Political Blogs
A country turned on its head
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- Published on Sunday, 10 February 2008 00:07
Between them stood nine mean-looking soldiers armed with rifles.
On either side of the road, shacks and low-lying buildings smouldered from the violence of a day earlier, when tensions flared and everything in sight was set alight.
'How can they be allowed to do this?'
Although the arrival of the army has brought with it calm, it is not to be confused with peace. The officers' presence won't last forever and their departure will no doubt give way to the tensions that continue to bubble below the surface.
The Kisii people traditionally hail from the province of Nyanza, which lies on one side of the town, the Kalenjin from the Rift Valley province on the other. For the past fortnight they have battled out their differences in the wake of the killing of an opposition Kalenjin MP, David Too, who was from the ranks of Raila Odinga's Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) and who was shot dead by a police officer from the Kisii tribe, an ethnic group perceived to be allies of President Mwai Kibaki's Kikuyu people.
His death sparked one of the worst waves of ethnic violence in the Rift Valley area in post-independence Kenya. More than 30 people were killed within a few days. Thousands fled to a nearby park in the town of Kericho, where they huddled together in the first displacement camp to appear on the town's map. Homes and businesses were looted. Roads were barricaded.
And as the locals prepare for his funeral this morning, Kisiis have begun to scatter in all directions, fearful of renewed attacks.
The message is clear. "We don't want you here. That's what they're telling us," said one Kisii at the border post. "But I bought my plot of land. I have my title deeds. How can they be allowed to do this?" he asks.
'They just came and trashed our house and then told us to get out'
The answer lies in a complex ethnic web that is divided along socio-economic lines, because what is happening in Chebilat is no different to what is unfolding in each of Kenya's eight provinces in the wake of the December 27 presidential poll.
Kikuyus are bearing the brunt of Kibaki's disputed victory. Since he came to power in 2002, he is said to have looked after his people very well, leaving all other Kenyans trailing behind. He did what President Jomo Kenyatta did during the early independence years and made ethnicity a ticket to economic freedom.
As Odinga rode to victory on that December day - as many still believe he did - it was on a ticket of change. His supporters, many of them from his own Luo tribe, looked forward to a new dawn. The ODM leader promised them equitable distribution of the country's vast wealth, and he pledged to reform the decades-old issue of land and to bring all Kenyans in from the cold.
But as Kibaki was installed as president for a second term three days later, hope turned to frustration as Kenyans began to unleash their fury on the Kikuyus. And as reprisals followed all over the country, Kenya was slowly brought to a halt.
They are still turning to the police for help, only to find that ethnicity is also a factor for some guardians of the peace. They rush to hospitals, only to find services so stretched that many centres can no longer cope with the demand.
The anger continues to mount as Kibaki digs in his heels. Six weeks on, his government puts the death toll at 995, but assures that the worst is over. Aid agencies say the number of internally displaced people is in excess of 300 000, but the situation is spiralling out of control. One Nairobi hospital has attended to 90 children who were raped in the post-election violence, and says the countless cases of sexual abuse it is witnessing in recent weeks is worrying for the country's HIV problem.
In more than 40 makeshift camps all over the country, Kenyans have left their homes and businesses, and lifestyles that seemed to characterise the 45-year-old democracy.
Joy, a 26-year-old mother-of-two, arrived at the Jamhuri Showgrounds in Nairobi last Sunday. She had fled from Thika, a city that lies 60km west of the Kenyan capital.
"They just came and trashed our house and then told us to get out," she said, but not before they gave her husband a battering with a machete. He was taken to hospital, while she fled with their children in the first of the getaway buses out of town. The lunatic express, the buses are called.
She had no idea where she would end up, but Joy is adamant she won't go back. "Never," she says. With 50 Kenyan shillings to her name, I suggest that her options may not be many. "I'll go to my ancestral home," she replies, "to the Western Province, the traditional home of the Luo."
It was a line I would hear repeatedly throughout the week. Kenyans are waking up to the reality that they will not be welcome back in the towns and villages that only a few weeks ago they called home. Not for now, at least. The internally displaced camps may be safe havens today, but they are only short-term solutions to an unsolved problem. Their tribal hometowns are the only places where they know they will be truly free of attack. Self-imposed ethnic cleansing is what it boils down to.
It is what is forcing the Kisiis to flee the displacement camp in Kericho ahead of today's funeral. They say they can't risk it anymore. "This is all we have left," said a young man as he climbed onto the back of a lorry that was piled high with people and their possessions making a rapid exit westwards on Wednesday, hoping to make it to the other side of the border in time.
"It can't work," said Patrick Nyongesa, a Rift Valley aid worker. "No country can come back from the verge of war if it divides itself up in this Balkanised way."
Nyongesa has worked around the clock in the past few weeks, setting up camps, ferrying relief to shelters, watching the turmoil unfold. It was he who was called upon on New Year's Day to do a head count of the women and children burnt to death when the Eldoret church in which they were seeking refuge was set alight.
"I still can't put words on what I saw," he says. "But I just hope Kenya never forces me to see anything like that again."
A few kilometres away from Eldoret, on the road to Kericho, gangs of young men who are manning the main road would suggest differently. The same youths just a few days ago barricaded this main thoroughfare and set passing cars and trucks alight, robbed and injured motorists, and instilled fear and panic in the neighbouring areas.
The roadblocks are rolled back halfway now, a blunt reminder that they can be rolled back out again in an instant if the occasion arises. The men are stopping every other car, in some cases demanding money. If not, they want to know the ethnic identity of the passengers. They don't appear to be causing any trouble. They just want to threaten, to make their presence felt - a reminder of who they are and what they are capable of doing.
Nearby, a newspaper vendor holds up the daily papers that spell out in large bold print the prospect of a stalemate in the ongoing peace talks back in Nairobi.
"If they don't come to a settlement, we'll fight. We'll keep going," he says, with not a trace of remorse or fear in his 25-year-old voice.
