AU boss heads to Kenya
2008-01-02 08:10
Nairobi - Young men armed with machetes manned roadblocks in Kenya on Wednesday as world powers stepped up efforts to end a wave of tribal violence over a disputed presidential election that threatened to tear the country apart.
Adding to chaos that included the torching of a church packed with panic-stricken villagers, the head of Kenya's electoral commission was quoted as saying that he did not know whether President Mwai Kibaki had won the vote.
The statement attributed to Samuel Kivuitu, who announced on Sunday that Kibaki had narrowly beaten opposition rival Raila Odinga, could not be immediately verified.
The African Union (AU) chairperson was due in Kenya on Wednesday for crisis talks with Kibaki after the death toll neared 250 in the East African nation, the region's biggest economy.
30 people burnt alive
Western powers had called for calm and warned citizens against visiting a popular tourist destination that had been regarded as one of the most stable democracies on a volatile continent.
In the most grisly incident in a spasm of ethnic clashes, about 30 members of Kibaki's Kikuyu ethnic group were burned alive on Tuesday after a mob set fire to the church, where they were hiding near Eldoret town.
Pictures of the area in western Kenya filmed from a helicopter by the Red Cross showed plumes of white smoke billowing from dozens of blazing homesteads.
Young men with machetes, rocks and bows and arrows could be seen manning crude checkpoints on highways.
Armed gangs were marching on the nearby Burnt Forest, part of the fertile Rift Valley that is home to many Kikuyus, local broadcaster NTV said.
Dialogue, reconciliation
Britain had called on the AU and Commonwealth to try to reconcile Kibaki and Odinga whose parties both accused the other of vote-rigging during the December 27 poll.
AU chairperson John Kufuor had agreed to help start a process of dialogue and reconciliation, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said: "This offers an opportunity to stop the violence and to help Kenyans unite." Britain was Kenya's colonial power.
The attack in Eldoret revived traumatic memories in east Africa of the slaughter in churches of tens of thousands of victims of Rwanda's 1994 genocide, and the mass suicide of hundreds of Ugandan cult members in a church fire in 2000.
Kibaki was sworn in on Sunday after the official election results showed he had narrowly beaten Odinga. The European Union observer mission said the exercise had "fallen short of key international and regional standards for democratic elections".
Washington had first congratulated Kibaki, then switched to expressing "concerns about irregularities".
In remarks carried on the Standard's website, Kivuitu said he was pressured by members of the president's party who called him frequently and asked him to announce the results immediately.