AFRICA

Recent history (19th-21st Century)
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kmaherali
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Ex-rebel lands Africa prize

Herald News Services


Tuesday, October 23, 2007


Joaquim Chissano, a former president of Mozambique, was awarded a multi-million-dollar prize Monday for achievement in African leadership.

At a ceremony in London, a panel headed by Kofi Annan, the former United Nations secretary general, announced Chissano as the first winner of the Mo Ibrahim Prize, funded by Mohammed Ibrahim, a Sudanese telecommunications billionaire, to promote good governance in Africa.

The former guerrilla, who fought the colonial Portuguese regime in Mozambique before becoming president in 1986, will receive annual instalments totalling $5 million over 10 years and then $200,000 per year for life.

While Chissano's record in government was praised, Annan made clear that the choice was just as much about the way he left office.

© The Calgary Herald 2007
kmaherali
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November 1, 2007
Editorial
Playing Sudan’s Game

After four years of genocidal massacres that have killed more than 200,000 people, the Darfur region of Sudan desperately needs a peace agreement and a robust multinational force to carry it out. Regrettably, this week’s internationally sponsored peace conference in Libya is doing little to meet those urgent needs.

The problem is not just Sudan’s continuing duplicity — it announced a cease-fire and then promptly violated it. Sudan does not really want a peace agreement. It merely wants more time to let the janjaweed militias it backs in Darfur finish killing or drive off what remains of the region’s non-Arab population.

Many of the rebel groups that claim to be Darfur’s defenders also bear serious responsibility. Some of the best-known rebel leaders failed to show up. And so, the killing is likely to proceed, with Sudan taking maximum advantage of the rebel’s fecklessness, the diplomatic timidity of those closest to it and the failure of an Iraq-distracted Bush administration to pay consistent, high-level attention to the Darfur issue.

The Arab League, to which Sudan belongs, and China, a major customer for Sudan’s oil, have at least started talking about Darfur. But they have yet to apply real pressure on Khartoum.

The Arab League is reportedly readying proposals for Darfur’s future economic development that all but overlook the far more pressing problem of creating the peace that is essential for development. China’s tepid complaints seem aimed more at fending off Darfur-related protests at next year’s Beijing Olympics than stopping the slaughter. President Bush’s words on Darfur have been admirably strong, but he has not followed up with the high-level diplomacy and focus needed to rally effective international pressure on Sudan.

These failures, large and small, go a long way toward explaining why the killing continues monthly despite worldwide protests, White House speeches, American sanctions, African peacekeepers and Security Council resolutions. They make it easier for Sudan to take credit for announcing cease-fires that it has no intention of honoring, agreeing to peacekeepers that it has no intention of cooperating with and attending peace conferences that have no realistic possibility of bringing peace.

Meanwhile, the genocide goes on.
kmaherali
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Post by kmaherali »

November 2, 2007
Editorial
Africa’s Chance

Amid an AIDS epidemic, against the drumbeat of regional conflicts, overshadowed by the most abject poverty, it is easy to miss the glimmer of hope in sub-Saharan Africa. Rising prices of raw materials are helping the region achieve its best economic performance since independence.

This vitality has fragile foundations. Africa’s past commodity booms turned to busts, which means Africans must carefully manage their resources. The United States and others must not use the good news as an excuse to shirk their commitments to the region.

In 2005, the Group of 8 leading industrialized nations pledged to increase aid to Africa by at least $25 billion by 2010. Since then, according to the International Monetary Fund, official grants to sub-Saharan Africa have actually declined as a share of its economy. That is shameful.

If Africa’s growth is to be self-sustaining, the wealthy countries must also end their most harmful subsidies on products like cotton and sugar, and aggressively expand market access for the products that African countries can export competitively, like textiles and shoes. Not only do the offers on the table in global trade negotiations fall short of what is needed, the talks seem at risk of collapsing over disagreements between rich nations and the bigger developing countries.

Growth in sub-Saharan Africa is expected to exceed five percent this year, which would be its fifth year in a row of doing so. That’s because of the surging price of oil — a boon for Nigeria and Angola — and rising demand for metals like copper and aluminum that benefit nonoil exporters. Africa has gained substantially from debt reduction. That has freed resources for public investment and underpinned a surge of private foreign investment.

Resource-hungry China has quickly become the region’s second-largest trading partner after the United States — and an important investor. There is a dark side to China’s role — providing financing and political support to despots like Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe or Sudan’s Omar Hassan al-Bashir — but it is becoming an important engine for the region’s economy.

Africa is still dirt poor — with an average annual income per capita of merely $600 and 300 million people living in poverty. Every year, nearly a million children die of malaria and more than two million die before they are a month old.

The region is also still locked in the vulnerable role as a supplier of basic commodities. That means its growth will falter if, say, China’s economy cools and its demand for raw materials wanes. Over the long term, Africa must move its way up the chain of commodity exports and into the worldwide networks of manufacturing that account for a growing share of global trade.

The immediate challenge requires investment to deal with historic bottlenecks: dismal health, poor education and derelict infrastructure, notably in transportation and power generation. And it must invest in bringing new technology to agriculture, an essential step to combat entrenched poverty in rural areas. Western aid will be crucial for making progress in all these areas.

Nobody can know for certain whether Africa south of the Sahara might be on the cusp of shaking its endemic destitution and starting up the ladder of development. But it has its best chance in decades, and it would be a crime not to try to grasp this opportunity.
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Post by kmaherali »

There is a related multimedia presentation linked at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/09/world ... ?th&emc=th

November 9, 2007
Gangs Terrorize Nigeria’s Vital Oil Region
By LYDIA POLGREEN

PORT HARCOURT, Nigeria — Rosemary Douglas has no connection to the oil business that pumps more than two million barrels of crude a day from beneath the swampy Niger Delta. But the violence surrounding it pierced her home in September anyway, when a bullet shattered her upper left arm as she napped with her 2-year-old daughter.

“I don’t know why this happened to me,” she said, grimacing in pain as she gave a bewildered account of the gunplay that has engulfed her neighborhood and much of this oil-drenched city. “I mind my own business.”

The violence that has rocked the Niger Delta in recent years has been aimed largely at foreign oil companies, their expatriate workers and the police officers and soldiers whose job it is to protect them. Hundreds of kidnappings, pipeline bombings and attacks on flow stations and army barracks have occurred in the past two years alone.

But these days the guns have turned inward, and open battles have erupted with terrifying frequency on the pothole-riddled streets of this ramshackle city. The origins of the violence are as murky and convoluted as the mangrove swamps that snake across the delta, one of the poorest places on earth. But they lie principally in the rivalry among gangs, known locally as cults, that have ties to political leaders who used them as private militias during state and federal elections in April, according to human rights advocates, former gang members and aid workers in the region.

“What is happening now cannot be separated from politics,” said Anyakwee Nsirimovu of the Institute for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law in Port Harcourt. “The cults are part and parcel of our politics. They have become part of the system, and we are paying in blood for it.”

The cults go by names that veer from the chilling to the improbable — like the Black Axe, the Klansmen, the Icelanders, the Outlaws and the Niger Delta Vigilante. Separate but not entirely distinct from the militant groups that have attacked the oil industry in the past, they represent a new, worrisome phase in a region that has been convulsed by conflict since oil was discovered here in 1956.

Since democracy returned to Nigeria in 1999, politicians across the country have used cults to intimidate opponents and rig votes. A Human Rights Watch report published in October concluded that the political system was so corroded by corruption and violence that, in some places, it resembled more a criminal enterprise than a system of government. The April elections were so brazenly rigged in some areas and so badly marred by violence that international observers said the results were not credible.

Nowhere is political violence more severe than here in the Niger Delta, where control over state government means access to billions of dollars in oil revenues and control of enough patronage for an army.

According to former gang members and human rights workers, the governing People’s Democratic Party and some opposition parties employed cult members in the delta during the election, as they had in the two previous ones, which led to landslide victories for the governing party.

One powerful gang leader, Soboma George, was given the lion’s share of patronage, they contend. Mr. George displayed his prowess in the months before the election by having his foot soldiers break him out of a city jail in a brazen assault. He then demonstrated his impunity by driving through the streets of Port Harcourt, the capital of Rivers State, in flashy cars, seemingly fearless of arrest.

The other gangs resented Mr. George’s growing influence and control over lucrative security contracts, and a war between them has turned increasingly bloody. Caught in the middle have been all kinds of civilians; no one is off limits to the violence.

The elderly mother of the newly elected state governor was kidnapped and held for ransom in the spring. Toddlers related to senior government officials and business leaders have been seized to extract ransom payments or settle political disputes.

The violence reached such a pitch that at Teme Hospital here, surgeons from the aid group Doctors Without Borders struggled to keep up with a flood of 71 gunshot victims in just two weeks in August, and more than a month later they were still treating many people recovering from shattered bones and flesh wounds from the fighting.

Ibinabo Bob-Manuel, a 25-year-old college student, said she was at home with her aunt and 6-year-old sister, Lolo, on Aug. 16 when shooting broke out between soldiers and a gang that had occupied the area.

Four bullets pierced the fleshy part of her thigh, and one remained lodged inside. She lost so much blood that she passed out. The top half of a toe was blown off. Her sister was shot through her hands as she pressed her palms in prayer in the hail of bullets, Ms. Bob-Manuel said.

“We were bleeding and crying,” she said. “My auntie shouted, ‘You killed my family!’ I thought I would die.”

The government says it is cracking down on gangs, and it has sent an elite army unit into Port Harcourt and the surrounding areas to impose law and halt the violence. The gunplay in the city streets has since died down, but it is a tense, uneasy calm.

Many residents worry that rivalries may soon heat up again. On Oct. 25 a judicial panel removed the new governor of Rivers State, Celestine Omehia, ruling that he had not been an eligible candidate because he did not win his party’s primary. The winner of the primary, Rotimi Amaechi, was sworn in as governor, and many worry that violent clashes will ensue between their supporters.

The bloodshed has reached beyond the cities, deep into the creekside communities of the delta. In Ogbogoro the fights between rival gangs were so intense in August that the council of traditional rulers felt compelled to act. Two cults, the Debam and the Dewell, were fighting over political turf, oil and contracts for security work with oil services companies, according to local officials.

“No one could sleep in the town,” said Chief Clement Chuku, one of the traditional rulers of Ogbogoro. “Bullets were flying all night.”

The chiefs met to announce an ultimatum: all cult members had to leave or risk being arrested by vigilante youths from the community. The vigilantes rounded up a few members as examples, Mr. Chuku said, and were planning to turn them over to the military.

But just as a community meeting got under way in the town hall in early September, dozens of young men on motorbikes, carrying machine guns and grenade launchers, overran the meeting. Two traditional rulers were shot dead and their bodies were dumped on a weedy riverbank.

George Ogan, a retired doctor and church leader who has been trying to stem gang violence farther down the delta in his hometown, Okrika, where some of the most fearsome cults are based, said that such violence was completely bound up with politics.

“Our politicians cannot stand on their own, so they find those who will stand with guns for them,” Dr. Ogan said.
kmaherali
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Post by kmaherali »

Mugabe inspires S. African leader

Herald News Services


Monday, November 12, 2007


South African President Thabo Mbeki, who has been entrusted with finding a solution to Zimbabwe's political crisis, sees Robert Mugabe as his father figure, according to a new biography.

As one of the last independence leaders still running his country, the Zimbabwean leader enjoys elder statesman status among many Africans.

But according to Mark Gevisser, author of Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred, Mugabe's relationship with the South African president is personal, and it is affecting the talks Mbeki is chairing between Mugabe's government and the opposition.

The negotiations are aimed at reaching agreement on holding free presidential and parliamentary elections next year. But every deadline for agreement has passed without a deal, and the opposition has made concessions in parliament without receiving anything in return. Mbeki "has proven he is not the right person to facilitate Mugabe's departure," said Gevisser, "because of the history of their relationship."

© The Calgary Herald 2007
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http://www.engineeringnews.co.za/articl ... _id=121128

Investors give green light to $650m undersea cable
By: Christy van der Merwe
Published: 13 Nov 07 - 17:35

Production of the high-tech cable and undersea repeaters for the submarine fibre optic cable, set to link Southern and East Africa with India and Europe, would start next week bandwidth service provider Seacom said on Tuesday, when it announced that the project had reached financial closure.

The company said that investors had committed financing for the project, and that construction of the components for the cable would now start.

The $650-million cable covers more than 15 000 km and would pass from Mtunzini, in South Africa, along the East Coast of Africa, linking Mozambique, Madagascar, Tanzania, and Kenya, before landing in Mumbai in India and Marseille in France.

Seacom said that African investors owned more than three quarters of its shares and that areements with service providers are already in place, or being finalised in most countries.

