NAIROBI, Kenya — Kenya, once a leader in the region, is following neighbors such as Somalia down a path of disintegration, with no solution in sight as burning slums and thousands fleeing in fear alter the ethnic map — perhaps forever.
Police in helicopters fired to turn back mobs Tuesday. Gunmen killed an opposition legislator, and slums where a tense peace had held for days exploded with machete-wielding gangs setting fire to homes and businesses owned by President Mwai Kibaki’s Kikuyu people.
Sabat Abdullah, a slum resident, said a gang dragged a Kikuyu doctor from his clinic “and then cut and cut until his head was off.”
Rivals pressured
International groups are pressuring Kibaki and chief rival Raila Odinga — a member of the Luo tribe — to share power to end the crisis over the disputed presidential election.
Former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan is negotiating but says it will take a year just to settle on a plan for resolving the deep-rooted problems that sparked anger.
Barack Obama, the U.S. Democratic presidential candidate whose father was Kenyan, made a plea for peace Tuesday, saying, “Kenya has come too far to throw away decades of progress in a storm of violence and political unrest.”
“We must not look back years from now and wonder how and why things were permitted to go so horribly wrong,” Obama said on Capital FM radio.
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called the violence “deeply concerning,” saying, “We are currently asking everyone to maintain calm.”
Political disputes in Kenya often mushroom into ethnic clashes, but never before with the ferocity that has left more than 800 people dead since the Dec. 27 vote that international observers and many Kenyans agree had a rigged tally.
It was only the second free election in Kenya, which suffered decades under one-party and authoritarian rule.
Kibaki, whose insistence that he had won incited some of the violence, on Tuesday deplored that some Kenyans “have been incited to hate one another and view each other as enemies.”
Some of the violence is an expression of pent-up anger by the marginalized majority in Nairobi slums, where 65 percent of the capital’s residents balance on the edge of survival. Statistics show Kenyans growing poorer and doing so in greater number each year while corrupt politicians who mouth pious words about alleviating poverty buy ranches in Australia and lakeside villas in Switzerland.
In the western Rift Valley, scene of the worst violence, thousands of people set homes ablaze, smashed shop windows to loot goods and set up blazing road blocks where they hunted for rival tribespeople.
A gang of Luos stoned a Kikuyu man, then slashed him with machetes and threw him to burn to death on their roadblock of flaming tires. Police took away the body.
“We didn’t waste time; we had to kill him,” Stanley Ochieng, 25, told an Associated Press reporter.
In villages around Eldoret, another western town, gangs of young Kalenjins on Tuesday slashed to death four Kikuyus and stoned two others until they died, witnesses said. When a helicopter tried to land to intervene, the youths set grasslands ablaze, the witnesses said.
Old land disputes fester
At the heart of the conflict are decades-old grudges over land.
The Rift Valley is the traditional home of the Kalenjin and Masai.
British colonizers seized large tracts of land to cultivate fertile farms there. When much of that land was redistributed after independence in 1963, President Jomo Kenyatta flooded it with his Kikuyu people, instead of returning it to the Kalenjin and Masai.
Kikuyus are Kenya’s largest ethnic group, making up about 22 percent of the population of 38 million. Two of the three presidents since independence were Kikuyu and their domination of politics and the economy is deeply resented.
Human rights groups and others charge that politicians are manipulating people’s anger to orchestrate much of the violence.
