By Stephanie McCrummen
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, January 8, 2008
BURNT FOREST, Kenya, Jan. 7 -- The two friends had talked politics easily before the presidential election, but in the days after, the relatively tolerant mood here in western Kenya vanished.
And so it was that John, who offered only his first name, given the circumstances, was among a group of young men who went on a house-burning rampage that included the home of his friend Kamau. The violence exploded after the group's candidate, opposition leader Raila Odinga, accused President Mwai Kibaki of stealing the election.
They mostly targeted members of Kibaki's ethnic group, the Kikuyu, whom John and others with him Monday described as "arrogant" and having a "superiority complex."
They attacked farms and villages with machetes and clubs, he said, and torched dozens of homes over a period of days, helping to prompt an exodus of tens of thousands of people that continues along the bumpy roads leading out of western Kenya.
"Perhaps he is among those leaving now," said John, referring to his Kikuyu friend and watching with no obvious remorse as an Eldoret Express bus packed with displaced people rolled by. "Currently, I do not know where he is. I cannot keep these friends around me anymore. The best way to solve this problem is for them to go back where they came from."
Over the past several days, buses, minivans and trucks piled high with furniture and packed with families -- mostly Kikuyus -- have left this area in a steady stream of mile-long convoys under Kenyan military escort.
Thousands more people still waiting for tickets out have fled to churches, schools and police stations around the region, as Kibaki and Odinga remain deadlocked in Nairobi over a political solution to a crisis in which more than 500 people across the country have been killed.
On Monday, Kibaki invited Odinga to meet with him at the equivalent of the Kenyan White House. It was unclear whether the opposition leader would go, but he did say Monday that he would call off nationwide protests to avoid further violence and give negotiations a chance.
Odinga, who has called for international mediation, says the starting point for any talks must be "that Kibaki is there illegally."
In many ways, though, the epicenter of the Kenyan crisis has shifted to this region about 200 miles northwest of Nairobi, which has lately become truer than ever to its name.
Burnt Forest is now a scene of burned houses, burned tires, burned trucks and burned markets, a landscape that was all the more otherworldly in the bright sunshine of Monday.
The area is considered the homeland of the Kalenjin tribe, but was settled after independence by large numbers of Kikuyu, who formed collectives and bought farms from the British, and enjoyed the favor of Kenya's first president, Jomo Kenyatta, who was Kikuyu.
The Kikuyu have more or less dominated Kenyan government ever since. Generally speaking, they have done well here in farming and other businesses, a fact that they attribute to their own hard work, not government favors.
Even so, a sense of resentment has festered between them and other tribes, particularly the Kalenjin. "The problem with the Kikuyu is they always have a lot of pride," said John. "They want to dominate us politically, economically and socially."
He and a couple of dozen other young men had gone into hiding when the Kenyan military came to town over the weekend, but emerged Monday to sift through the blackened ruins of the roadside market where many of them had kiosks selling tea or beer or cellphone cards.
They said that the market, a place where people of many ethnicities gathered, was burned down by Kikuyus who were celebrating an announcement that Kibaki had won. It was Kikuyu "arrogance" that touched off the wave of attacks against them, they said. Houses were torched and dozens of roadblocks were created where the men searched out Kikuyus by forcing passers-by to show national identity cards.
One of the men, who gave his name as Alex, described all this as an effort to "sensitize the government that we're here. . . . We had to defend ourselves. In the process of protecting ourselves, we overcame them."
"We are glad they are leaving this land," yelled another man, Cheluleh.
As they picked out glass bottles and useable sheets of corrugated metal from the ruins, the men said that the violence was not tribal per se, but a matter of defending their rights in an election they believe was stolen by an entrenched Kikuyu elite and its supporters.
"I burned down a Kalenjin house because they were for Kibaki," offered Cheluleh, who is Kalenjin, by way of proving he did not only punish Kikuyu.
He and others can cite the election returns from all eight Kenyan provinces, for instance, and discrepancies between reported parliamentary turnout and presidential turnout. John referred repeatedly to Form 16A, the election tally sheet that Odinga's supporters believe was fixed. Another young man said he used to be a clerk at a polling station and could see through the scam.
The young men, many of them unemployed, described a kind of discrimination they've felt growing up among their Kikuyu neighbors.
Cheluleh and others said that even as they shared tea together, their Kikuyu friends would often joke that Kalenjin and other tribes were "sheep" or "monkeys" or "less civilized."
"They think it's funny, but they are hurting us," Cheluleh said. "They make jokes out of us."
Alex said that when he had traveled to the Kikuyu homeland, Central province, the tightly knit Kikuyu community had not exactly welcomed him. "They see you as an intruder," he said.
Tribal clashes targeting the Kikuyu erupted in western Kenya during the 1990s, but the scale of the current violence is unprecedented. Cheluleh and the others said that their goal is nothing less than the total expulsion of Kibaki's supporters from the western region.
"Everyone can be at home so we can be in peace," he said, referring to various tribes' ethnic homelands.
Across Kenya, an estimated 100,000 people are displaced, with the largest percentage of that figure coming from this region.
On Monday, caravans of buses pulled up to an open field outside the town of Nakuru, about 100 miles south of this area. There, thousands of families were sprawled across the grass, sleeping on mattresses and heaps of clothes.
Though the young men in Burnt Forest said that their attacks were spontaneous acts of rage, many people in the field said that even before the election, their Kalenjin friends had warned them of what might be coming. Some said that they had received leaflets warning them to leave, regardless of the election's outcome.
"We thought it was a joke what they were saying," said Teresa Wanjiku, who arrived Sunday night from the Burnt Forest area. "Now we want the government to give us a place to live. Those people are animals."
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