The investors in Seacom are Industrial Promotion Services (IPS) - an arm of the Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development (25%), Venfin (25%), Herakles Telecom (25%), Convergence Partners (12,5%), and Nedbank capital was appointed mandated lead arranger for all the debt funding requirements of the project, with funding to be provided by Nedbank Capital and Investec bank.

"Seacom has already invested more than $10-million in the marine survey and engineering of the cable. This advance work has allowed Seacom to maintain its ready-for-service date of June 2009," the company added.

Seacom will have a design capacity of 1,28 terrabytes a second, in order to support the expected exponential increase in demand in 2010 and beyond. It aims to bring down prices of broadband connectivity for businesses, institutions, communities and individuals in Africa.

"The agreements signed today make the Seacom broadband cable a reality for Africa," said IPS CEO Lutaf Kassam.

South African converged communications network provider Neotel, would invest R20-million in the South African segment of the Seacom cable, which would go towards the cable landing station and all facilities within the South African territory, it said on Tuesday.

"Neotel will operate the facilities on an open access basis thus stimulating the country's international bandwidth market," the company stated.

Engineering News previously reported that South Africa's Department of Communications had objected to a "foreign owned" cable landing in South Africa and suggested that landing rights should only be extended to schemes where the shareholding was overwhelmingly local.

The Department of Communications indicated that it was in discussions with Neotel and other potential investors on the modalities, and how they could participate in the proposed fibre-optics network for the continent.
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Post by kmaherali »

There is a related multimedia linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/15/world ... ?th&emc=th
November 15, 2007
African Crucible: Cast as Witches, Then Cast Out
By SHARON LaFRANIERE

UIGE, Angola — Domingos Pedro was only 12 years old when his father died. The passing was sudden; the cause was a mystery to doctors. But not to Domingos’s relatives.

They gathered that afternoon in Domingos’s mud-clay house, he said, seized him and bound his legs with rope. They tossed the rope over the house’s rafters and hoisted him up until he was suspended headfirst over the hard dirt floor. Then they told him they would cut the rope if he did not confess to murdering his father.

“They were yelling, ‘Witch! Witch!’” Domingos recalled, tears rolling down his face. “There were so many people all shouting at me at the same time.”

Terrified, Domingos told them what they wanted to hear, but his relatives were not appeased. Ferraz Bulio, the neighborhood’s traditional leader, said seven or eight captors were dragging Domingos down a dirt path to the river, apparently to drown him, when he intervened.

“They were slapping him and punching him,” he said. “This is the way people react toward someone accused of witchcraft. There are lots of such cases.”

Mr. Bulio is right. In parts of Angola, Congo and the Congo Republic, a surprising number of children are accused of being witches, and then are beaten, abused or abandoned. Child advocates estimate that thousands of children living in the streets of Kinshasa, Congo’s capital, have been accused of witchcraft and cast out by their families, often as a rationale for not having to feed or care for them.

The officials in one northern Angolan town identified 432 street children who had been abandoned or abused after being called witches. A report last year by the government’s National Institute for the Child and the United Nations Children’s Fund described the number of children said to be witches as “massive.”

The notion of child witches is not new here. It is a common belief in Angola’s dominant Bantu culture that witches can communicate with the world of the dead and usurp or “eat” the life force of others, bringing their victims misfortune, illness and death. Adult witches are said to bewitch children by giving them food, then forcing them to reciprocate by sacrificing a family member.

But officials attribute the surge in persecutions of children to war — 27 years in Angola, ending in 2002, and near constant strife in Congo. The conflicts orphaned many children, while leaving other families intact but too destitute to feed themselves.

“The witches situation started when fathers became unable to care for the children,” said Ana Silva, who is in charge of child protection for the children’s institute. “So they started seeking any justification to expel them from the family.”

Since then, she said, the phenomenon has followed poor migrants from the northern Angolan provinces of Uige and Zaire to the slums of the capital, Luanda.

Two recent cases horrified officials there. In June, Ms. Silva said, a Luanda mother blinded her 14-year-old daughter with bleach to try to rid her of evil visions. In August, a father injected battery acid into his 12-year-old son’s stomach because he feared the boy was a witch, she said.

Angola’s government has campaigned since 2000 to dispel notions about child witches, Ms. Silva said, but progress comes slowly. “We cannot change the belief that witches exist,” she said. “Even the professional workers believe that witches exist.”

Instead, her institute is trying to teach authority figures — police officers, teachers, religious leaders — that violence against children is never justified.

The Angolan city of Mbanza Congo, just 50 miles from the border with Congo, has blazed a trail. After a child accused of witchcraft was stabbed to death in 2000, provincial officials and Save the Children, the global charitable organization, rounded up 432 street children and reunited 380 of them with relatives, the witchcraft report stated.

Eleven fundamentalist churches were shut down because of reports of child exploitation and abuse. Eight Congolese pastors were deported. Villages formed committees to monitor children’s rights. The authorities say the number of children who are abused or living on the streets dropped drastically.

Uige, about 100 miles to the south of Mbanza Congo, is another story. Surrounded by lush green hills, it is a cluster of mud-clay settlements around crumbling shops pockmarked by bullet holes. In this region, said Bishop Emilio Sumbelelo of St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, persecution of children is rising.

“It is very, very, very common in the villages,” he said. “We know that some children have been killed.”

His church runs the town’s only sanctuary for children victimized as witches, a shelter barely bigger than a three-car garage. Thirty-two boys, including Domingos, occupy bunk beds stacked a foot apart, their few clothes stashed in boxes underneath. No shelter exists for girls.

Since July, all newcomers have been turned away. “Children come here to ask for protection, but we have no space,” the bishop said. “To date, we have not found any special way to fight against this phenomenon.”

Many boys describe pasts of abuse, rejection and fear. Saldanha David Gomes, 18, who lived with his aunt until he was 12, said she turned on him after her 3-year-old daughter fell ill and died.

After, he said, his aunt refused to feed him and bound his hands and feet each night, fearing that he would take another victim.

A neighbor finally warned him to flee. “I am not a witch, and I was not a witch,” Saldanha said. “But I had to run away because they were threatening to kill me.”

Afonso García, 6, took the shelter’s last empty cot in July. “I came here on my own because my father doesn’t like me and I was not eating every day,” he said matter-of-factly.

After Afonso’s mother died three years ago, he moved in with his father. His stepmother, Antoinette Eduardo, said she began to suspect that he was a witch after neighborhood children reported that he had eaten a razor. Besides that, she said, “he was getting thinner and thinner, even though he was eating well.”

Under questioning, she said, Afonso admitted that a male relative had visited him in his dreams, demanding that he kill a family member. Afonso denies ever confessing to witchcraft.

What unfolded next is typical of many cases here. Afonso’s relatives turned to a traditional healer for a cure.

The healer, João Ginga, 30, wears a fur-collared leather jacket and works out of what he calls a hospital — a cramped mud-walled room. “If someone has a bad spirit, I can tell,” he said one recent morning as clients waited on a bench. “We treat more than a thousand cases a year.”

With such a busy trade, Mr. Ginga said, he could not remember Afonso’s case. Afonso’s aunt, Isabella Armando, said her family gave Mr. Ginga $270 in cash, candles, perfume and baby powder to treat Alfonso.

Mr. Ginga performed some rituals, put a substance in Afonso’s eyes that made him sob in pain and pronounced him cured, she said. But Afonso’s father and stepmother, the only relatives who could afford to care for him, did not agree, and expelled him from their household.

“I pitied him, and I still pity him because he was living in the streets,” the stepmother explained. “But we were afraid.”

Mr. Ginga is hardly the only healer here who claims to cure child witches. Sivi Munzemba said she exorcised possessed children by inserting a poultice of plants into their anuses, shaving their heads and sequestering them for two weeks in her house.

Moises Samuel, director of the provincial office of the children’s institute, said he was concerned not only about traditional healers but also about a bevy of churches with soothsayers who claimed to exorcise evil spirits and drew crowds even on weekdays.

Once a soothsayer or healer brands a child a witch, child welfare specialists say, even the police often back away.

Officers kept Domingos, the boy who was suspended from a rafter, for one night at the station house, then sent him home, said Mr. Bulio, the settlement’s traditional leader. They never investigated Domingos’s uncle, who Mr. Bulio said led the attack.

“Of course it was a crime,” Mr. Bulio said. “But because it is witchcraft, the police do not take any responsibility.”

Domingos, now 15, insisted that he said he was a witch only to save his life. But even his 32-year-old mother, Maria Pedro, disbelieves him.

Ms. Pedro is obviously fond of Domingos, her oldest child. She beams over his academic progress and worries about further attacks by his relatives, should he leave the shelter.

Still, she said, she suspects that he was bewitched into murder. “It must be true because he himself confessed,” she said, eyeing Domingos carefully across a table in her two-bedroom house.

At that, Domingos stood up and walked swiftly from the house. Ten minutes later, he reappeared in the doorway, his face red and splotchy. “Mother, from this day on, I am no longer your son,” he declared fiercely.

Ms. Pedro wordlessly watched him go. “I just don’t know why Domingos got so angry,” she said later.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/20/world ... &th&emc=th

November 20, 2007
As Somali Crisis Swells, Experts See a Void in Aid
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

AFGOOYE, Somalia, Nov. 19 — The worst humanitarian crisis in Africa may not be unfolding in Darfur, but here, along a 20-mile strip of busted-up asphalt, several top United Nations officials said.

A year ago, the road between the market town of Afgooye and the capital of Mogadishu was just another typical Somali byway, lined with overgrown cactuses and the occasional bullet-riddled building. Now it is a corridor teeming with misery, with 200,000 recently displaced people crammed into swelling camps that are rapidly running out of food.

Natheefa Ali, who trudged up this road a week ago to escape the bloodbath that Mogadishu has turned into, said Monday that her 10-month-old baby was so malnourished she could not swallow.

“Look,” Ms. Natheefa said, pointing to her daughter’s splotchy legs, “her skin is falling off, too.”

Top United Nations officials who specialize in Somalia said the country had higher malnutrition rates, more current bloodshed and fewer aid workers than Darfur, which is often publicized as the world’s most pressing humanitarian crisis and has taken clear priority in terms of getting peacekeepers and aid money.

The relentless urban combat in Mogadishu, between an unpopular transitional government — installed partially with American help — and a determined Islamist insurgency, has driven waves of desperate people up the Afgooye road, where more than 70 camps of twigs and plastic have popped up seemingly overnight.

The people here are hungry, exposed, sick and dying. And the few aid organizations willing to brave a lawless, notoriously dangerous environment cannot keep up with their needs, like providing milk to the thousands of babies with fading heartbeats and bulging eyes. “Many of these kids are going to die,” said Eric Laroche, the head of United Nations humanitarian operations in Somalia. “We don’t have the capacity to reach them.”

He added: “If this were happening in Darfur, there would be a big fuss. But Somalia has been a forgotten emergency for years.”

The officials working on Somalia are trying to draw more attention to the country’s plight, which they feel has fallen into Darfur’s shadow. They have recently organized several trips, including one on Monday, for journalists to see for themselves.

“The situation in Somalia is the worst on the continent,” said Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the top United Nations official for Somalia.

That situation has included floods, droughts, locusts, suicide bombers, roadside bombs and near-daily assassinations.

United Nations officials said the recent round of plagues, natural and man-made, coupled with the residual chaos that has consumed Somalia for more than a decade, have put the country on the brink of famine. In the worst-hit areas, like Afgooye, recent surveys indicate the malnutrition rate is 19 percent, compared with about 13 percent in Darfur; 15 percent is considered the emergency threshold.

The officials, in making the comparison, were not trying to diminish the problems in Darfur, where more than 200,000 people have died from violence and disease since 2003. But they said they were concerned that the crisis here was increasingly urgent.

Unlike Darfur, where the suffering is being eased by a billion-dollar aid operation and more than 10,000 aid workers, Somalia is still considered mostly a no-go zone. Just last week, a Somali aid worker and a guard were shot to death at an aid distribution center in Afgooye. United Nations officials estimate that total emergency aid is under $200 million, partly because it is so difficult just getting food into the country.

Pirates lurking off the coast of Somalia have attacked more than 20 ships this year, including two carrying United Nations food. The militias that rule the streets — typically teenage gunmen in wraparound sunglasses and flip-flops — have jacked up roadblock taxes to $400 per truck. The transitional government last month jailed a senior official of the United Nations food program in Somalia, accusing him of helping terrorists, though he was eventually released.

United Nations officials now concede that the country was in better shape during the brief reign of Somalia’s Islamist movement last year. “It was more peaceful, and much easier for us to work,” Mr. Laroche said. “The Islamists didn’t cause us any problems.”

Mr. Ould-Abdallah called those six months, which were essentially the only epoch of peace most Somalis have tasted for years, Somalia’s “golden era.”

Somalia’s ills have always come in waves, starting in 1991 when clan-based militias overthrew the central government and the country plunged into anarchy. That fighting, like the fighting today, disrupted markets, kept out aid shipments and led to rapid inflation of food prices. As a result, hundreds of thousands of people starved.

