For Kenya's Human Rights Chairman, an Environment of Fear

Threats Shadow Critic of Election And Its Aftermath

It was a telephone call that drove home Maina Kiai's worst nightmare.

Kiai, the head of Kenya's National Commission on Human Rights, had appeared on television during a dinner party in January in one of Nairobi's wealthy neighborhoods. Since the disputed presidential elections the previous month, he had been denouncing rights violations by all factions in Kenya, highlighting in particular the government's alleged meddling in the vote and police brutality.

"This man has a few more days to live," a former government minister attending the party told the guests, according to a person who was there.

Among the guests was a friend of Kiai's, who politely excused himself from the table to call Kiai with a warning.

That night, Kiai, a 42-year-old father of two, could not shake his fear.

"I started wondering what, how and where they would do this," he said last week by telephone from Nairobi, Kenya's capital. "What have I done wrong? You start questioning yourself."

His anxiety reflected the general mood of Kenya in the immediate aftermath of the election, a fevered time when even elegant Nairobi homes kept the television news on during dinner parties to monitor the country's swift descent into violence. Kiai had been on the receiving end of death threats before, but the lawlessness of the early post-election period seemed to him to provide greater motive and opportunity to those wishing to carry them out.

"I feared people may take advantage of the chaos," said Kiai, who recently visited Washington to warn of the serious threat the unrest poses to Kenya's tradition of political stability in a volatile part of the world. "You never know when or how they are going to come and get you."

To end the ethnic violence, which erupted from deep-rooted frustrations over land, money and power after President Mwai Kibaki's dubious claim of victory, Kenya's opposition has been pushing for a power-sharing government and fresh elections. Opposition and government negotiators broke off talks for the weekend Friday without reaching an agreement.

In testimony to a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee earlier this month, Kiai compared this period in Kenya to the most traumatic chapter of the American experience.

"In a sense, Kenya is at its 'civil war' moment that the U.S. was at in 1861," he said. "We can either learn from others and avoid that nasty phase or lurch back into chaos."

He added, "Things are calm now, but everyone is getting prepared for the next round, we hear. If these negotiations fail, we are in trouble."