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Tribal Rage Tears at Diverse Kenyan City
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"They are saying, 'Go back,' " said Salome, a Kikuyu afraid to give her last name, who was waiting at the Eldoret airport on Wednesday with several hundred others trying to catch a flight out. "They are saying all the Kikuyus must go away -- back to their home province."
On one road leading out of Eldoret, perhaps 1,000 men armed with machetes manned a roadblock, preventing aid workers and police from entering while checking for Kikuyus on buses leaving the city, according to residents who tried to pass.
On Wednesday, three burned bodies were scattered there in the road.
An army truck transporting rifle-carrying soldiers attempted to evacuate about 30 people but was stopped by gangs demanding that Kikuyus get out of the vehicle. The driver tried to barrel through but turned around after two people inside were shot with arrows, according to occupants of the truck.
"I don't think right now there's a feeling of national identity, even among national leaders," said the Catholic bishop of Eldoret, Cornelius Kipng'eno Arap Korir, who noted that his church is hosting 10,000 people, mainly Kikuyus whose homes have been torched. "What comes first is your people."
In the green grass of the church courtyard, Jidraph Muiruri, a Kikuyu mason, was among scores of people camped out amid foam mattresses and heaps of belongings. He said Kalenjin gangs burned 50 homes in his neighborhood and then warned the remaining residents to leave.
"They said they'd burn all the houses -- and us -- if we didn't go by 9 a.m.," he said, adding that he recognized people with whom he had traded timber and milk for years. "They want us to go back to our motherland."
The fundamental problem, he said, was a flawed election that had polarized communities against Kikuyus, who have been demonized for what many perceive as government favoritism.
"They see us as Kikuyu, not Kenyan," Muiruri said.
On the edge of town, the remains of the Assemblies of God church still smoldered Wednesday, a day after the attack.
Strewn about were piles of corn, cooking pots, half-melted thermos bottles, a baby's shoe, a boot and a tangled pile of charred bicycles. Though accounts of the attack varied, many survivors said they had fled to the church after their homes were burned.
They were cooking beans, washing clothes and trying to go about their daily life when the fighters appeared in the distance, across a fallow field. The men were singing and looting farms of cows and goats along the way, witnesses said.