The United States tried to come to the rescue in 1992, sending thousands of soldiers to Somalia to assist with humanitarian operations.

But American troops abruptly pulled out after Somali militiamen shot down two Black Hawk helicopters in Mogadishu in October 1993.

After that, the United States — and much of the rest of the world — basically turned its back on Somalia. But in the summer of 2006, the world started paying attention again after a grass-roots Islamist movement emerged from the clan chaos and seized control of much of the country.

The United States and Ethiopia, Somalia’s neighbor and rival, quickly labeled the Islamists a threat and accused them of harboring terrorists from Al Qaeda.

Inside Somalia, the Islamists were very popular, at least initially. But then they overplayed their hand and declared a holy war against Ethiopia in December 2006, which provoked a crushing Ethiopian response. American military commanders funneled key satellite imagery to Ethiopian troops as they rolled across the Somali border; American planes bombed fleeing Islamists. One American official said the operation was considered an antiterrorism success.

The transitional government arrived in Mogadishu at the end of December. It has struggled ever since against an insurgency that is a mix of Islamist fighters, rival clans and profiteers who have made a fortune as a result of the anarchy, whether by importing expired baby formula or renting out former government land.

“Those criminals are our biggest problem,” said Abdi Awaleh Jama, an ambassador at large for the transitional government.

The African Union promised to send 8,000 peacekeepers to help. But because of the focus on building a 26,000-strong force for Darfur, only 1,600 Ugandans have arrived. Clearly, some of Somalia’s problems are not the government’s fault. Neither is the drought-flood-drought cycle that has left an impenetrable crust of rock-hard silt over Somalia’s fields, causing the worst cereal harvest in 13 years.

But most Western diplomats agree that unless the transitional government reaches out to Islamist elements and becomes more inclusive, it will fail — like the 13 transitional governments that came before it.

“This government doesn’t control one inch of territory from the Kenyan border up to Mogadishu,” said a Western diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing diplomatic protocol.

Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, the warlord turned transitional president, recently forced out the prime minister and is looking to replace him with a leader who can bridge clan divides.

“This is basically the last chance,” the Western diplomat said.

But the people in Afgooye’s squatter camps do not have a lot of faith. “We want the Islamists back,” said Mohammed Ahmed, a shriveled 80-year-old retired taxi driver.

Mr. Mohammed said he was not especially religious. “But,” he said, “at least we had food.”
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Appeared in the Calgary Herald 25/11/2007

Don't give up on Africa
THE ECONOMIST

Seldom has East Africa seen such turmoil. Eastern Congo faces a humanitarian disaster, the killing in Sudan's Darfur region goes on; war rages between Islamist militias and Ethiopian troops in Somalia; and rebels threaten the government in Chad.

On top of that, war may resume between Eritrea and Ethiopia, and between Sudan's government and former rebels in the autonomous south.

As a result, the United Nations is sending unprecedented numbers of troops to the region It already has 17,000 in Congo and 20,000 more are due to join an existing 6,ooo-strong African Union (AU) force in Darfur.

These are the largest UN forces in the world. Another 2,ooo-odd are sandwiched between the Eritreans and the Ethiopians, plus 10,000 in south Sudan. The AU also has some 1,600 Ugandan troops under its command in Somalia's blighted capital, Mogadishu.

The numbers alone look impressive, as befits the world's much-vaunted determination to help end Africa's bloodiest conflicts.

Tn Congo, the UN is doing its best to hold the ring between several rival ragtag armies.

In Darfur the UN is due to start deploying its forces in a few weeks. The speed with which several African governments have offered troops has been a welcome surprise.

In a region as big as France with no proper roads, the static AU force has been easy prey for rebels and government proxies alike. That makes it imperative for the UN to provide both transport and attack helicopters for its expanded force.

The government in Sudan's capital, Khartoum, may balk at the prospect of West Europeans or Americans providing or flying aircraft over Darfur, so it would be good if Russia or India were to help out. In Somalia, it is the African countries that have failed to deliver. In February, the AU promised a force of 8,000 to keep the peace in Mogadishu. So far only the Ugandans, too few to do the job, have turned up. So the Islamists have regrouped and war threatens to engulf the city again.

Africa and the West, not to mention the UN, seem to have lost hope and interest. African governments, whose forces in Darfur are being paid for by the West should pay some of their own way in Somalia, albeit with more help from the rich world.

But the main foreign governments involved in the painful task of negotiation—Britain, Italy, Norway and America— must not give up.

DISTRIBUTED BY THE NEW YORK TIMES SYNDICATE.
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There is a slide show relating to the essay linked at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/01/world ... ?th&emc=th

December 1, 2007
Nigeria Turns From Harsher Side of Islamic Law
By LYDIA POLGREEN

KANO, Nigeria — Just last year, the morality police roamed these streets in dusky blue uniforms and black berets, brandishing cudgels at prayer shirkers and dragging fornicators into Islamic courts to face sentences like death by public stoning.

But these days, the fearsome police officers, known as the Hisbah, are little more than glorified crossing guards. They have largely been confined to their barracks and assigned anodyne tasks like directing traffic and helping fans to their seats at soccer games.

The Islamic revolution that seemed so destined to transform northern Nigeria in recent years appears to have come and gone — or at least gone in a direction few here would have expected.

When Muslim-dominated states like Kano adopted Islamic law after the fall of military rule in 1999, radical clerics from the Arabian peninsula arrived in droves to preach a draconian brand of fundamentalism, and newly empowered religious judges handed down tough punishments like amputation for theft. Kano became a center of anti-American sentiment in one of the most reliably pro-American countries in Africa.

But since then, much of the furor has died down, and the practice of Islamic law, or Shariah, which had gone on for centuries in the private sphere before becoming enshrined in public law, has settled into a distinctively Nigerian compromise between the dictates of faith and the chaotic realities of modern life in an impoverished, developing nation.

“Shariah needs to be practical,” said Bala Abdullahi, a civil servant here. “We are a developing country, so there is a kind of moderation between the ideas of the West and traditional Islamic values. We try to weigh it so there is no contradiction.”

The federal government cracked down on the Hisbah last year, enforcing a national ban on religious and ethnic militias, and the secular, federally controlled police force has little interest in enforcing the harshest strictures of Shariah. Violence between Muslims and Christians has also begun to subside in the north.

But even before then, the feared mutilations and death sentences almost never materialized. Public floggings are quite common, and in Zamfara, the first state to adopt Shariah as the basis of its criminal code, at least one man had his hand amputated in 2000 for stealing a cow, but other sentences of mutilation have rarely been carried out.

And despite several internationally known adultery sentences of death by stoning in a public square — including that of Amina Lawal, a woman from Katsina State who gave birth to a child out of wedlock that a Shariah court in 2002 took as evidence of the crime — not one stoning sentence has been carried out. Ms. Lawal’s conviction was overturned the following year, and she is now active in local politics, living freely with her daughter Wasila in her hometown.

The change has little to do with religious attitudes — northern Nigeria remains one of the most pious Muslim regions in Africa, as it has been since the camel caravans across the Sahara first brought Islam here centuries ago. In Kano, the main city of Kano State, thousands of men spill out in neat rows onto the city’s main boulevards on Friday afternoon, an overflow of devotion for the week’s most important prayer, and virtually all Muslim women are veiled.

The shift reflects the fact that religious law did not transform society. Indeed, some of the most ardent Shariah-promoting politicians now find themselves under investigation for embezzling millions of dollars. Many early proponents of Shariah feel duped by politicians who rode its popular wave but failed to live by its tenets, enriching themselves and neglecting to improve the lives of ordinary people.

“Politicians started seeing Shariah as a gateway to political power,” said Abba Adam Koki, a conservative cleric here who has criticized the local government’s application of Shariah. “But they were insincere. We have been disappointed and never got what we had hoped.”

Facing backlash from citizens and criticism from human rights groups at home and abroad, state governments that had swiftly enacted Shariah and embraced its harshest tenets are now shifting the emphasis from the punishments and prohibitions to a softer approach that emphasizes other tenets of Muslim law, like charity, women’s rights and the duty of Muslims to keep their environment clean.

“Shariah is not only about the cutting off of wrists,” said Muzammil Sani Hanga, a member of Kano State’s Shariah Commission and a legal expert who helped draft the state’s Islamic code. “It is a complete way of life.”

New programs have sprung up to encourage parents to send their daughters to hybrid public elementary schools that offer traditional Islamic education along with math and reading, in keeping with Islamic principles that call for the education of girls. In many of these classrooms, girls outnumber boys, and the United States Agency for International Development is so impressed with the potential of these programs that one third of the schools it supports across Nigeria are integrated Islamic and secular, according to officials at the agency.

State officials are using Islamic exhortations on cleanliness to encourage recycling of the plastic bags that choke landfills and gutters. One governor, citing the Islamic duty to care for the indigent, recently instituted a monthly stipend for disabled beggars.

“Our approach is a humane Shariah, not a punitive Shariah,” said Bala A. Muhammad, director of a state program in Kano called A Daidaita Sahu. The name, a Hausa commandment, means “straighten your rows,” a reference to the razor-sharp lines formed by Muslims as they line up to pray and a metaphor for the orderliness required in everyday life by the Koran.

Hundreds of yellow motorized rickshaws purchased by the state government make it easier for women, who had been barred from taking motorcycle taxis, to get around.

“As a Muslim woman I want to be modest,” said one commuter, Amina Abubakar, as she stepped daintily into the back seat of a rickshaw and pulled its privacy curtain closed. “This is more comfortable, and the safety is better.”

To be sure, conservative elements hold sway in some areas. In October, a Shariah court in Kaduna upheld the ban of a satirical play by the human rights activist Shehu Sani about a corrupt politician who uses Shariah to manipulate his constituents.

But the shift may also be helping to ease tensions between Muslims and Christians in a country where sectarian conflicts, often stoked by politicians to stir up support, have killed thousands over the past decade.

“The thing has caused a lot of harm,” said the Rev. Foster O. Ekeleme, a Methodist bishop in Kano who leads a flock of mostly Ibo tribespeople from southeastern Nigeria. “There was burning of Christian churches. Christians were killed. So many people were displaced. But now, the tempo is cooling down.”

Mr. Ekeleme had just been visited by a senior adviser of the Kano State governor, an Ibo Catholic, Chris Azuka, who was appointed to try to improve interfaith relations in the state.

“The idea of Shariah is to promote social justice, not create religious conflict,” Mr. Azuka said. “Shariah is not about violence.”

Northern Muslims and southern Christians have long coexisted uneasily across what is now modern Nigeria. Two centuries ago, the Hausa rulers of the north waged a jihad to convert southerners to Islam, and while they only reached the middle of the country, the aftershocks of the period can be felt to this day.

More recently, the Hausa elite have dominated the military, while southern Christians, like the Yoruba and the Ibo, have dominated commercial and intellectual life. According to international human rights organizations, 11,000 to 15,000 people have been killed in sectarian and ethnic conflicts in Nigeria since the return of democracy in 1999.

In Jigawa State, religious violence exploded in September 2006, amid political tensions before elections in 2007. A Muslim woman claimed that a Christian one had insulted the Prophet Muhammad, and mobs of Muslim youths descended on Christian churches in the state capital, Dutse, burning several to the ground.

The mob arrived at the Assemblies of God church, where the pastor’s wife, Nadi Dangana, said she barely escaped over the wall before the youths broke down the gate.

“We escaped with our lives, but all our property is gone,” she said.

The church was left in ashes, its altar and crosses charred stumps. A makeshift sanctuary without walls stands in its place. Blackened bits of salvaged corrugated roofing keep out the rain.

But these days tensions have cooled, said Garba Shehu, a former Muslim from Dutse who converted to evangelical Christianity. When the governor signed the law creating a stipend for beggars, he invited three Christian clergy members to pray alongside three Muslim clerics.

“We thank God we don’t see the same tensions as before,” Mr. Shehu said. “We are free to practice our faith without fear.”
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There is an interesting multimedia relating to this essay linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/02/world ... ?th&emc=th

December 2, 2007
Ending Famine, Simply by Ignoring the Experts
By CELIA W. DUGGER

LILONGWE, Malawi — Malawi hovered for years at the brink of famine. After a disastrous corn harvest in 2005, almost five million of its 13 million people needed emergency food aid.

But this year, a nation that has perennially extended a begging bowl to the world is instead feeding its hungry neighbors. It is selling more corn to the World Food Program of the United Nations than any other country in southern Africa and is exporting hundreds of thousands of tons of corn to Zimbabwe.

In Malawi itself, the prevalence of acute child hunger has fallen sharply. In October, the United Nations Children’s Fund sent three tons of powdered milk, stockpiled here to treat severely malnourished children, to Uganda instead. “We will not be able to use it!” Juan Ortiz-Iruri, Unicef’s deputy representative in Malawi, said jubilantly.

