In Aptly Named Rift Valley, Kenyan Deal Rings Hollow

"People are still coming here on buses," said Agnes Wairimu, whose Rift Valley farm was burned down. "It's still going on, so we don't see how we can go back there. People are still in that mood."

Naivasha, a town of flower farms and empty tourist lodges, has absorbed busloads of displaced Kikuyus. It was also the scene of a brutal revenge attack in which Kikuyu gangs went door-to-door hacking people mostly from the Luo, Kalenjin and Luhya ethnic groups assumed to have backed Odinga.

Many people displaced by that attack are living in a second camp several miles from where the Kikuyus are staying. They said it was better that way, to remain separated, and that they are uneasy about going into town.

"The tension is still there," said Vincent Ochimbor, 37, who works at a nearby flower farm. "After the deal was signed, some people went to town and they were beaten."

Many people have left Naivasha, preferring to be jobless rather than work with Kikuyu neighbors who had attacked them.

"There are people who saw their wife or husband or child killed," said Matthew Obonyo, a friend of Ochimbor's. "You find the people who participated are workmates and you're told to forget. But it's difficult."

Across the Rift Valley, many of the settlements for the displaced are taking the shape of semi-permanent refugee camps, with tented schools, tented health clinics and tented counseling centers.

People who had jobs and productive farms in the fertile valley are receiving rations of yellow peas and yellow flour and growing impatient with a life they can hardly imagine as permanent.

"We are just waiting for an answer from Kibaki," said Regina Wanjiko, who has been living at the Nakuru camp for two months. "We want Kibaki to help us, to give us another place to live -- anywhere but in the Rift Valley."

A few hours beyond Nakuru, past scorched fields and the charred remains of gas stations and markets, it is easy to see why people are uncomfortable about heading home.

In the town of Kericho, a stronghold of the local Kalenjin ethnic group blamed in so many attacks on Kikuyu farms, Dominic Bettkibet, an elder, still holds sway over young men who are jobless and idle. He spoke in well-polished phrases and slogans -- "A Kikuyu is a Kikuyu, whether he's a bishop or whatever" -- of the sort that motivated militias to attack Kikuyu farms.

"If they come back, we cannot guarantee their security," Bettkibet said as he sat in a restaurant with friends. "The government should resettle those people somewhere else."

He said the Kikuyus -- who lost land during the colonial period and were resettled in the Rift Valley over many decades through government programs that often favored them -- were "invaders" who needed to be repelled.

"The influx of these people here means the indigenous people in the Rift Valley in 50 years will be squatters on our own motherland," he said. "We are hospitable, but they have undermined our hospitality. . . . When someone undermines you, dehumanizes you, you will not feel comfortable."

A police official in Kericho said that efforts were underway to promote reconciliation but that "the political big shots" needed to tour the region and address their supporters.

The official, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said that although there had been no large-scale attacks on Kikuyu homes lately, the situation remained volatile.

"The hostility of locals is still there," he said.