Blood flows, houses burn, and politicians sit idly by

Montreal, January 27

I am feeling sick to my stomach as I read news reports that chaos has spread to the Naivasha from Nakuru. Houses are being torched, people hacked with machetes or beaten with clubs, and roadblocks erected on the main highway to single out people from a 'certain community.' In this case, that certain community appears to be anyone perceived to support the ODM and oppose Kibaki and the PNU. These are revenge attacks being organized, most likely by local gangs of young men, and they represent a new wave of violence in the aftermath of the election.

Naivasha has the potential to be a horrible powder-keg. While the area has come to be dominated by Kikuyu labourers and small-farmers, many of them descendants of migrants who left their ancestral area for work on white-owned farms during the colonial era, it is also diverse. People from many parts of Kenya have been drawn to Naivasha because of the presence of a cut-flower industry which supplies up to 1/3 of the flowers for the global market in Holland. Thousands of workers have flooded in over the past few decades, along with their families who struggle to make ends meet. To add to the problem, the whole area is considered by the Maasai – who mainly live within the boundaries of the former colonial reserve to which they were displaced by white settlement – as Maasailand, which is historically true. A fellow researcher who has been carrying out fieldwork in the area told me that she thought the Kikuyu around Naivasha would be hesitant to take up arms (of whatever sort) because of the very real possibility of drawing in the Maasai, who many of them fear. Over this weekend, that fear appears to have been pushed far enough aside for action to have been taken.

I have yet to hear direct news from the area, and have not seen reports of Kikuyu attacks on Maasai, but there are many reports of Kikuyu gangs attacking Luo, Luhya, and other residents of the Naivasha area. One particularly disgusting act was the torching of a house in which a family of some 16 people were hiding. It looks like none survived. Shadows of the church burning in Eldoret, in which Kikuyu residents were taking refuge from Kalenjin gangs and were burnt alive. Other reports, and the Kenyan media are characteristically silent on naming ethnic groups, have Kikuyu gangs attacking 'certain communities' in Nakuru town and along the Naivasha-Nakuru road, to the point of dragging people out of public vehicles and beating them on account of their names.

After being targeted, in Eldoret, Narok, and other parts of the country, some Kikuyu seem to be asserting their claim to the central Rift Valley as a Kikuyu area. They are, in fact, the majority in Nakuru and Naivasha, both of which (not coincidentally) belonged to the Maasai before British colonization, expropriation, and settlement. While this escalation of violence carries with it memories of Rwanda and Yugoslavia, it is a very different, popular form of ecstatic violence. While Kenya's periodic outbreaks of violence generally have ethnicity as a defining feature, they are not usually planned from above, unlike both Rwanda and Yugoslavia. The kind of conflict growing in Kenya can not properly be called ethnic cleansing or genocide (at least as long as this sickeningly familiar pattern, which we have seen over and over in Kenya, continues), it can spiral on into a series of revenge attacks and revenge for revenge attacks. Until Nakuru erupted late last week, the situation had begun to look hopeful; now, I have great doubts about the prospect for peace in the near future, and for the prospect of a major change that will prevent this kind of thing from recurring again in the long-term.

This is a very discouraging and depressing turn of events, and it can be directly attributed to the unwillingness of either side, the ODM or the PNU, to make overt gestures of compromise. While PNU politicians continue to blame ODM for organizing ethnic cleansing and even genocide (which I still maintain is a grossly overstated position), they make no mention of Kibaki and their own refusal to accept or admit what all election observers have been stating: that the presidential results are not credible and that the election was thus flawed. The ODM, for its part, continues to fan the flames by stating its quite legitimate position that it will not allow any group of politicians steal democracy from the Kenyan people. While it seems apparent to me, from my reading of news and other reports, that the ODM has a far more legitimate claim in this battle, they are not blameless. They are, as one colleague here in Montreal pointed out the other day, doing as much as they can if they still want to maintain grassroots support of their followers. If ODM were to capitulate and accept the current 'government' as legitimate, or even sufficient to rule Kenya, they would lose all credibility, and there is no guarantee that their supporters would follow such a proclamation.

The 'government,' on the other hand, bears at least as much of the blame, and potentially more. They were apparently responsible for the initial trigger of this mess, a stolen presidential election. They have spoken out, condemning the violence, which is positive, but have generally done so by blaming ODM for organizing or inciting it. The “government's” unwillingness to even suggest, in public or private, that it may be willing to discuss a compromise, is as much to blame for the ongoing and spreading conflict. It is understandable, in a sense, that they cannot admit their own treachery, especially if they want to retain any sense of legitimacy if, in fact, they do come out of this period as the governing body of Kenya. It is, however, a disgusting display of their willingness to leverage ongoing chaos, the deaths of many Kenyan citizens, and the destruction of property, livelihoods, and before long the entire economy, to pressure their opponents to accept the group's claims to legitimacy.

While Kenya has already become a loser in this staring contest, with a country in tatters, hundreds dead, and a lost faith in the growth of a Kenyan state along democratic lines, if ODM backs down now, and PNU and Kibaki are allowed to maintain the President's post, the country will lose yet again, and all of this violence will have been even more in vain. That a political elite can sit by and allow the country they want to rule to descend into chaos while they engage in a staring contest over who will rule what's left when the violence dies down turns my stomach. That one side is sitting in the halls of power, posing as a government and claiming to represent their nation, and that they might be able to use the blood of their own citizens to make the final victory push in their fraudulent, and now criminal, grab for power, breaks my heart.

To see a country that I have come to love dearly torn apart in this way is incredibly difficult. To sit here from a distance, away from the friends I have made and the families I have become a part of, is an excruciating experience. I have never felt so helpless, so angry, and yet so determined to find a way to make this better.