Farmers explain Malawi’s extraordinary turnaround — one with broad implications for hunger-fighting methods across Africa — with one word: fertilizer.

Over the past 20 years, the World Bank and some rich nations Malawi depends on for aid have periodically pressed this small, landlocked country to adhere to free market policies and cut back or eliminate fertilizer subsidies, even as the United States and Europe extensively subsidized their own farmers. But after the 2005 harvest, the worst in a decade, Bingu wa Mutharika, Malawi’s newly elected president, decided to follow what the West practiced, not what it preached.

Stung by the humiliation of pleading for charity, he led the way to reinstating and deepening fertilizer subsidies despite a skeptical reception from the United States and Britain. Malawi’s soil, like that across sub-Saharan Africa, is gravely depleted, and many, if not most, of its farmers are too poor to afford fertilizer at market prices.

“As long as I’m president, I don’t want to be going to other capitals begging for food,” Mr. Mutharika declared. Patrick Kabambe, the senior civil servant in the Agriculture Ministry, said the president told his advisers, “Our people are poor because they lack the resources to use the soil and the water we have.”

The country’s successful use of subsidies is contributing to a broader reappraisal of the crucial role of agriculture in alleviating poverty in Africa and the pivotal importance of public investments in the basics of a farm economy: fertilizer, improved seed, farmer education, credit and agricultural research.

Malawi, an overwhelmingly rural nation about the size of Pennsylvania, is an extreme example of what happens when those things are missing. As its population has grown and inherited landholdings have shrunk, impoverished farmers have planted every inch of ground. Desperate to feed their families, they could not afford to let their land lie fallow or to fertilize it. Over time, their depleted plots yielded less food and the farmers fell deeper into poverty.

Malawi’s leaders have long favored fertilizer subsidies, but they reluctantly acceded to donor prescriptions, often shaped by foreign-aid fashions in Washington, that featured a faith in private markets and an antipathy to government intervention.

In the 1980s and again in the 1990s, the World Bank pushed Malawi to eliminate fertilizer subsidies entirely. Its theory both times was that Malawi’s farmers should shift to growing cash crops for export and use the foreign exchange earnings to import food, according to Jane Harrigan, an economist at the University of London.

In a withering evaluation of the World Bank’s record on African agriculture, the bank’s own internal watchdog concluded in October not only that the removal of subsidies had led to exorbitant fertilizer prices in African countries, but that the bank itself had often failed to recognize that improving Africa’s declining soil quality was essential to lifting food production.

“The donors took away the role of the government and the disasters mounted,” said Jeffrey Sachs, a Columbia University economist who lobbied Britain and the World Bank on behalf of Malawi’s fertilizer program and who has championed the idea that wealthy countries should invest in fertilizer and seed for Africa’s farmers.

Here in Malawi, deep fertilizer subsidies and lesser ones for seed, abetted by good rains, helped farmers produce record-breaking corn harvests in 2006 and 2007, according to government crop estimates. Corn production leapt to 2.7 million metric tons in 2006 and 3.4 million in 2007 from 1.2 million in 2005, the government reported.

“The rest of the world is fed because of the use of good seed and inorganic fertilizer, full stop,” said Stephen Carr, who has lived in Malawi since 1989, when he retired as the World Bank’s principal agriculturalist in sub-Saharan Africa. “This technology has not been used in most of Africa. The only way you can help farmers gain access to it is to give it away free or subsidize it heavily.”

“The government has taken the bull by the horns and done what farmers wanted,” he said. Some economists have questioned whether Malawi’s 2007 bumper harvest should be credited to good rains or subsidies, but an independent evaluation, financed by the United States and Britain, found that the subsidy program accounted for a large share of this year’s increase in corn production.

The harvest also helped the poor by lowering food prices and increasing wages for farm workers. Researchers at Imperial College London and Michigan State University concluded in their preliminary report that a well-run subsidy program in a sensibly managed economy “has the potential to drive growth forward out of the poverty trap in which many Malawians and the Malawian economy are currently caught.”

Farmers interviewed recently in Malawi’s southern and central regions said fertilizer had greatly improved their ability to fill their bellies with nsima, the thick, cornmeal porridge that is Malawi’s staff of life.

In the hamlet of Mthungu, Enelesi Chakhaza, an elderly widow whose husband died of hunger five years ago, boasted that she got two ox-cart-loads of corn this year from her small plot instead of half a cart.

Last year, roughly half the country’s farming families received coupons that entitled them to buy two 110-pound bags of fertilizer, enough to nourish an acre of land, for around $15 — about a third the market price. The government also gave them coupons for enough seed to plant less than half an acre.

Malawians are still haunted by the hungry season of 2001-02. That season, an already shrunken program to give poor farmers enough fertilizer and seed to plant a meager quarter acre of land had been reduced again. Regional flooding further lowered the harvest. Corn prices surged. And under the government then in power, the country’s entire grain reserve was sold as a result of mismanagement and corruption.

Mrs. Chakhaza watched her husband starve to death that season. His strength ebbed away as they tried to subsist on pumpkin leaves. He was one of many who succumbed that year, said K. B. Kakunga, the local Agriculture Ministry official. He recalled mothers and children begging for food at his door.

“I had a little something, but I could not afford to help each and every one,” he said. “It was very pathetic, very pathetic indeed.”

But Mr. Kakunga brightened as he talked about the impact of the subsidies, which he said had more than doubled corn production in his jurisdiction since 2005.

“It’s quite marvelous!” he exclaimed.

Malawi’s determination to heavily subsidize fertilizer and the payoff in increased production are beginning to change the attitudes of donors, say economists who have studied Malawi’s experience.

The Department for International Development in Britain contributed $8 million to the subsidy program last year. Bernabé Sánchez, an economist with the agency in Malawi, estimated the extra corn produced because of the $74 million subsidy was worth $120 million to $140 million.

“It was really a good economic investment,” he said.

The United States, which has shipped $147 million worth of American food to Malawi as emergency relief since 2002, but only $53 million to help Malawi grow its own food, has not provided any financial support for the subsidy program, except for helping pay for the evaluation of it. Over the years, the United States Agency for International Development has focused on promoting the role of the private sector in delivering fertilizer and seed, and saw subsidies as undermining that effort.

But Alan Eastham, the American ambassador to Malawi, said in a recent interview that the subsidy program had worked “pretty well,” though it displaced some commercial fertilizer sales.

“The plain fact is that Malawi got lucky last year,” he said. “They got fertilizer out while it was needed. The lucky part was that they got the rains.”

And the World Bank now sometimes supports the temporary use of subsidies aimed at the poor and carried out in a way that fosters private markets.

Here in Malawi, bank officials say they generally support Malawi’s policy, though they criticize the government for not having a strategy to eventually end the subsidies, question whether its 2007 corn production estimates are inflated and say there is still a lot of room for improvement in how the subsidy is carried out.

“The issue is, let’s do a better job of it,” said David Rohrbach, a senior agricultural economist at the bank.

Though the donors are sometimes ambivalent, Malawi’s farmers have embraced the subsidies. And the government moved this year to give its people a more direct hand in their distribution.

Villagers in Chembe gathered one recent morning under the spreading arms of a kachere tree to decide who most needed fertilizer coupons as the planting season loomed. They had only enough for 19 of the village’s 53 families.

“Ladies and gentlemen, should we start with the elderly or the orphans?” asked Samuel Dama, a representative of the Chembe clan.

Men led the assembly, but women sitting on the ground at their feet called out almost all the names of the neediest, gesturing to families rearing children orphaned by AIDS or caring for toothless elders.

There were more poor families than there were coupons, so grumbling began among those who knew they would have to watch over the coming year as their neighbors’ fertilized corn fields turned deep green.

Sensing the rising resentment, the village chief, Zaudeni Mapila, rose. Barefoot and dressed in dusty jeans and a royal blue jacket, he acted out a silly pantomime of husbands stuffing their pants with corn to sell on the sly for money to get drunk at the beer hall. The women howled with laughter. The tension fled.

He closed with a reminder he hoped would dampen any jealousy.

“I don’t want anyone to complain,” he said. “It’s not me who chose. It’s you.”

The women sang back to him in a chorus of acknowledgment, then dispersed to their homes and fields.
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One man's battle is all of ours

Mamby Fofana
CanWest News Service


Friday, December 07, 2007


The government representatives at the UN conference on climate change this week in Bali will hear from a legion of experts, but they will not hear the voice of one man who is on the front line in the fight against climate change: Ali Angoiba.

Angoiba's field in Africa is a long way from the conference site in Indonesia. Yet, he and others in the Sahel village of Petaka in eastern Mali are experts on the effects of climate change. Every year, Angoiba and his wife struggle to provide for their five sons, and to protect their family and village against the devastating impact of climate change.

Angoiba is not a scientist; he's a 41-year-old farmer and a village leader who studies the changes in the weather closely. He is very worried by what he sees.

The winds are getting stronger, warmer and drier. The land he cultivates -- inhospitable at the best of times -- is cracked, arid and increasingly infertile. Sometimes, Angoiba must plant seeds three times before harvesting a successful crop. The flowering patterns of local shrubs and trees have become unpredictable, another worrying sign. The Sahara Desert is creeping closer, threatening to claim his land for itself.

The rain, if it comes, falls in a torrent. Rather than nourishing the land and his crops, the floods can wash it away, leaving his family destitute. One day last year, the equivalent of a third of the seasonal rainfall drenched his village in an afternoon. Within four hours, 45 millimetres of rain fell.

I know Angoiba's future is in serious jeopardy. I live in Mali myself, and my work as an agricultural specialist tells me that climate change is seriously hurting agricultural production. The ability of Angoiba, his wife and fellow villagers to feed themselves is in jeopardy. For them, and millions of other small-scale farmers, the greatest fear from climate change is not related to the weather -- it's the fear that Petaka's people will not be able to feed themselves, or live off the land as they always have.

The threat of large-scale natural disasters looms over people clinging precariously to subsistence farming. Oxfam says that the number of annual natural disasters -- most of them floods, cyclones and storms -- has quadrupled in the last 20 years. The number of people affected each year has grown over that time from 145 million to 250 million.

Each shock, piled on one after the other, can be devastating for subsistence farming villages like Angoiba's home in Mali. That's why many farmers are not waiting for the delegates in Indonesia to take action. Instead, Angoiba and his community are taking action themselves to fight climate change.

Angoiba has started using soil conservation techniques, nitrogen-fixing plants and shrubs, and better pest-control techniques such as intercropping plants that pests don't like. Most importantly, Angoiba is saving seeds, knowledge and genetic resources, developed with support from organizations such as USC Canada, to ensure the biodiversity of his crops.

"Many of us in North America are not making the work of farmers like Ali any easier," said USC Canada's Susan Walsh. Hers and other Canadian organizations have written to Prime Minister Stephen Harper calling for leadership on climate change. In an open letter, they pointed out that increasingly, Canadian government aid resources are being diverted from development and poverty alleviation to respond to climate disasters.

Today, I will share Angoiba's story with MPs at the Commons foreign affairs committee. My message will be that in Bali, Canada must be part of a strong global response to climate change, and take measures that will support farmers such as Angoiba. That would be the right thing to do, given that his community is bearing a heavy burden for what Canadians have helped cause. And Canadians might even learn a thing or two from the people of Petaka about fighting back against climate change.

Mamby Fofana is a Malian agricultural specialist and an international board member of USC Canada, founded in 1945 as the Unitarian Service Committee of Canada.
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December 9, 2007
Mugabe’s Presence Hijacks European-African Meeting
By STEPHEN CASTLE

LISBON, Dec. 8 — A summit meeting of leaders from Europe and Africa on Saturday was dominated by divisions between the two continents over trade and criticism from European leaders of human rights abuses in Zimbabwe.

The first such European Union-African meeting in seven years began amid growing concern in Europe that its economic and political influence in Africa was being eclipsed by China’s growing economic influence there.

But the start of the two-day meeting was overshadowed by the presence of Robert G. Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s president, who remains a liberation hero in some African countries. His appearance, however, led Gordon Brown, Britain’s prime minister, to decline to attend.

In her speech, Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, criticized Mr. Mugabe, who is accused of human rights abuses, vote rigging and substantially worsening the level of poverty in his country.

“The whole European Union has the same view of what is happening there,” Mrs. Merkel said, according to a copy of her speech distributed at the meeting. “Zimbabwe concerns all of us, in Europe and in Africa.”

After criticism of Zimbabwe from other European leaders, African countries appeared to close ranks around Mr. Mugabe. Senegal’s president, Abdoulaye Wade, said that the comments about Mr. Mugabe were “not true,” and that Mrs. Merkel was misinformed.

“Zimbabwe is making progress toward democracy and should be helped, not sanctioned,” he said.

