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Kenyans flee for their lives
05/01/2008 22:14 - (SA)
Todd Pitman
Cheptiret - Thousands of terrified refugees under armed escort fled western Kenya on Saturday in buses that streamed down roads strewn with downed power lines, burnt-out vehicles and the corpses of others killed trying to escape an explosion of post-election ethnic violence over the past week.
Behind the fleeing busloads, thousands more huddled at church compounds and a police station in the city of Eldoret as wailing relatives tried to identify hacked, burned and strangled family members in a mortuary so full of bodies they lay piled wall-to-wall across bloody floors.
"We are defending democracy," said one man in Cheptiret, Bernard Kimutai, trying to explain the ethnic violence unleashed across Kenya after a presidential vote that the opposition claims President Mwai Kibaki stole.
At Cheptiret, 20km south of Eldoret, bus after packed bus mostly carrying people from Kibaki's Kikuyu tribe, drove slowly past soldiers loyal to the president who stood guard at a roadblock. Hours earlier, a machete-wielding mob had controlled the roadblock.
Wide-eyed passengers pointed out the windows, hands covering their mouths, as they looked at two bodies lying in the dirt on the roadside next to the charred hulk of a white minibus.
'They failed to identify themselves'
The two slain men had been pelted with stones by Kalenjin mobs several days earlier and then set ablaze, said Kimutai, an ethnic Kalenjin who said he was a human rights worker. "They failed to identify themselves properly, and then tried to run," he said, indicating he believed they were Kikuyu.
The dispute between Kibaki and opposition leader Raila Odinga over who won a bitterly contested December 27 presidential vote has ignited some of the worst ethnic unrest in Kenya's history, destroying its image as a stable democracy and a top tourist destination. Hundreds have been killed and at least 250 000 have been displaced across Kenya.
Kibaki was declared winner of the election by 200 000 votes, but the head of the electoral commission and the country's attorney general have questioned the results, saying the controversial tally must be independently reviewed.
Kenya's population is a mosaic of more than 40 tribes, and tensions between them have rarely boiled into open, widespread conflict. But the prosperity and power of the influential Kikuyu minority has led to a simmering resentment among some for years.
Fleeing for safety
Ken Wafulah, director of Eldoret's independent Centre for Human Rights and Democracy, estimated up to 5 000 people left Eldoret for more safety in the capital, Nairobi, on Saturday in five convoys that included long trails of private cars.
Those who could not afford to move stayed behind, some displaced within their own town, sleeping in the open around churches in which they sought refuge.
The worst atrocity of the crisis occurred at a Protestant church on the outskirts of Eldoret last week. A mob set fire to the church where hundreds of terrified people had taken refuge. Many were burned alive.
Those caught trying to escape the flames were hunted down and hacked with machetes. Dozens of Kikuyus were killed there.
Philip Cheptinga, a doctor at the Eldoret's Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital - the country's second-largest - said most victims had been hacked to death with machetes known as "pangas," shot with bows and arrows, or burned.
The hospital's morgue was built for 60 bodies, but on Saturday it held about 210. Cheptinga said family members had collected at least 20 more corpses.
Hospital administrator Micah Kosgei said at least 123 corpses from election-related violence had been brought to the hospital.
Three bodies to a gurney
Bodies, including those of children, were stacked two and three to a gurney inside barely refrigerated freezers. One man had a long, deep gash, apparently from a machete, across the side of his skull. Only the charred skeleton of another remained.
In another room, an elderly woman lay on top of a stretcher, the fraying rope that strangled her still wrapped around her neck.
"You haven't even seen the casualty ward," Cheptinga said. "We're doing our level-best to cope with this ... and we're still getting more."
Hospital officials said two Kikuyus had been killed and one wounded early Saturday by a Kalenjin mob on the outskirts of Eldoret.
One man, who declined to be identified because he feared for his safety, said his brother was similarly slaughtered on Tuesday and that there was going to be revenge killing.
Emily Bunoro said her nephew, an ethnic Luhya pastor, had been forced from his home by a group of Kalenjin who gave him a bow and arrow and told him to fight earlier this week.
He escaped and hid in a pit latrine at what he thought was a friendly Kikuyu home. But its owners, fearing for their own lives, killed him with machetes, Bunoro said.
As the man's body was removed from a pile among dozens of others, lowered into a waiting wooden coffin and loaded onto an ambulance to be taken away for burial, his wife Victoria Atemba wept in the arms of her sister.
Shot while buying milk
Twenty kilometres north of Eldoret in the rural countryside, a group of Kalenjin men buried one of their own. Residents said he had been shot inexplicably as he tried to buy milk.
Wafulah, the rights worker, said police had killed the man as he and a group of others prepared to carry out raids on the Kikuyu community.
"It's only these extrajudicial police killings that are restraining them," Wafula said of the Kalenjin.
But most Kalenjin do not have firearms, "and they're afraid there may be reprisals," he added.
The government has deployed reinforcements of armed security forces to Eldoret who have cleared roads of rocks and tree trunks and taken back roadblocks from militias.
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