Revenge Killings Stoke a Violent Cycle in Kenya

Tribal Gangs Spread Deadly Confrontations Across Country's West

NAIROBI, Jan. 28 -- The toll from five days of fighting between rival tribal gangs across western Kenya rose to at least 85 Monday, as the post-election violence that has swept this East African nation began to take on a new character: revenge.

It began in the western city of Nakuru on Thursday, with gangs of young men from President Mwai Kibaki's tribe, the Kikuyu, roaming the streets with machetes and clubs. They hunted down and hacked to death people from opposition leader Raila Odinga's Luo tribe, residents said. It was payback time, it seemed, for past weeks in which hundreds of Kikuyus have been killed and tens of thousands driven from their homes.

The violence then moved to the tourist town of Naivasha, 50 miles northeast of Nairobi, and by Monday, about 2,000 young men squared off along a main road, taunting one another, with machetes, rocks and nail-studded clubs in hand.

Police officers, appearing nervous, fired bullets into the air to disperse the groups. But the tribal divisions that have characterized the violence since the disputed Dec. 27 presidential election were clearly drawn: Kikuyus on one side of the road, staring down mostly Luos on the other.

"This is Kikuyu land!" one side shouted, according to local reporters, with the other retorting "No Raila, no peace!"

The dead in Naivasha included 19 people, mostly Luos, who were chased through the streets Sunday by Kikuyu gangs, trapped inside a house and burned to death, according to Luka Katee, the Naivasha district commissioner.

That incident in particular appeared to be retribution for 17 Kikuyus who were burned to death this month in a church where they were hiding. The church burning, along with the torching of homes and villages across western Kenya in recent weeks, seems to have been committed by well-organized local militias loyal to Odinga. It is unclear, however, whether the Kikuyu involved in the latest violence were also well-organized, or ad-hoc mobs, or both.

Some reports indicated that young Kikuyu men had been bused into Naivasha to exact revenge on Luos. But Katee said that as far as he could tell, both the Kikuyu and Luo gangs in Naivasha were young, unemployed locals taking their own revenge.

"They are mobs," he said Monday. "They don't have a leader."

In the sort of vicious cycle that has leaders and diplomats here worried, the killings in Naivasha -- news of which was broadcast across the country -- prompted a violent reaction 125 miles to the west in the opposition stronghold of Kisumu.

There, thousands of Odinga's Luo supporters poured into the streets Monday, blocking roads with boulders, setting fire to five buses owned by a Kikuyu company and pulling apart a stretch of railway line that ships food from the fertile Rift Valley region into Nairobi.

In the afternoon, a drunken group stoned to death a man they presumed to be Kikuyu, who had been running for his life through one of the city's poorest neighborhoods. Although Kikuyus have been chased out of Kisumu, the incident appeared to be the first mob-style killing in that city.