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This AP photo is one of the best I've seen from Kenya's post-election crisis.
It encapsulates so much: Many, many of the protesters are just poor kids, often drunk or drugged up. The boy in the yellowish shirt at the bottom left is sniffing glue.
Kenya's leaders have to stop portraying the violence as some outburst of righteous indignation and figure out a way to make sure that kids like these don't dictate their next moves.
Came across this surprisingly uninspired editorial effort in The Wall Street Journal. It raises a couple of issues.
First, I don't see how holding a new vote is at all possible within the next few months or even year. At least 300,000 people (the alleged margin of President Kibaki's victory) have fled their homes in what has essentially been a redrawing of Kenya's ethnic map. Where will all those people vote in a do-over? They're not going to risk going back to the places they came from. The next time around, I don't think Luo, Kikuyu, Kalenjin and Kisii will agree to stand in line with one another so peacefully.
Strictly from a logistical level, power-sharing seems to be the only option, but neither side wants that at all. President Kibaki has already named his Cabinet. Raila Odinga probably won't consent to being prime minister. Kenya doesn't even have a prime minister. Presumably creating one would require the constitution to be rewritten. And that's not going to happen overnight.
The spookiest part of my visit to the slum of Witeithie, outside Thika, was the tour I got from a 23-year-old Kikuyu man, John Kimani. He made clear from the outset that he believed Luos, Luhyas and Kalenjin should leave the slum.
We spent the next hour walking through Witeithie, and he would say with nonchalance, "Oh, a Luo lived here," or "the Luhya man who was in that house has fled." Obviously it was depressing to see these empty homes, and to see him care so little about it.
But two things struck me most: 1. Everyone once lived together in Witeithie, with no apparent importance put on ethnicity; and 2. Down to the door, a 23-year-old kid knew the exact location of Witeithie's Luo and Luhya residents. It felt terribly ominous.
If this small slum is any example, Kenya's peace-makers will have a lot of work to do. We were followed by six or seven boys who couldn't have been older than 10. All said they believed Luos and Luhyas should leave. Why? "They killed our tribesmen. They must go."
The one positive thing I can say was that I didn't see out-and-out violence in Witeithie. I talked to several Luos and Luhyas who were still packing up. John Kimani looked on, and didn't seem too troubled by their presence. As long as they were gone by January 31, he said, he didn't care.
There has been lots of talk about Kenya's ethnic groups distributing fliers warning their enemies to get out of town. Today, a Luo who had fled the Witeithie slum just south of Thika showed me one she had received.
This was distributed by Kikuyus in Witeithie who told me they were enraged by attacks on their fellow tribesmen in the Rift Valley. It's tough to call this anything but ethnic cleansing.
Here's the latest U.S. Embassy warning to American citizens living in Kenya. All in all, it's surprisingly restrained.
Embassy of the United States of America
Nairobi, Kenya
January 30, 2008
WARDEN MESSAGE
Situation Security Update - January 29, 2008 PM
* Several official Americans have been temporarily relocated from Kisumu to Nairobi.
*
The widespread violence that has affected parts of Kenya since
President Kibaki was declared the winner of the December 27 election
has subsided in some areas. However, a recent outbreak of protests in
Nairobi and violent civil unrest in Kisumu, Nakuru and Naivasha
demonstrates the potential for spontaneous violence in the current
political climate.
* Americans in Kenya should be prepared for
a large police presence and potential outbreaks of hostile clashes
between police and demonstrators, and between rival groups of
demonstrators.
Things in Kenya have taken a very, very ominous turn in the last few days. And I have been irked by all the western pundits who accuse the international media of racism for citing the role that tribe plays in the latest violence. It is clear that, whatever the cause, tribe has come to play a major role in the killing.
But one thing does choke on the way down. Enough with the "baying" for blood. It's a cliche for starters. And it does seem to connote an element of savagery that is better left out.
David Lewis at Reuters: "Many fled to the police station as evening fell, others sought refuge in prison. The rest huddled in the dark, singing songs to raise their spirits, exhausted by a stand-off with mobs baying for their blood."
Maria Mackay at Christian Today: "Men, women and children have been forced to flee the gangs baying for their blood, seeking refuge in prisons and police stations, now impromptu refugee camps."