President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, also speaking about human rights, avoided criticizing Mr. Mugabe, according to Baroness Amos, a former deputy foreign minister representing Britain here in Mr. Brown’s place.

In a briefing with reporters, Lady Amos cited Mr. Mbeki’s role as a negotiator between Mr. Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party and the opposition as a legitimate explanation for his reluctance to confront his fellow leader.

Sudan’s president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, whose government is accused by many countries and aid groups of causing the humanitarian crisis in Darfur, was also at the meeting, as was Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, Libya’s president. In all, 80 European and African governments were represented.

A meeting between Mr. Bashir and senior European officials yielded no breakthrough over plans to send non-African peacekeepers to Darfur.

Access to Mr. Mugabe was closely controlled. As he left his five-star hotel in Cascais, on the coast near Lisbon, on Saturday morning, he refused to answer questions from reporters as his security team jostled a camera crew from the BBC.

In order for Mr. Mugabe to attend the meeting, his Portuguese hosts had to waive a European Union visa ban that normally prevents him and 130 other Zimbabwean officials from traveling to Europe.

Mr. Mugabe was invited when southern African nations made it clear that they would not attend the meeting were he excluded.

In 2003, a similar standoff prevented a summit meeting from taking place, but such is the concern over China’s growing economic influence in Africa that all but a handful of European leaders agreed to override their objections and sit down with Zimbabwe’s president.

Ireland’s prime minister, Bertie Ahern, said that he would have preferred Mr. Mugabe had stayed away and said human rights needed to be addressed at the meeting. “Any country that halves the life expectancy of its population speaks for itself,” Mr. Ahern told reporters.

Though Europe remains Africa’s biggest trading partner, China’s investment ambitions were underlined recently when a Chinese bank bought 20 percent of Standard Bank, Africa’s largest lender, for $5.4 billion.

According to the European Commission, 800 Chinese companies have invested $1 billion in Africa through 2006, the latest year for which figures are available. The country imports 32 percent of its oil from Africa, and oil-related investment in recent years amounts to $16 billion, the commission said.

Despite their historical ties to Africa, Europeans have found it difficult to compete with China, which finances giant infrastructure projects and offers investment without conditions related to human rights or government transparency.

European leaders have called for a new partnership between the continents based on common interests, from trade to climate change, instead of the traditional relationship between donors and aid recipients.

But the legacy of Europe’s colonial past is a source of continuing controversy. “Africa doesn’t want charity or paternalism,” said Alpha Oumar Konaré, the chairman of the African Union, at the opening session on Saturday. “We don’t want anyone doing things for us. We want to play in the global economy but with new rules.”

Mr. Konaré also criticized the European Union’s strategy of pressing individual African regions and states to sign new trade deals, called economic partnership agreements. He said the practice was divisive and would hurt the continent’s industries and rural poor.

Mr. Wade, of Senegal, accused Europe of trying to impose on Africa a “straitjacket that does not work.”
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December 10, 2007
Unlikely Ally Against Congo Republic Graft
By LYDIA POLGREEN

BRAZZAVILLE, the Congo Republic — The main teaching hospital here is in such disrepair that many patients have to pay freelance porters for piggyback rides up and down the stairs to get X-rays. It costs $2 a flight, each way.

But why is the hospital, like so much of the Congo Republic, so tattered when the country sells billions of dollars of oil each year?

The government says it is still recovering from a devastating war and faces a new problem: Western investors, sensing a chance to rake in millions, are suing to recover old debts that they bought for pennies on the dollar.

Such investors, running what critics derisively call vulture funds, have been widely denounced by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund for forcing poor countries to fend off costly lawsuits rather than build classrooms and clinics.

But in the Congo Republic, where a deep-seated culture of graft has squandered so much of the nation’s wealth, those investors have become unexpected allies of anticorruption campaigners, who say such lawsuits may be the only way of holding the country accountable for how it spends its money.

“We ask ourselves, why is our country like this?” said Dr. Bebene Bondzouzi-Ndamba, a neurologist at the hospital. “Why are we so rich and yet so poor?”

Her questions have come into sharp relief in the fight between the Congo Republic and an affiliate of an American hedge fund, Elliott Associates. For an undisclosed price, the company bought about $31 million in debt that the country took on in the 1980s but later defaulted on. Now it is suing in American, European and Asian courts to collect the principal plus interest and penalties — more than $100 million in all. So far, it has collected $39 million.

Advocates of canceling third world debt recoil at such cases, with some calling for a code of conduct among lenders to prevent them from selling unpaid debts to investors.

“I deplore the activities of so-called vulture funds that seek to profit from the debts owed by the poorest countries,” Gordon Brown said in May, the month before he became prime minister of Britain. “I am determined to limit the damage done by such funds.”

But organizations that fight corruption argue that those investors are exposing in court the corrupt networks of government officials, providing a much-needed check on mineral-rich states. Beyond that, anticorruption campaigners, like the groups Global Witness and the Publish What You Pay Coalition, contend that when nations win debt relief without becoming more accountable, they will simply repeat old mistakes and end up deep in debt once again.

“If it were not for these vulture funds, we would not know any facts about the way our country’s wealth is being taken away,” said Brice Mackosso, a campaigner for greater transparency in the Congo Republic’s government. “We don’t agree with their ultimate aims, but they are the only ones capable of exposing the truth.”

Critics argue that virtually all countries use their debt relief savings to help the poor, and that so-called vulture funds achieve outsize returns from long-forgotten debts at the expense of the world’s poorest people.

Cutting Both Ways

While investor lawsuits may expose nefarious dealings, they may also make governments more secretive to avoid asset seizures. “It can cut both ways,” said Mark Thomas, a senior economist at the World Bank. “It can be a cause of revealing nontransparent practices, but it can also be a cause of those nontransparent practices in the first place.”

Debts are bought and sold all the time, and Western courts have awarded hundreds of millions of dollars in judgments to debt investors. Peru is the best-known example: In 2000, Elliott Associates, whose founder, Paul E. Singer, is a top Republican donor and a backer of Rudolph W. Giuliani’s presidential campaign, won a $58 million judgment on debt it had bought in 1996 for $20 million.

Now African countries are in the sights of debt investors. In 1979, Zambia borrowed $15 million from Romania to buy agricultural equipment. Twenty years later, the two governments agreed to settle the old debt for about $3 million. But a hedge fund, Donegal International, bought it first and sued for about $55 million. This year, a British court ruled that Zambia must pay Donegal $15 million.

The plight of Zambia, a poor country stricken by AIDS, raised awareness of so-called vulture investing in Africa, and debt relief campaigners, celebrities and some members of the Bush administration have taken up the issue.

Most creditors go along with debt reduction or write-off deals, and the Congo Republic has qualified under international programs for a reduction of much of the $8.5 million in debt it owed as of December 2004.

Government officials here point to a slew of new projects under construction, like a hydroelectric dam, hundreds of miles of new roads and an emergency power plant as evidence that they are rebuilding the country. A June report from the I.M.F. noted that at least some progress has been made to address “corruption and weak governance.”

Still, half the nation’s population lacks access to clean water, according to Unicef. The lifetime risk of dying in childbirth for women in the Congo Republic is 1 in 26, one of the world’s highest rates. Life expectancy is just 53 years, down from 55 in 1990.

That deprivation exists despite the significant amount of oil the country produces relative to its 3.8 million people — 250,000 barrels a day.

The litigation surrounding the country has unearthed a complex web of questionable practices that may have stripped untold millions of that oil money from the nation’s treasury since 1997.

Defense From Creditors

In interviews, officials here said the purpose of their complex transactions — which, according to court documents, included discounted prices for well-connected companies — was to avoid what it viewed as overzealous creditors.

“We are in a war, and we have to defend ourselves,” said Alain Akouala, the Congo Republic’s information minister.

But the group Global Witness has seized on court records to tease out these connections between government officials, private companies and a French bank that set up oil transactions.

The litigation has also exposed the free-spending habits of government officials. According to hotel bills, the country’s president, Denis Sassou-Nguesso, paid $8,500 a night for a triplex suite at the New York Palace Hotel during a visit to the United Nations in 2005. His hotel bills in the United States in 2005 and 2006 added up to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Officials here said that Mr. Sassou-Nguesso was simply staying in the same type of hotels as other heads of state.

Another embarrassing find was the credit card bills of one of the president’s sons, Denis Christel Sassou-Nguesso, who runs the marketing arm of the Congo Republic’s state oil business, Cotrade. They showed large purchases from shops like Christian Dior, Louis Vuitton and Gucci, and a paper trail suggesting that companies receiving state oil business had paid for the purchases, Global Witness said.

The world of luxury implied by those credit card bills is emblematic of the vast gap between the country’s elite and its impoverished masses.

The Congo Republic’s main teaching hospital may be in terrible shape, but its director, Ignace Ngakala, works in a plush office outfitted with a large, lacquered wood desk and a high-backed leather chair. His office, he said, was recently renovated along with the delivery room in the maternity ward and a meeting room for medical conferences, complete with a state-of-the-art sound system. In his parking space sat a late-model Volkswagen sport utility vehicle that sells for about $50,000 in the United States.

“We are coming from war,” he said, explaining why the elevator in one of the hospital buildings was not fixed. “We are in the middle of a progressive renovation.”

Mr. Sassou-Nguesso, the president, first ruled the country as a Marxist-Leninist dictator, from 1979 to 1992, then seized power again in 1997. A brutal civil war followed, devastating the country. He was elected president in 2002, but the vote was deeply flawed because his main rivals were excluded, international observers say.

Mr. Sassou-Nguesso’s government has jettisoned its Communist past in favor of petro-capitalism. But aides say that the image of a free-spending kleptocrat is false, noting that here in the capital the president stays in the same modest home he has lived in since he was an army lieutenant.

But in Pointe-Noire, the center of the Congo Republic’s booming oil industry, Mr. Sassou-Nguesso lives in a sprawling oceanfront mansion. At a reception there in October, government ministers drank single-malt Scotch by the swimming pool, while Mr. Sassou-Nguesso sipped Champagne from a cut-crystal glass.

In an interview, Mr. Sassou-Nguesso said his government was committed to transparency and posts oil revenues on a Web site. It also submits to independent audits, as requested by the International Monetary Fund.

Both Sides Point Fingers

He criticized as immoral the private creditors seeking to gain from the Congo Republic’s misery, and rejected the notion that debt investors could play a positive role in exposing corruption. “Vulture funds cannot give us lessons,” he said.

In a statement, Elliott Associates said it could not be blamed for the Congo Republic’s problems. “The poor in developing countries are poor because the political and economic systems in their countries have failed them,” the statement said.

According to Justice Department records, the Congo Republic’s government has spent $3.3 million this year and last to hire lobbyists and lawyers to press its cause in Congress and in the news media, including the firms of Washington heavyweights like Plato Cacheris and Bob Livingston.

Their efforts have borne some fruit in the form of Congressional hearings on the impact of debt investors, and news articles about Mr. Singer’s contributions to Mr. Giuliani’s presidential campaign.

Caught in the middle of this fight are schoolchildren, like 10-year-old Laurent Mbemba in Pointe-Noire. His school has 3,583 students. Its three latrines are broken. Many teachers have not been paid in years — they get by on donations from parents.

Rain pours in thundering sheets onto the tin roof, dribbling through rust holes onto the children beneath. The classrooms are so packed — as many as 200 a class — that many children sit on the cement floor, notebooks perched on their narrow thighs.

“There aren’t enough desks for everyone,” Laurent said.

The school’s principal, Martial Itsouhou, said the school received virtually no assistance from the government.

“Our country exports wood, but we have no desks,” Mr. Itsouhou said. “Our children are literally learning on their knees. We don’t know where the money goes. We just pray for help.”
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A related multimedia is linked at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/13/world ... ?th&emc=th

December 13, 2007
After Clashes, Fear of War on Congo’s Edge
By LYDIA POLGREEN

SAKE, Congo — A major confrontation between the Congolese Army and a renegade general is plunging the country back toward war, threatening to undermine the fledgling democratic state and set off a new regional conflict on a scale not seen here in years.

The battle between government troops and the rebel general, Laurent Nkunda, turns on many of the same issues that caused Congo’s civil war, which supposedly ended in 2003. It was Africa’s deadliest modern war, fueled by the ethnic tensions between Hutus and Tutsis, which had led to the genocide in neighboring Rwanda.

Another factor was the quest to control Congo’s unusually rich endowment of minerals and farmland, especially here in North Kivu Province.

None of those underlying problems have been fully resolved, and the recent violence they have spurred has pushed 425,000 people from their homes in the past year alone, including the residents of this strategic provincial town. On Tuesday, they flooded out of town in a vast river of suffering, bedrolls and clothing bundles atop their heads, children toddling at their sides.

