a population that is just being attacked and hit from both sides.”

Pressure is mounting on Sudan over Darfur. In January, a long-sought hybrid United Nations and African Union peacekeeping force began working in Darfur, but the Sudanese government’s quibbling over which countries the troops will come from and bureaucratic delays have stalled the force’s deployment. Sudan’s biggest trading partner and ally, China, has also come under pressure from advocates who have linked the Olympic Games in Beijing this summer to the fighting in Darfur. China has been more publicly critical of the Sudanese government in recent weeks. Sudan has also been trying to improve its relationship with the United States, and last week, President Bush’s new special envoy to Sudan, Richard S. Williamson, visited Darfur and the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, meeting with President Omar al-Bashir. Any improvement in relations, he said, would be contingent on tangible improvements in the humanitarian situation. “Since the first of the year another 75,000 people in Darfur have been displaced,” Mr. Williamson said in a telephone interview. “That is more than a thousand a day. There are not going to be any changes until that reverses.”

Despite the pressure, the government seems determined to fight on, and the most powerful rebel groups — the biggest factions of the Justice and Equality Movement and the Sudanese Liberation Army — have refused to sit down for talks. So the violence continues, tracing a familiar arc as it wears on. It was five years ago last week that an attack by rebels from non-Arab tribes like the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa, seeking greater wealth and autonomy for the neglected and impoverished region of Darfur, prompted the Arab-dominated government to marshal Arab militias in the region that ultimately evicted millions from their homes, burning, looting and raping along the way. The campaign effectively pushed many non-Arab people off their land and into vast, squalid camps across Darfur and Chad. In the first two years of the conflict, 2003 and 2004, joint attacks by the Sudanese Army, janjaweed militiamen and the government’s old Russian-made Antonov bombers terrorized Darfur, waging a brutal counterinsurgency against non-Arab rebel groups by attacking their fellow tribesmen in their villages. At least 200,000 are believed to have died as a result of the violence or sickness and hunger caused by the crisis, according to international estimates, with the majority of violent deaths in that period. But in the past two years, the conflict has grown more complex and chaotic, and while some coordinated attacks by janjaweed militias and aerial bombardment have occurred, they were not of the same scale or intensity. But Darfur has remained a deadly place.

In 2006, before a peace agreement and then in the aftermath of its failure, rebel groups fractured and began fighting among themselves. Hundreds of thousands of people were displaced and hundreds died as a result of their battles. Today, according to some estimates, two dozen rebel groups are jockeying for territory and influence in Darfur. Some analysts and human rights workers say the government has sown chaos by splintering the rebel groups to weaken them. In 2007, Arab tribes, some of which had allied with the government and some of which had taken up arms to fight the rebels, also began to fight one another. Many of the violent deaths of 2007 were caused by these bloody battles between Arab groups and their militias, according to aid workers and diplomats in the region. But as the conflict enters its sixth year, an older, deadly pattern is returning, and with it fears are rising among villagers, aid workers, diplomats and analysts that Darfur is headed for a new cycle of bloodletting and displacement on a vast scale.

In recent weeks, bombs dropped from government planes hit Abu Surouj, Sirba, Suleia and other towns in West Darfur, then came janjaweed militiamen, who killed, raped and burned, helping themselves to livestock and grain, furniture and clothing. In one town, the raiders pried the corrugated metal roof off a school, aid workers said. In another, water pumps were destroyed. “This is the kind of destruction that makes it hard for people to return,” said Ted Chaiban, the Unicef representative in Sudan, who has toured the area of the attacks. “People need security. They are totally vulnerable.”

The recent violence in Chad, where rebel groups with bases in Sudan tried to topple the government in early February, has worsened matters. Rebels in Darfur, who diplomats and analysts say have received arms and cash from the family of Chad’s president, Idriss Déby, rushed into Chad to help defend him, creating a vacuum in the territory they had occupied. Sudan’s government seized the opportunity to retake the ground and now appears to be pushing farther into areas long held by the rebels, according to peacekeepers stationed here. Few people in the region were unhappy to see the Justice and Equality Movement evicted. Banditry was rife in the territory it controlled, and for months aid groups had dodged carjackings and other attacks. African Union peacekeepers had been barred from the area, according to Brig. Gen. Balla Keita, the new regional commander of the hybrid United Nations-African Union force in West Darfur. "They were causing a lot of insecurity," General Keita said of the rebels, but he added that this did not justify attacks on heavily populated areas. In Suleia, only a few hundred residents remained of the 15,000 who had lived here. Those left behind were too weak to run and have sought safety near the army camp at the edge of town, sleeping in the open, huddled together for warmth against the frigid night winds. The Sudanese soldiers here have promised to protect them from militiamen who still roam the edges of town. They prevented militiamen from stealing sacks of grain delivered by aid groups, residents said. Adam Adoum Abdullah, a former rebel fighter who joined the Sudanese Army as part of a peace deal with one rebel group in 2006, commandeered an army truck to help collect what little food, blankets and bits of shelter remained in the town for those sleeping out in the cold next to the army camp. “I am ashamed that the janjaweed come with the soldiers,” Mr. Abdullah said. “What kind of army are we to fight like this? These people, they are suffering. We must help them.”
By Lydia Polgreen
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Disclaimer
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