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Odinga 'to blame for violence'
02/01/2008 09:54 - (SA)
Nairobi - President Mwai Kibaki's government accused political rival Raila Odinga on Wednesday of responsibility for an explosion of tribal violence over a disputed presidential poll that threatened to tear Kenya apart.
"Supporters of Raila Odinga are involved in ethnic cleansing," said spokesperson Alfred Mutua as the death toll from four days of clashes rose to about 250. "We don't want this to tarnish Odinga, to be seen to be conducting ethnic cleansing."
Odinga's supporters, drawn mainly from his Luo tribe, had made similar charges against Kibaki, whose Kikuyu had dominated political and business life in East Africa's biggest economy.
As young men armed with machetes manned roadblocks in rural areas, a trickle of office workers in the capital, Nairobi, made it through police cordons to begin the new working year.
30 Kikuyus burned alive
The opening of the local foreign exchange market was delayed by two hours to 08:00.
A central bank worker, delayed by police as he tried to get to work, said: "They call this democracy. They should stop instilling fear in us and let us go back to our work."
On Tuesday, about 30 Kikuyus were burned alive after a mob set fire to a church they had fled to in the western town of Eldoret - reviving memories of the slaughter in churches of hundreds of thousands in Rwanda's 1994 genocide.
The Eldoret attack was one the worst episodes of violence that had uprooted tens of thousands of Kenyans, many of them fleeing across the border to Uganda.
Adding to the chaos, Kenya's electoral commission head Samuel Kivuitu was quoted as saying: "I do not know whether Kibaki won the election." The comment by Kivuitu, who pronounced Kibaki the victor on Sunday, could not be immediately verified.
Dialogue, reconciliation
Western powers had called for calm and warned citizens against visiting a popular tourist destination that was regarded as one of the most stable democracies on a volatile continent.
African Union chairperson John Kufuor was due in Kenya on Wednesday to try and start what British Prime Minister Gordon Brown called a process of dialogue and reconciliation.
Pictures of the Eldoret area filmed from a helicopter by the Red Cross showed plumes of white smoke billowing from dozens of blazing homesteads on Tuesday. Young men with machetes, rocks and bows and arrows could be seen manning crude checkpoints.
There was early calm in Nairobi's slums on Wednesday, but residents said the Mungiki, a gang with roots in traditional Kikuyu rituals, had dropped leaflets warning of reprisals against Luos.
Britain had called on the African Union and Commonwealth to try to reconcile Kibaki and Odinga whose parties both accused the other of vote-rigging during the December 27 election.
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