Many were running for the second time in two weeks, as General Nkunda’s forces routed army troops in towns they had taken just days before and threatened to take Sake as well. General Nkunda, a Tutsi, has vowed to protect Congolese Tutsis against Hutu militias from Rwanda. His advance here was just barely staved off by United Nations peacekeepers, who swept in late Tuesday to occupy the town as the Congolese Army fled.

The fight comes only a year after Western nations helped organize and pay for an election that produced Congo’s first democratically chosen government. The violence is also unfolding despite years of military and diplomatic intervention by the United Nations, the European Union and the United States to stem the tide of blood and create, for the first time since its independence, a stable and prosperous Congo.

“The fundamental issues that led to the Congo war have never really been dealt with,” said Anneke Van Woudenberg of Human Rights Watch. “We are seeing the results of that now.”

After years of being overlooked in favor of crises in Darfur, Somalia and elsewhere, Congo has again sprung to the top of American and European agendas on Africa. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met last week with leaders of the region, with a considerable focus on Congo, and another high-level meeting of diplomats is set for this weekend.

The recent fighting has unleashed a catastrophe of a proportion that is outsize even for Congo, where some researchers say four million people have died, mainly of disease and hunger, since the civil war began in 1996.

“This situation now is the worst we have had” since 2003, said Patrick Lavand’homme, a senior United Nations emergency aid official in Goma, the regional capital. “And it is going to get much, much worse.”

The Congo civil war traces its roots directly to the Rwandan genocide. The perpetrators of the slaughter of 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus fled, along with more than a million Rwandan Hutu refugees, spilling across the border into Congo in 1994.

The Tutsi-led Rwandan government sponsored a rebel group to pursue them into Congo, then called Zaire, in 1996. Congo’s longtime ruler, Mobutu Sese Seko, presided over an increasingly unstable nation rotted through by his autocratic rule. Neighboring countries like Angola and Uganda, sensing a chance to cash in on Congo’s mineral riches, jumped into the fray.

In 1997 Mr. Mobutu was forced into exile, and the rebel leader Laurent D. Kabila became president. A year later, though, he split with his Rwandan backers, who then sponsored another rebellion, this time against Mr. Kabila. It would set off a second civil war, throwing the region into turmoil as neighboring countries backed different sides.

The current crisis again risks drawing in Congo’s neighbors, especially Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi.

Today in Goma, clinics are packed with spindly children so malnourished they must be fed through a tube. Outside the city, ragtag camps have sprung up, and more than 800,000 people are now displaced in the region.

On the road between Sake and Goma, a panorama of misery unfolded mile after mile, as families trudged in search of sanctuary. Many slept in the open by the side of the road, shivering through a frigid night.

“Running, running, we are always running,” said Simwirayi Byenda, who left Sake with his two children on Tuesday. “It is always the civilians who suffer.”

Crowded camps struggled to absorb the newcomers —aid workers at one camp said that Monday would be the soonest new arrivals could get any food.

“Even then I do not think there is enough shelter materials and food and water,” said David Nthengwe, a spokesman for the United Nations refugee agency. “We will be needing more urgently to just cope with the current influx.”

The military setback to the government has been stunning. Just last Saturday, Col. Delphin K. Kahimbi, a deputy commander of the vast force trying to defeat General Nkunda, said many rebels had been killed and victory was at hand.

“We are progressing well, and our army is strong,” he said.

With the early success of the army offensive, aid workers and human rights officials initially worried that the Congolese Army would barrel through rebel towns filled with displaced Tutsi civilians, opening up the possibility of more violence against an ethnic group that had already suffered through a genocide.

But those worries have been overtaken by concerns that Congo’s Army will fail altogether. That could be particularly destabilizing because Joseph Kabila, who became Congo’s first democratically elected president last year, is already losing support over the unrest.

The Congolese Army has thrown its might into the fight with General Nkunda. About 20,000 troops have been deployed to the region, along with heavy artillery and a pair of attack helicopters. Still, the army, a mix of former militias that were integrated into the national force after the war, has struggled for even small victories.

Last week, it took three days of heavy bombardment for the government to win back Mushake, a crossroads town that had given General Nkunda’s forces control over the road to rich mining areas. The town’s recapture was hailed as a huge victory, but rebels won it back in just a few hours of fighting this week.

On Tuesday, Colonel Kahimbi acknowledged that his troops had suffered a serious setback, saying at the front line, “In war, you win some and you lose some, but we will win.”

Soldiers who just a week ago seemed disciplined and in high spirits quickly degenerated into drunken rabble as they bid a hasty retreat from the town of Kingi, following hundreds of families seeking sanctuary and preying upon them for food.

“I had nine goats when I left, now I have only one,” said Kimomote Ndezirizaza, who fled Kingi with his wife and nine children. “The soldiers harass us and steal our property. We only want a safe place to hide.”

With his army in retreat, Mr. Kabila is left with few options. Attempts at negotiating with General Nkunda over the past year, including an experiment at mixing his men into army brigades, collapsed in August, leading to a new round of fighting. After a cease-fire agreement collapsed in October, the Congolese government vowed to remove General Nkunda by force.

“Kinshasa is in a panic,” said one senior United Nations military official, referring to the nation’s capital. “They gambled everything on a military solution and were humiliated.”

But reopening negotiations with General Nkunda is also a dangerous proposition for Mr. Kabila. Other ethnic and regional militias willingly went through an integration process requiring them to be redeployed into regions where they had not fought, giving up control of lucrative mining areas. They would be angered by special treatment for General Nkunda’s force, which they see as another ethnic militia.

General Nkunda is demanding that his men be allowed to stay in North Kivu. He is also demanding the dismantling and deportation of the Rwandan Hutu militia led by some of the fighters responsible for the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. Congo’s government put forth a plan to break up the militia beginning in March, but General Nkunda’s forces have insisted that the militia must be disarmed first.

General Nkunda’s critics, who seem to include the vast majority of the people of North Kivu, the Congolese government and the United Nations, argue that he is a warlord seeking to protect financial and political interests and is using ethnicity as a pretext.

The Congolese Army has relied on ethnic militias to help fight its enemies, and it has also cooperated with the Rwandan Hutu militia, now known as the F.D.L.R., to fight General Nkunda’s forces, according to former and current members of the militia and human rights workers.

The prospect of these Rwandan Hutu militiamen fighting Congolese Tutsis risks provoking Rwanda’s government, which has been pressing for the dismantling of the militias since 1994, to invade Congo, as it has several times in the past decade.

Senior Western diplomats and aid officials say Rwanda has so far pledged restraint. The United Nations Security Council will be voting this month on renewing the mandate of the peacekeeping force here, known as Monuc.
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December 18, 2007
A Midnight Service Helps African Immigrants Combat Demons
By NEELA BANERJEE

WASHINGTON — At an hour when most people here are sleeping or sinning, the worshipers of the Spiritual Warfare ministry gather in the cold sanctuary of a neighborhood church to battle evil.

The students, taxicab drivers, homemakers and entrepreneurs, all Christians, mostly from French-speaking Africa, attend a midnight service four nights a week to seek deliverance from lust, anger, fear and sadness.

They sing. They pray fervently. Finally, they kick and shadowbox with what they contend is the real force behind life’s problems: the witches and devils whose curses they believe have ground down their families, towns, entire nations in Africa and that have pursued them to a new country, making it hard to find work, be healthy and survive.

“Some situations you need to address at night, because in the ministry of spiritual warfare, demons, the spirits bewitching people, choose this time to work,” said Nicole Sangamay, 40, who came from Congo in 1998 to study and is a co-pastor of the ministry. “And we pick this time to pray to nullify what they are doing.”

Founded by a Congolese couple, Spiritual Warfare is one of many ministries and congregations in the growing African diaspora in the United States and abroad grappling with witchcraft. In most other churches, Ms. Sangamay said, you could not even raise the issue, let alone pray to combat its effects.

Those other churches might argue that such a focus on witchcraft is a relic of Africans’ old beliefs, a dangerously pagan preoccupation. But scholars say this is Christianity made profoundly African. Spiritual Warfare considers itself Pentecostal, and like many other Pentecostals, worshipers see the battle between God and Satan, or what they also call the Bible against witchcraft, shaping the world.

“Religion for them is not like in the West,” said Jacob K. Olupona, professor of African religious traditions at the Harvard Divinity School. “It’s not simply seen as meaning and reference to a transcendental order. Religion is seen as something that works. It has a utilitarian view, and people are looking for solutions in different angles and different ways.”

The Spiritual Warfare congregants here said that because their ancestors were not Christians, they were cursed, Africa is cursed and the sins of their fathers are now visited upon all the children.

One blustery Monday night, men and women trickled into the ministry’s rented space at Deeper Life Bible Church on Sargent Road Northeast, some groggy from the nap they had to take to stay awake to midnight.

René Tameghi put his Bible and notebook down before kneeling, placing elbows in his chair and praying. Sita Waba would have to be at work at 8:30 a.m., but these two hours, Ms. Waba said, holding a cup of coffee, gave her strength. A few parents carried sleeping toddlers.

“Say, ‘Jesus, I am here for you tonight,’” José Shinga told the congregation from a small, raised stage covered in red carpeting and bordered by pots of silk flowers.

The men and women, still in coats, vests and caps, sang a song of “Allelujahs” in French, stomping, clapping and shuffling along with the joyful beat. The voices seemed stronger than those of the 25 people gathered, a quarter of the regular Sunday attendance. The neighbors once called the police to complain, a congregant said, and the police told them to keep it down.

The day before, the parishioners began a fast. “Why do we fast toward the end of the year?” Mrs. Shinga said to the worshipers. “That is when Satan wants sacrifices, blood, and so we ask God to protect us and our families.”

When Mrs. Shinga asked the worshipers to pray for forgiveness, the loud pleas of each man and woman, faces turned to the floor or heavenward, rose together like the rumble of a train.

People repeat accounts that they have heard of cancer and infertility cured through Spiritual Warfare. But few such events have occurred so far in Washington, Ms. Sangamay said, because the congregation is just two years old. Still, she said, people turn to her and her husband for “soul therapy,” which involves prayer and fasting. The ministry does not turn away people from secular resources like counseling or medicine.

“Every day in the village, or even here, people are putting curses on you,” said Yemba Shinga, Mrs. Shinga’s husband and the other preacher on Monday. “They declare that you won’t get a job, or will be separated from your family or get an incurable disease.

“But you know how to pray to God. Tell them, ‘C’est fini!’ I will not repeat the story of my ancestors, of my past, of the devil.”

The congregants shouted, “C’est fini!”

They listened, they moved the red chairs to the back of the hall, and then they called on the Holy Spirit to fight the enemy. Following Mr. Shinga, they said: “I rise now against every form of the devil! You want me under a curse, but I renounce you in the name of Jesus.”

With each prayer, young men and middle-age women punched, kicked or stood and quaked. They pounded their fists. They reviled the devil in all his forms.

They sliced their arms through the air to cut the chains of evil binding them. They pretended to tie up Satan. A toddler happily stamped the floor like the grown-ups. Mr. Shinga ran out of breath as he urged on the worshipers. The prayers ended. They did all that they could.

“We declare this place to be blessed,” Mrs. Shinga said, as the worshipers quieted down. “Thank you, Lord, Jesus Christ. Go in the peace of the Lord.”

People had already zipped up against the chill. They walked out into the Washington night, ready.
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Post by kmaherali »

There is an interesting video related to the essay linked at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/22/world ... &th&emc=th

December 22, 2007
In Helicopter or Hummer, Kenya Contender Dazzles
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

SUSWA, Kenya — At the sound of the copter blades, a thousand Masai tribesmen crane their necks upward.

It is as if their savior is dropping from the sky.

“Railaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!” they yell.

The tribesmen turn into a stampede, hollering and poking their gnarled wooden clubs in the air.

An enormous cloud of dust swallows the copter as it lands. Out comes Raila Odinga, one of Kenya’s most flamboyant politicians, a man who when he is not buzzing over the savannah in a helicopter is being chauffeured around in a red Hummer, who favors purple suits, whose son’s name is Fidel Castro and who may very well become Kenya’s next president.

The election is Thursday, and for months most polls have predicted that Mr. Odinga, 62, will unseat President Mwai Kibaki, though some recent surveys show the president catching up, with the race too close to call.

Mr. Kibaki, 76, is vintage old guard. He is from Kenya’s dominant tribe, the Kikuyu; he has been a member of Parliament since Kenya’s independence in 1963, and he is a reliable friend of big business and the United States (his campaign ads are even red, white and blue).

Mr. Odinga seems different. For starters, he is Luo, one of the country’s largest tribes, but one that many Kenyans say has never gotten its due. Although Kenya has one of the most mature democracies in Africa, many Kenyans still vote along tribal lines.

Kenya’s 37 million people are split among some 40 distinct ethnic groups. And unlike many politicians who would rather not acknowledge tribal frictions, Mr. Odinga is confronting them head on and has made inclusion and an end to discrimination the cornerstones of his campaign.

