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  Continuing Crisis: No Solution in Sight for Kenya

Continuing Crisis No Solution in Sight for Kenya

By Thilo Thielke

Part 2: International Mediators Stream In

In the wake of the violence, Odinga has also changed his strategy. While his voters expect him to fight for power, he is also under pressure to avert another bloodbath. "We have three options," the opposition leader said at his party headquarters, dubbed the "Orange House": civil disobedience, resistance in parliament and action through the law courts.

But the parliamentary option would be tantamount to capitulation in the eyes of Odinga's supporters. Civil disobedience, on the other hand, could lead to further chaos, which Odinga wants to avoid, and yet he is unwilling to give in. Last week he likened Kibaki to the former Ugandan dictator and mass murderer Idi Amin and called his opponent's election win a "civilian coup."

When heavily armed police used their clubs to break up protests by his supporters in downtown Nairobi last Thursday, Odinga promptly called for another protest march on the next day. Although it failed to materialize, the threat alone was enough to keep tensions high in Nairobi. A few shops opened their doors again on Friday, but stockpiling of food and fuel quickly led to shortages. According to a UN spokesman, violence has forced 180,000 people from their homes and half a million Kenyans are now dependent on humanitarian assistance.

It is unlikely that Kibaki will be able to ignore international pressure for long. Even the Americans, who prematurely congratulated him on his election victory, were quick to withdraw their statement. Although Washington sees Kibaki as a loyal ally in the war against terrorism, it distanced itself from the autocratic ruler in the wake of growing protests against the president.

Despite international efforts, a sustainable solution to the conflict is still not in sight. Kibaki offered to form a national unity government with the opposition but Odinga prefers the option of a power-sharing coalition or even an interim government to prepare for new elections. Still, Odinga agreed to meet with international mediators over the weekend, including Washington's top diplomat in Africa, Jendayi Frazer. On Monday he called off protests planned for Tuesday.

Even Desmond Tutu concedes that a recount of votes would be ineffective. After the chaos of recent days, Tutu believes, it would be nearly impossible to reconstruct the true results. And any coalition between Odinga and Kibaki also seems unpromising, because the same experiment has already failed once before.

Odinga forged the rainbow coalition that brought Kibaki into power five years ago. But once he was president, Kibaki broke his promise to name Odinga his prime minister. Instead, he placed Kikuyu in key positions and soon proved to be so uninhibited in filling his own pockets that Edward Clay, the former British high commissioner to Kenya, accused Kikuya and his ministers, in their arrogance and greed, of stuffing themselves "like gluttons."

The recent EU-Africa summit in Portugal revealed just how prickly some African leaders like Kibaki react to Western criticism. When German Chancellor Angela Merkel chided Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe over human rights abuses, Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade angrily set Merkel straight, telling reporters: "Who can say that human rights are being violated more in Zimbabwe than in other African countries? No one can say that."

Ironically, the constant flow of aid to Africa has reduced the effectiveness of diplomatic pressure. The West supplies aid to most African dictatorships, Zimbabwe included, almost always justifying its decision with the argument that eliminating aid would be most harmful to those in need.

Another element complicating the Kibaki case is that the world community has regarded Kenya as a bastion of stability until now, especially given the far more troubling conditions in other countries in the region. Uganda has suffered from more than two decades of internal unrest and civil war, Rwanda was devastated by genocide in 1994, and Congo, Somalia and Sudan have all seen their shares of civil war. Meanwhile, the West studiously chose to overlook the alarming conditions in Kenya's interior.

Even as international mediators stream in and out of Nairobi, ethnic reprisals appear to be continuing outside the capital. Last Thursday men from the Kalenjin ethnic group, armed with knives and machetes, erected burning roadblocks in the region around Eldoret, where they checked cars for members of the hated Kikuyu group.

At the same time, endless convoys of cars formed in front of the region's police station, where hundreds of Kikuyu have been camped out for days. "Last week a Kalenjin came to our house to tell us that they would soon come back to kill me and my family," says Joe Kamau, 37. He packed his belongings, took his three children and sought refuge at the police station. Kamau says that he wants to go to Nairobi.

Meanwhile, Red Cross employees have found 13 charred corpses of toddlers and infants, the youngest perhaps no more than two months old, in the ruins of the church in Kiambaa. The bodies of their murdered fathers still lie in front of the church, where they tried to protect their families -- and were killed for their efforts.

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan