Fresh
clashes killed 15 people in Kenya, police said on Friday, while former UN chief Kofi Annan pushed for dialogue to end
political and ethnic turmoil sparked by last month’s disputed presidential poll. Violent attacks, exacerbated by latent tribal tensions and land disputes, have increased in the Rift Valley in recent days and spread to the province’s main town of Nakuru, where eight
people were killed in clashes on Friday. Annan orchestrated a symbolic first meeting between President Mwai Kibaki and
opposition leader Raila Odinga on Thursday, but both sides later accused each other of trying to undermine the mediation effort.
The meeting followed weeks of violence set off by the December 27 election, mainly in Nairobi slums and the country’s west that have killed close to 800 people and displaced around 260,000 others. The latest fatalities were hacked or shot to death in the Rift Valley towns of Molo and Nakuru.
“Eight more have been killed in Nakuru,” a police commander told AFP on Friday. “Five people have been hacked to death in Molo and Nakuru (where) six others were slashed and wounded, including a police officer,” he said earlier, adding that two others had been shot dead in Molo.
Arsonists razed scores of houses overnight in Nakuru and used piles of large stones and overturned carts to form roadblocks on some streets, witnesses said. The town centre was locked down and shots were heard on Friday, while some residents fled a nearby slum.
After meetings with election officials and religious figures, Annan flew to the western city of Eldoret, also in the Rift Valley and scene of some of the worst post-poll clashes, including the burning of some 30 people in a church. The Kenya Red Cross appealed for the government to beef up security, especially in the vast Rift Valley region.
“The spiral effect of counter-attack and reprisals is getting out of hand in this area of the Rift Valley and urgent measures need to be put in place to resolve this,” Abbas Gullet, secretary general of the Kenya Red Cross told a news conference in Nairobi.
“The challenge is for the government to provide security,” he added. The International Committee of the Red Cross said it had sent medical supplies to Nakuru provincial hospital, where some 100 wounded people had been taken for treatment.
Human Rights Watch on Thursday accused opposition officials of inciting ethnically-motivated attacks in the area, especially against members of Kibaki’s Kikuyu tribe. The opposition immediately rejected the claims. In a sign that the political deadlock held as firmly as ever, Odinga — who claims he was cheated of the presidency — on Friday urged an upcoming African Union summit to refrain from endorsing Kibaki’s re-election.
“We don’t think that the AU should recognise a government that is illegitimate. It would be setting a very bad precedent, that the AU is condoning the rigging of elections in Africa,” Odinga told reporters.