“Ethnicity is the disease of the elite,“ he says, adding that throughout Kenya’s history, money, land and opportunity have been sprinkled around unequally, based on tribe.

But it is not as if Mr. Odinga is working class. His father was one of Kenya’s first limousine liberals, a businessman and former vice president who, despite his vast wealth and land holdings, espoused socialist values. The Odingas were clearly fond of the Eastern bloc, and when it came time for college, young Raila was sent to East Germany, where he earned a degree in mechanical engineering.

“You know, in the 60’s, those days of imperialism, when you had the Americans in Vietnam, in Cambodia,” he said, laughing, “it was very fashionable to be leftist!” He even played left wing in soccer.

After Mr. Odinga returned to Kenya, he became an opposition leader, when it was incredibly dangerous to do so. In 1982, he was accused of plotting a coup against the president at the time, Daniel arap Moi and spent eight years in jail, where he was beaten and tortured.

Since then, his Marxist politics have mellowed, though he still talks a big proletarian game. He promises to focus on poverty, unemployment and corruption.

The big question is, if he wins how much will Kenya change? The economy has been humming along, with a growth rate around 7 percent and a billion-dollar-a-year tourism industry. And there is peace, which is nothing to sneeze at in a neighborhood that includes war-racked Somalia, Sudan and Congo.

Macharia Gaitho, a managing editor at The Daily Nation, Kenya’s biggest newspaper, does not think Mr. Odinga will disrupt that stability. “I see a Jekyll and Hyde character,” Mr. Gaitho said. “He can set himself up as a populist leader who responds to the masses. But on the other level he is very pragmatic. He is a businessman, with ties across all ethnic lines.”

But some voters, especially Kikuyus, argue that Mr. Odinga profits from tribalism as much as he rails against it.

“Even if Kibaki could have improved this economy by 80 percent, believe you me, the people in Raila’s tribe, they would not vote for him, because they are kinsmen,” said Andrew Macharia, who is running for a city council seat in the capital, Nairobi. “It’s a sorry state that our politics are tribal-based.”

The president’s inner circle has accused Mr. Odinga of making promises he cannot keep. Amos Kimunya, the finance minister, dismissed Mr. Odinga’s economic plans as “domonomics,” a play on the Swahili word for mouth and meaning something like “talk economics.” Mr. Odinga’s proposals “will cause debt to balloon, interest rates and inflation to rise,” Mr. Kimunya wrote in a recent opinion piece.

The neck-and-neck race between Mr. Odinga and Mr. Kibaki shows how far Kenya’s democracy has come from just a decade ago, when it was still under the grip of Mr. Moi, who has been widely criticized as a dictator and who is campaigning for Mr. Kibaki.

Today, there is a free press, 2,548 candidates running for Parliament and genuine issues separating the leading parties, like strong central government versus federalism. Electoral politics here are not saddled by the deep cynicism that dogs Nigeria, Africa’s most populous democracy, or the one-party rule of South Africa, the continent’s most developed country.

Mr. Odinga, who has been a member of Parliament for the last 15 years, has taken full advantage of Kenya’s open system and used his flair for appealing to the masses to reel in millions of Kenyans who feel marginalized by the Kikuyu elite. He has also charmed many Muslims upset at the Kibaki government’s crackdowns in Muslim areas as part of its counterterrorism campaign.

“The best way to explain this is not who is popular but who is so unpopular,” said Chweya Ludeki, a political science professor at the University of Nairobi. “Raila’s harvesting from Kibaki’s unpopularity and the perception that the president has favored his ethnic group.”

Though the cabinet includes members of many tribes, the ministries that matter — like defense, justice, finance and internal security — are all run by Kikuyus. The government’s response has been that it hires the most qualified people.

Many of Mr. Odinga’s supporters are worried that these politicians might try to steal the election. Already the government’s own human rights commission accused Mr. Kibaki’s party of using public resources, like government planes and vehicles, for campaign events.

There have also been some cheap shots. Even Mr. Odinga’s foreskin was thrown into the fray. Circumcision is a rite of passage in many tribes, including the Kikuyu, but not the Luo. If a man is not circumcised, the whisper campaign goes, then he is not a real man.

Still, Mr. Odinga draws thousands of fans to his rallies.

“Roads! Electricity! Water!” Mr. Odinga belted out.

The crowd roared. It was a jostling mass of orange — orange hats, orange T-shirts, orange shopping bags, even orange shukas, the signature cloaks Maasai herders wear. Orange is the official color of Mr. Odinga’s party, the Orange Democratic Movement, and Nalanju Punyua, a woman selling sodas, said Mr. Odinga looked fabulous in it.

“Raila’s absolutely beautiful,“ she said. “He’s a very strong man. He could walk all the way from here to Narok.“
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December 25, 2007
Cases Without Borders
Food Scarcity and H.I.V. Interwoven in Uganda
By DAVID TULLER

MBARARA, Uganda — At the AIDS clinic here, the stories are brutal. A young cattle herder, infected with H.I.V. along with his wife, tells me that all four of their children died before turning 3.

A mother of five, also infected, reports that after her marriage she was forced to have sex with her husband’s three brothers, in accordance with tribal tradition.

And most patients I meet say they and their families scramble to survive from meal to meal, never far from the edge of starvation. Many say their H.I.V. drugs have drastically increased their appetites and made them crave food even more.

“Sometimes I am so hungry,” a 44-year-old widow says. “It’s intense. My whole body is shivering from hunger. Even when I have just finished eating, I am hungry again minutes later. It’s such a problem, because I don’t always have food.”

As a journalist turned graduate student in public health, I am in Uganda for five weeks as part of a research team investigating whether “food insecurity” — a persistent difficulty in finding enough to eat — undermines the effectiveness of H.I.V. treatment.

I am interviewing dozens of patients — anonymously, as is standard in such qualitative research — about what they eat, how much food they have, whether they grow it or buy it and whether the side effects from the medications are worse if they take the pills on an empty stomach. Our team also wants to know whether costs related to treatment limit their ability to cover basic foods and whether hunger forces women to offer men “live sex,” or intercourse without condoms, in exchange for food or money.

The study is part of a collaboration between the University of California, San Francisco, and the Mbarara University of Science and Technology, a prestigious institution in this small, bustling city southwest of Kampala, the Ugandan capital. Other patients will be followed for two years to monitor how food insecurity affects their drug regimens, and illness and death rates.

Western donors have increased the distribution of antiretroviral drugs in sub-Saharan Africa. But they have done little to make sure that the recipients do not starve to death or have to choose between paying for transportation to the clinic and feeding their children. Studies like this one seek to demonstrate that packaging food aid with H.I.V. drugs or reimbursing patients for travel can actually improve health and save lives.

Uganda has been hailed for its success in reducing H.I.V. infection, with adult prevalence falling to just below 7 percent in 2005, from 15 percent in 1991. That success is not apparent from my observation post, a small corner office at the ramshackle clinic here.

Every weekday morning, more than 100 people pack the clinic. About two-thirds are women, many swathed in brilliant colors. Men often refuse to be tested or seek treatment. The patients cluster on benches in the hallways, jostling infants on their knees and waiting to see clinicians or counselors and pick up their monthly supplies of medication.

Women, in particular, confront what medical anthropologists call “structural violence,” the social, cultural and legal constraints that often rob them of control over their own and their children’s destinies.

Their accounts of beatings, neglect and rape, of unfaithful and absent husbands and boyfriends, do not exactly showcase the human male’s most appealing qualities. More than one woman tells me she became infected because her H.I.V.-positive partner had threatened her with abuse or abandonment if she refused his demands for “live sex.”

“I used to tell my husband that we should use condoms, and he outright refused,” a mother of four says in a tone more resigned than bitter. “If I wouldn’t have live sex with him, he would refuse to bring home food and take care of the children.”

Most of the respondents grow some or all of their own food or they cultivate other people’s gardens in exchange for basics. The staples are matoke, a carbohydrate-heavy mush made from green plantains, and posho, a carbohydrate-heavy mush made from maize flour. They are served with “sauce,” if available — beans, a paste made from groundnuts, or another protein source. Meat, chicken and fish are luxuries. Many families can afford them just once a year, if that.

To make ends meet, parents have to engage in a desperate triage, navigating between bad choices and worse ones.

If they let their hungry children eat everything that the family grows, they will have nothing to sell at the market. If they do not sell part of the harvest, they will not have cash for the monthly clinic trip for the medication that keeps them alive.

But every time they go to the clinic, they lose a whole day of gardening or other work and spend cash they could otherwise use for the children’s diets.

“I feel bad that I have to spend that money for transport when I could have spent it on something else,” one mother says. “And then the days I’m at the clinic, of course, I come knowing that I won’t do anything that day.”

Listening to the accounts of poverty and deprivation, I feel helpless and miserable. I promise myself I will never again take a decent meal for granted.

I want to empty out my pockets and shove dollars at every patient I interview. Instead, I buy them a cup of chai, a milky African tea, from the clinic canteen. The chai costs 300 Ugandan shillings, or 18 cents in dollars. For most, that is a luxury beyond their means.

I wonder sometimes what is the point of researching this? Why not just give food to people so obviously in need? But international donors demand data and documentation. They want proof that an intervention will reduce the total misery index before they will shell out millions of euros for new programs, even if the need appears self-evident.

I get to return home when my work here is done. I will analyze my data, write up my findings and hope that what I have done makes some small contribution to change.

The women and men I have met will trek to the clinic month after month, if they can scrape together $5 or $8 for the bus fare. They will consult with the doctor, grab their drugs from the pharmacy and wonder where they will find enough beans and matoke to feed the kids tomorrow.
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December 26, 2007
Editorial
Democracy and South Africa

The recent leadership election held by South Africa’s ruling African National Congress wasn’t pretty — democracy often isn’t — but it was an encouraging step forward.

For the first time since the A.N.C. took power after the end of apartheid, there was a serious leadership race and somebody other than the front-runner won. If democracy is to fully flower in South Africa, the A.N.C. will now need a real competition to choose its candidate for the 2009 presidential elections — and it will need to encourage other parties to get into the race.

The A.N.C.’s triumph over apartheid is an inspiration to the world, but the country is still, all these years later, effectively a one-party state — with growing problems of corruption and arrogance. It is not surprising that other parties have a hard time competing with the A.N.C., but pluralism and dissent must be encouraged.

It was good to see real politics going on inside the A.N.C. Normally, party leaders are chosen behind closed doors, and the rank and file then loyally vote for their leaders’ choice. If it had worked that way again, Thabo Mbeki, South Africa’s president and the current party leader, would have come out the winner.

Instead, Jacob Zuma, whom Mr. Mbeki fired as the country’s deputy president in 2005, waged a robust and open contest. The 3,900 delegates at last week’s party conference chose him as their new leader. Unfortunately, the bitter Mbeki-Zuma rivalry is likely to continue to roil the country.

What makes Mr. Zuma’s selection even more important — and more problematic — is that Mr. Mbeki cannot run for another term. And Mr. Zuma will almost certainly use his new position to ensure that he is the party’s next candidate for president.

Mr. Zuma is no Nelson Mandela. He is sometimes referred to as the “comeback kid” because he overcame such daunting obstacles as being charged with raping a family friend in 2006. He was acquitted. But corruption allegations linger, and South Africa’s top prosecutor said he will soon bring formal charges against Mr. Zuma.

Mr. Zuma’s supporters suspect such allegations are politically motivated. The charges must be fairly adjudicated. And for that to happen, Mr. Mbeki must distance himself from the prosecution, perhaps by bringing in an independent prosecutor, to handle the case.

South Africa and the A.N.C. should also resist assuming that Mr. Zuma is the only possible nominee and the only possible next president. There are other credible candidates. For its democracy to develop, South Africa needs an open and inclusive political system in which any candidate, whether nominated by the A.N.C. or another party, can compete.
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December 30, 2007
Riots Batter Kenya as Rivals Declare Victory
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

NAIROBI, Kenya — With the results from Kenya’s closely contested elections still up in the air and evidence growing of election mischief, riots erupted across the country on Saturday.

Columns of black smoke boiled up from the slums ringing Nairobi, the capital, as supporters of Raila Odinga, the leading presidential challenger, poured into the streets to protest what they said was a plot by the government to steal the vote.

The demonstrators clashed with police officers in riot gear and tore apart metal shanties with their bare hands. The scene replayed itself in Kisumu, Kakamega, Kajiado, Eldoret and other towns across Kenya, with several people killed.

Just 12 hours before, Mr. Odinga, a flamboyant politician and businessman, had been cruising to victory, according to preliminary results. He was leading Kenya’s president, Mwai Kibaki, by about one million votes in an election that was predicted to be the most fiercely fought in Kenya’s history and perhaps the greatest test yet of this young, multiparty democracy.

