Kenyan Violence Shows Fragility of Stable Nations

Kenya and “humanitarian crisis” just don’t go together. Kenya is one of the places we count on to be stable. To be a responsible host for refugees and the agencies that assist them. To be the logistical hub for agencies mounting operations in neighboring countries damaged by conflict.

Yet post-election violence in Kenya -- violence with an ethnic dimension -- is driving people from their homes. According to the Kenya Red Cross, the conflict between the primarily Kikuyu supporters of President Mwai Kibaki and the supporters of Raila Odinga, a Luo, has displaced 100,000 people. Road blocks set up by marauding gangs are preventing access to some of the displaced. 5,000 Kenyans have sought refuge in Uganda in recent days.

The combination of the ethnic fault lines and the use of machetes by some of the attackers has inevitably led to press accounts evoking the 1994 Rwandan genocide, in which gangs organized by Hutu militants killed 800,000 Tutsis and Hutu members of opposition political parties as the United Nations and the major powers refused to intervene.

Evoking Rwanda is premature and even irresponsible. The Rwandan genocide was centrally planned and organized over a period of many months, awaiting the spark of the death of President Habyarimana in an air crash. What is happening in Kenya is spontaneous political violence by members of ethnic groups frustrated by their exclusion from political power for generations.

While the violence is unjustified, the anger is understandable. Initial reports had opposition candidate Odinga well in front, giving his followers the expectation that victory was at hand. The electoral commission’s validation of suspicious results from President Kibaki’s Kikuyu strongholds and subsequent declaration of him as the victor dashed those hopes.

Kenya was tantalizingly close to conducting an open election and having a smooth transition to new leadership, rare achievements in Africa. The apparent unwillingness of the ruling party to abide by the results has created a temporary humanitarian emergency that will require swift internal political action to solve, with assistance from the external mediators from the African Union and donor governments.

For me and for my colleagues at Refugees International, the events in Kenya underscore just how fragile our world is. We have enough collective experience to know that violence that produces displacement can erupt anywhere and at any time. Nonetheless, we want to be able to believe that there might be a few countries out there that are not going to fall apart. Most of us had Kenya fixed on the stable side of the ledger. As we enter 2008, chalk up another illusion and add Kenya to the list of vulnerable countries.

--Joel Charny
Vice President, Refugees International

Photo: Aerial footage of displaced people in the area where a
church was attacked near Eldoret, 193 miles northwest of Nairobi.
Credit: Reuters/Kenyan Red Cross via Reuters TV, courtesy www.alertnet.org.