Cosmas Butunyi at The Daily Nation: "Although the attackers followed her to the house baying for her blood, the man stood his ground and insisted she was not inside. The men later gave up and left."
My chum Steve Bloomfield at The Independent: "Warning shots were fired as the would-be lynch mob surged forward, baying for blood."
Another chum, Rob Crilly, in The Times: "Peter Oduri tried to deny that he was from the Luo tribe, but the baying mob at the door knew how to check."
And Crilly again in The Irish Times: "The gang was baying for blood and wouldn't believe Peter Oduri as he tried to deny being a member of the Luo tribe."
I know it's hard for reporters to find tourists in Kenya at the moment, but this is getting ridiculous. Debbie Shillito (or Shillitto, depending on whom you ask) gets a rare Wire Trifecta with an appearance in AFP after having been quoted by AP and Reuters. And wait! Shillito is through to the bonus round with this mention in the Ottawa Citizen and this one in the Voice of America!
(For the non-journos out there, what happened was that the Kenya Tourist Board arranged a junket trip for reporters to the Samburu Game Reserve and get an inaccurate accurate sense of how Kenya's crisis has affected the tourism industry. Apparently Debbie was the only person there.)
Actually, I shouldn't be so flip. One of the most onerous tasks reporters face is trying to find a Real Person for their stories, particularly when a deadline looms. An affable, talkative Real Person such as Debbie is manna from heaven.
I've been struck in recent weeks by the disconnect between western pundits, who shrink at attributing Kenya's crisis to tribe, and Kenyans themselves, who are far more likely to give some truth to the idea.
As a contrast: Here is a commentary in today's Daily Nation newspaper which describes how the British colonial government preyed on "age-old rivalries," and warns that "Kenya's boil will continue to fester under the skin before erupting into ethnic cleansing or a civil war."
And here is an explanatory piece posted by the Council on Foreign Relations, which attributes the crisis to "weak institutions" and argues that Kenyans "have not traditionally identified themselves by ethnic groups (despite the fact that Kikuyus almost exclusively voted for Kibaki (a Kikuyu) and Luos almost exclusively voted for Raila Odinga (a Luo)).
The CFR piece calls it "political and economic tensions with an ethnic face." I don't know, though. Maybe South of West was right.
As an aside, the CFR analysis says every election since multiparty politics were introduced in 1992 has been accompanied by "low-level outbreaks of violence." But that simply isn't true _ there was nothing "low-level" about it. The 1992 vote saw at least 2,000 people killed _ and possibly thousand more. And throughout the 1990s, some 300,000 Kenyans were displaced from their homes as a result of ethnic clashes.
I have generally been stunned by the degree of bloviating that's been committed about Kenya's elections, particularly by western academics who don't seem to have any real first-hand knowledge about the conflict.
The creme de la creme has to be Gunnar Heinsohn, a sociologist at the Raphael Lemkin Institute for Comparative Genocide Research at the University of Bremen (aside: what in God's name is comparative genocide research?).
Heinsohn recently penned this piece in the International Herald Tribune, and as far as I can tell, he has basically written the exact same story (sometimes using the same language) about every conflict and period of unrest in recent memory: Pakistan, the Palestinian territories, and Afghanistan among them. In all these cases, he blames the violence on what he calls the Youth Bulge (I thought that was a puberty thing, but whatever).
Another aside: According to the above-referenced Wikipedia entry, Heinsohn argues that antisemitism has its roots in the fact that Jews were the first to abolish animal and human sacrifice. Everyone else felt secretly ashamed that they were still killing people and animals, and they ended up directing their self-hating rage at the Jews.
This is a guy you want to listen to about Kenya? Yikes.
I just came across this supposedly Swahili proverb, which strikes me as relevant to the political wrangling and subsequent friendly handshake between President Mwai Kibaki and Raila Odinga. It's hackneyed but good.
“When two elephants fight, the grass suffers; when two elephants make love, the grass also suffers.”
And I also came across this surprisingly spot-on Newsweek story, "How to choose a gang name in Kenya." This strikes me as further proof that the Internet is where it's at. You'd never see such a detailed, cogently written piece of journalism in the actual pages of Newsweek.
