Pelajaran dari Kenya
Kenya Kikuyus, Long Dominant, Are Now Routed
NAKURU, Kenya Kenyas privileged tribe is on the run.
Over the past few days, tens of thousands of Kikuyus, the tribe of Kenyas
president, have packed into heavily guarded buses to flee the western part of
the country because of ethnic violence. On Sunday, endless convoys of buses
some with their windshields smashed by rocks crawled across a landscape of
scorched homes and empty farms.
It is nothing short of a mass exodus. The tribe that has dominated business
and politics in Kenya since independence in 1963 is now being chased off its
land by machete-wielding mobs made up of members of other tribes furious about
the Dec. 27 election, which Kenyas president, Mwai Kibaki, won under dubious
circumstances. In some places, Kikuyus have been hunted down with bows and
arrows.
The hospital in Nakuru, a town in the Rift Valley, is full of Kikuyu men with
deep ax wounds, fingers cut off and slash marks across their faces.
"It was the Kalenjin," said Samuel Mburu, a Kikuyu farmer with rows of
stitches in his head, when asked who had nearly killed him. The Kalenjin are
one of the bigger tribes in the Rift Valley, and they have fought fiercely with
the Kikuyus before, mostly over land.
Many Kalenjin are unapologetic. Robert Tutuny, a Kalenjin farmer, stood on a
hillside on Sunday with an iron bar in his hands and looked down at the charred
remains of a Kikuyu village that was razed a week ago.
"We hate these people," Mr. Tutuny said.
The election and the unresolved battle about who won has ignited old
tensions in Kenya, which in a week and a half has gone from being one of
Africas most promising countries to another equatorial trouble zone.
The political impasse continued Sunday, with Jendayi E. Frazer, the American
assistant secretary of state for African affairs, meeting again with opposition
leaders and government officials, but no resolution was in sight.
The heavy fighting that claimed more than 300 lives last week has subsided
and many people have gone back to work in the capital, Nairobi. There, people
from different tribes live side by side and often work in the same office. They
are aware of ethnic differences and sometimes joke about them, but it usually
does not go further than that.
But out here where little towns rise from the veld like mirages and where
there is so much wide-open space it seems incongruous to fight over land
these differences matter. A tribal war is shaping up between the Kalenjin, who
mostly support Kenyas opposition leaders, and the Kikuyus, who voted heavily
up to 98 percent in some areas for the president.
Tens of thousands of Kikuyus are camped out at police stations and churches
for protection, waiting for buses guarded by military escorts to evacuate them
to the central highlands, the traditional Kikuyu homeland. There, amid the lush
tea fields and rolling green hills, they are safe because almost everyone who
lives in the highlands is Kikuyu.
Ethnic conflict is now threatening the decades of stability that has set
Kenya apart from so many of its neighbors, like Congo, Rwanda, Somalia and
Sudan. But Kenya has struggled with ethnic violence before. Its rare bursts
usually come around election time.
"You have to understand that these issues are much deeper than ethnic," said
Maina Kiai, chairman of the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights.
"They are political," he said, and "they go back to land."
The last time the Rift Valley was this violent was in 1992, another election
year in Kenya and a time of turbulent transition between dictatorship and
democracy. Kalenjin militias, stirred up by politicians who told them that the
valley was Kalenjin ancestral land, massacred hundreds of Kikuyus in a bid to
steal their farms.
Since then, Mr. Kiai said, "Emotions have been festering, resentments have
been building and we sat around pretending ethnicity didnt exist."
Kenya has more than 40 tribes, but the Kikuyus have almost always been on
top. They run shops, restaurants, banks and factories across the country. One
reason Mr. Kibaki has engendered so much resentment from other tribes is
because many of the top officials in his government including the ministers
of defense, justice, finance and internal security are Kikuyus.
The Kikuyus are the biggest tribe in Kenya but far from a majority, at 22
percent of the population. The Kalenjins make up about 12 percent.
In the Rift Valley, the anti-Kikuyu grudge goes back to independence, when
the British government bought out Britons who owned huge, picturesque farms.
But instead of redistributing that land to the impoverished people who had
lived here for centuries, like the Kalenjin and Masai, the newly formed Kenyan
government, led by Jomo Kenyatta, a Kikuyu, gave much of it to Kikuyus from
other areas.
Most of the Kikuyus here are hardly rich. The men lying on bloody sheets at
the Nakuru hospital are emaciated farmers with threadbare clothes. The same
goes for the Kikuyus who have been slaughtered by gangs of opposing tribes in
Nairobis slums, causing an exodus from there, too. They lived in iron shanties
just as their non-Kikuyu neighbors do.
But in many cases, the Kikuyus own kiosks or small patches of land or they
are related to someone who does, and that makes them a little better off by
local standards.
"Land is very important to us," said Anthony Kirunga, a Kikuyu, who sells
spare car parts in Nakuru. "Its not our fault that other people are jealous."
This election stirred up anti-Kikuyu jealousies like never before. Raila
Odinga, the top opposition candidate and a member of the Luo tribe, built his
campaign on a promise to end Kikuyu favoritism and share the fruits of Kenyas
growing economy with all tribes.
Early election results had him way ahead and his party winning the most seats
in Parliament. But at the 11th hour of the vote-tallying process last Sunday,
Mr. Kibaki surged. Election observers have said the presidents party rigged
the results to stay in power.
Millions of opposition supporters across Kenya were outraged. Not only did
their candidate lose, but it also seemed to them that their system, which until
the election had been celebrated as one of the most vibrant democracies in
Africa, had cheated them.
In western Kenya, where Kikuyus are vastly outnumbered, they became easy
targets. In Kisumu, the third-largest city in the country, Luos went on a
rampage, burning down Kikuyu shops and ransacking the downtown.
In the Rift Valley, Kalenjin gangs stormed Kikuyu farms. Police officers
seemed reluctant to intervene. Dozens of Kikuyus were massacred, including up
to 50 women and children hiding in a church who were burned alive. What has
kept the death toll from rising even higher is the fact that few people here
have guns; most of the clashes have been fought with clubs, knives and stones.
Jeremiah Mukuna, 75, a Kikuyu farmer, was attacked by a Kalenjin mob last
Monday while he was sitting on the porch of his shack, his family said. His
head was split open with an ax. On Sunday, he lay in a coma in the Nakuru
hospital, taking short, shallow breaths.
His wife, Grace, said she was leaving the Rift Valley.
"I will never come back," she said.
www.nytimes.com/2008/01/07/world/africa/07kenya
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
Published: January 7, 2008
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