NAIROBI (Agencies)
Tens of thousands of people have been forced to flee their homes amid brutal post-election violence in Kenya that had claimed at least 300 lives by Wednesday and threatens to descend into a full-scale tribal conflict.
On Tuesday, at least 35 children and adults sheltering in a church were burnt alive by an angry mob, in an eruption of violence that has raised fears Kenya may follow in the footsteps of it's troubled neighbors in Darfur, Somalia or 1994 Rwanda.
The problem began when President Mwai Kibaki was re-elected and sworn in Sunday despite widespread accusations of fraud, tribal violence flared in strongholds of defeated challenger Raila Odinga's Orange Democratic Movement (ODM).
Kibaki's government accused political rival Raila Odinga of total responsibility for an explosion of tribal violence.
"It has been one-way all the way. It is basically Raila Odinga-led ethnic cleansing of the Kikuyu (tribe)," government spokesman Alfred Matua told the BBC.
Supporters of Odinga, who comes from the Luo tribe, have in turn made ethnic cleansing charges against Kibaki, whose Kikuyu tribe has long dominated political and business life in Kenya, East Africa's biggest economy.
With Kibaki belonging to Kikuyu, Kenya's largest tribe and Odinga to the Luo, the second largest, the violence has taken on a distinctly ethnic hue, with tit-for-tat killings and targeted arson attacks.
Young men armed with machetes rocks and bows and arrows could be seen manning crude checkpoints, allowing only those from the right ethnic group through.
The violence is the worst Kenya has witnessed since a failed 1982 coup.
"What I saw was unimaginable and indescribable," said the director of the Kenyan Red Cross, Abbas Gullet, after visiting several of the worst hit areas of western Kenya on Tuesday.
"This is a national disaster," he told reporters. "From the area we visited today there are roughly about 70,000 (displaced)." |
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Chaos erupts In Nairobi, slum areas were overrun by rioters burning down shops belonging to members of the Kikuyu tribe and looting anything from refrigerators to basic goods.
"The big men are fighting it out over the election, but if a compromise is not reached soon, we will just be left here to die," said 63-year-old shop-owner John Okwiri.
"One tribe is targeting another one in a fashion that can rightly be described as ethnic cleansing," said one senior police commander who declined to be identified.
Pictures of the Eldoret area filmed from a helicopter by the Red Cross showed plumes of white smoke billowing from dozens of blazing homesteads on Tuesday.
Armed gangs were marching on the nearby Burnt Forest, part of the fertile Rift Valley that is home to many Kikuyus, local broadcaster NTV said.
Residents feared the shadowy Mungiki gang, with roots in Kikuyu traditional rituals, and the "Taliban" gang of mostly ethnic Luos who support Odinga would launch reprisal attacks.
Vincent Ochieng nursed a gaping head wound after about 100 Mungiki youths raided the capital's ethnically mixed Kiambiu shanty town on Tuesday and hacked five people to death.
"First it was protests, then it got violent, now this is revenge," he said.
The Eldoret attack revived memories in East Africa of the slaughter of tens of thousands of people in Rwanda's 1994 genocide, which began much in the same way as tribes erupted against each other. |