But that lead nearly vanished overnight. On Saturday morning, the gap had been cut to about 100,000 votes, with Mr. Odinga still ahead, but barely, with 47 percent of the vote compared with 46 percent for Mr. Kibaki. By Saturday night, with about 90 percent of the vote counted, Mr. Odinga’s lead had shrunk to a mere 38,000 votes.

But those results may not be valid. According to Kenya’s election commission, which is considered somewhat independent from the government, at least three areas from Mr. Kibaki’s stronghold of central Kenya reported suspiciously high numbers. In one area, Mr. Kibaki received 105,000 votes, even though there were only 70,000 registered voters. In another, the vote tally was changed, at the last minute, to give the president an extra 60,000 votes. In a third area, the turnout was reported at 98 percent.

Samuel Kivuitu, the chief of Kenya’s election commission, said his officers would investigate.

“We have powers to refuse results if they have obvious defects,” he said. He delayed announcing final results until Sunday.

Mr. Kibaki’s party denied it did anything wrong and said it had simply gained many votes from areas where the president is immensely popular.

But the sudden reversal immediately ignited suspicions, especially after results showed that many members of Parliament close to the president — including the vice president, the defense minister, the foreign minister and more than 10 other cabinet members — were voted out of office in a wave of seeming dissatisfaction with the government.

Several foreign observers said they feared that the government was using its muscle to swing the election and stay in power, which could be a recipe for chaos, with the results rejected by millions of people and Kenya’s cherished stability in danger of collapsing.

Kenya is one of the most developed countries in Africa, but this election has exposed its ugly tribal underbelly.

Mr. Odinga is a Luo, a big tribe in Kenya that feels marginalized from the country’s Kikuyu elite that has dominated business and politics since independence in 1963. Mr. Kibaki is a Kikuyu, and the voting so far has split straight down tribal lines, with each candidate winning big in his tribal homeland.

On Saturday, the first signs of a tribal war flared up in Nairobi, with Luo gangs sweeping into a shantytown called Mathare and stoning several Kikuyu residents. In Kibera, another huge slum, supporters of Mr. Odinga burnt down kiosks that they said belonged to Kikuyu businessmen.

“No Raila, no Kenya!” they screamed, with the fires crackling behind them.

The streets were a collage of destruction, strewn with burning tires, broken bottles, fist-size rocks and fresh shell casings from soldiers who fired in the air to scare the demonstrators off. Some men sharpened machetes on the asphalt, vowing to shed blood should Mr. Odinga lose.

Kikuyus responded by forming packs of vigilantes to patrol their neighborhoods. As night fell, the gangs waited on corners, armed with machetes and lengths of wood.

Many Kenyans seemed distressed about what was happening. In Kibera, one man in a suit guided a young girl, her face a mask of panic, through the embers of burning tires.

“Unless they announce the winner soon,” said Lionel Joseph Ochieng, a Kibera resident, “this will only get worse.”

Election officials seemed to feel the clock ticking. They said they were trying to count the votes from Thursday’s election as quickly as possible but that they have been hampered by logistical problems and a record turnout, possibly upward of 70 percent.

Both political parties declared victory on Saturday, saying that by their calculations they had won the most votes. But by 1 p.m., the election commission had counted only 8 million votes out of a projected 10 to 11 million. The hush inside the heavily guarded election headquarters was a marked contrast to the raging street battles not far away.

The foreign diplomats who initially praised the election as being free and fair were beginning to change their tone.

Michael E. Ranneberger, the American ambassador to Kenya, rushed to the election headquarters at midnight on Friday because he said he had heard reports about vote rigging, though he declined to provide details. He urged voters to remain calm.

“This is a time for Kenyans to come together,” he said.

The head of the European Union’s election observer mission said that several election officials in the pro-Kibaki areas of central Kenya had initially kept their poll results secret, which is against Kenyan law.

“This is something we witnessed ourselves,” said Alexander Graf Lambsdorff, chief of the European delegation. “It’s clearly disturbing.”

The European Union is also investigating the high turnouts in the Kikuyu highlands north of Nairobi, where few have broken ranks with Mr. Kibaki’s party and some areas have voted nearly 100 percent in favor of the president.

The scenario that may be unfolding is the exact one that many foreign diplomats were dreading: a questionable razor-thin margin for the president, who had been trailing in just about every pre-election poll. It is not that Mr. Kibaki, 76, is so disliked himself. He has been in government since independence and is known as a courtly gentleman and economics whiz.

But he is seen by many Kenyans as continuing an unfair political system that has favored the Kikuyu at the expense of Kenya’s 30-plus other ethnic groups. Mr. Odinga, 62, boosted his popularity by tapping into those frustrations and building a coalition of many other tribes. His party has already demanded a recount in several districts and said it will not concede defeat if it loses.
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December 31, 2007
Tribal Rivalry Boils Over After Kenyan Election
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

NAIROBI, Kenya — It took all of about 15 minutes on Sunday, after Kenya’s president was declared the winner of a deeply controversial election, for the country to explode.

Thousands of young men burst out of Kibera, a shantytown of one million people, waving sticks, smashing shacks, burning tires and hurling stones. Soldiers poured into the streets to fight them. In several cities across Kenya, witnesses said, gangs went house to house, dragging out people of certain tribes and clubbing them to death.

“It’s war,” said Hudson Chate, a mechanic here. “Tribal war.”

The dubious conclusion of the most fiercely fought election in Kenya’s history has pitched the country toward chaos. The opposition rejected the results and vowed to inaugurate its leader, Raila Odinga, as “the people’s president,” which the government warned would be tantamount to a coup. As the riots spread, the government took the first steps toward martial law on Sunday night and banned all live media broadcasts.

Western observers said Kenya’s election commission ignored undeniable evidence of vote rigging to keep the government in power. Now, one of the most developed, stable nations in Africa, which has a powerhouse economy and a billion-dollar-a-year tourism industry, has plunged into intense uncertainty, losing its sheen as an exemplary democracy and quickly descending into tribal bloodletting.

With the president, Mwai Kibaki, a Kikuyu and Mr. Odinga a Luo, the election seems to have tapped into an atavistic vein of tribal tension that always lay beneath the surface in Kenya but until now had not provoked widespread mayhem.

The news media blackout made it difficult to assess the level of popular outrage. But it was clear Sunday night that the violence was spreading.

In Mathare, a slum in Nairobi, Luo gangs burned more than 100 Kikuyu homes. In Kibera, Kikuyu families loaded their belongings in cars and fled. Almost all the businesses in the country are shut. The only figures in downtown Nairobi, the capital, which is usually choked with traffic, are helmeted soldiers hunched behind plastic shields. Oily black clouds of smoke rose from the slums, smudging out the sun. At least 15 people have been killed.

“It’s a sad day for Kenya,” said Michael E. Ranneberger, the American ambassador to Kenya. “My biggest worry now is violence, which, let’s be honest, will be along tribal lines.”

Mr. Odinga’s supporters are unleashing their frustrations about the election, which was held on Thursday and initially praised as fair, against people they suspect supported the president, namely Kikuyus. The Odinga camp urged election officials to recount the votes after exposing serious discrepancies between the results announced on the night of the election versus the numbers that were later entered into a national total.

It had been predicted that the vote would be close, and the final results had Mr. Kibaki winning by a sliver, 46 percent to 44 percent. But that gap may have included thousands of invalid ballots. The European Union said its observers witnessed election officials in one constituency announce on election night that President Kibaki had won 50,145 votes. On Sunday, the election commission increased those same results to 75,261 votes.

“The presidential elections were flawed,” said Alexander Graf Lambsdorff, the chief European observer.

Koki Muli, co-chairwoman of the Kenya Election Domestic Observation Forum, said she was in the room on Sunday when the election commission was presented with dozens of suspicious tally sheets — some missing signatures, others missing stamps — and most of them were from the president’s stronghold of central Kenya. In some areas, more people voted for the president than there were registered voters. “I saw this with my own eyes,” she said.

Ms. Muli said that 75 of the 210 constituencies — meaning more than one-third of the vote — had serious question marks and that the election chairman initially agreed to investigate. But later on Sunday he changed his mind.

Kenya is a close American ally, and a team of Western diplomats, including the American ambassador, tried for hours to persuade election officials to recount the votes. One Western ambassador said they knew that if the dubious results were certified and the president declared the winner based on them, Kenya would plunge into crisis. But the commission would not budge.

“The government was determined to hold onto power,” said the ambassador, who did not want to be identified because he said he feared reprisals from the Kenyan government.

About 4 p.m., the election commission announced at its temporary headquarters in a downtown conference center that it was ready to declare a winner. The Western ambassadors filed in, looking worn out. Dozens of soldiers lined the walls, some armed with assault rifles and tear gas. Opposition leaders began shouting. The soldiers pounced and the room erupted into chaos, with men in suits fleeing, chairs getting knocked over and the election chairman making a hurried exit, with a crowd chasing him, yelling: “We want justice! Kenya has spoken!”

The commission then reconvened — in front of reporters chosen by government officials — and declared Mr. Kibaki the winner, with 4,584,721 votes compared with 4,352,993 for Mr. Odinga — a spread of about 2 percent.

There were indeed irregularities, the commissioners said, but it was not their job to deal with them. “The judicial system provides peaceable avenues to address these complaints,” said the chairman, Samuel Kivuitu.

The opposition has not indicated if it will contest the results in Kenya’s courts, which are notoriously slow and corrupt. But it announced a swearing-in ceremony for Mr. Odinga on Monday and declare him the “people’s president.”

Officials with Mr. Kibaki’s party warned that such a move could bring consequences. “If Raila does this, he will be attempting a coup and he will get what he deserves,” said Ngari Gituku, a spokesman for the Party of National Unity, Mr. Kibaki’s party.

Mr. Odinga was jailed in the 1980s for several years for plotting a coup in Kenya and was beaten and tortured.

As for the restrictions on the news media, which many journalists said were a severe setback to what had been considered one of the freest presses in the world, Mr. Gituku said: “The only thing the president wants to do is to heal this nation, and the media is not part of that process. The media has been propagating hate.”

Mr. Kibaki was sworn in almost immediately after the results were announced. In a surreal scene, as gunfire rattled in the slums, Mr. Kibaki stood serenely with a Bible in his hand. It was as if he were talking about another election.

“We have demonstrated to the world we are politically mature,” he said. He called the vote “honest, orderly and credible.”

The election did not start out ominously. Kenyans streamed to the polls in record numbers on Thursday. Some waited for hours in lines that were miles long.

The contest was seen as a test of Kenya’s young multiparty democracy, with Mr. Kibaki, 76, representing the establishment and Mr. Odinga, 62, a new brand of politics. Mr. Kibaki has been in government since independence in 1963 and was seen by many Kenyans as continuing an unfair political system that has favored the Kikuyu at the expense of Kenya’s 30-plus other ethnic groups. Mr. Odinga, a rich businessman who campaigned as a champion of the poor, added to his popularity by tapping into those frustrations and building a coalition of many tribes.

The first batch of results showed a sweeping victory for the opposition, with Mr. Odinga ahead by one million votes on Friday. But that lead evaporated overnight, and by Saturday the race was essentially a tie.

But the sudden reversal ignited suspicions, especially after many members of Parliament close to the president were voted out of office in a wave of seeming dissatisfaction with the government.

Ms. Muli, the Kenyan election observer, said it was clear the government had rigged the election. “This country has come a long way,” she said. “And now we have been set back many miles.”
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January 1, 2008
Fighting Intensifies After Election in Kenya
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

NAIROBI, Kenya — Kenya sank deeper into trouble on Monday, with a curfew imposed in Kisumu, the country’s third-largest city, ethnic fighting intensifying and more than 100 people killed in election-related violence.

A knot of rage seems to be moving across the country, from the slums of Nairobi, the capital, to the cities along the Indian Ocean, to usually tranquil towns on the savannah. Many people are furious that President Mwai Kibaki was declared the winner on Sunday of the country’s most fiercely fought election, despite widespread evidence of ballot rigging.

After three days of rioting, some streets in Nairobi are beginning to look like war zones. Trucks filled with soldiers rumbled through a wasteland of burned cars and abandoned homes, their tires crunching over broken glass. Gangs of young men have built roadblocks between neighborhoods of the Kikuyus, Mr. Kibaki’s tribe, and the Luos, the tribe of Raila Odinga, the top opposition leader, who narrowly lost the election.

The no man’s land between them is often a single lane of potholed asphalt, patrolled by men holding huge rocks in their hands.

The election has uncorked dangerous resentment toward the Kikuyus, the privileged ethnic group of Kenya, who have dominated business and politics since independence in 1963.

Witnesses said that in some areas mobs had stopped cars and pulled out passengers. They demanded identification cards to determine whether they were Kikuyu — one can often tell by the name — and if so, they were lynched. Six Kikuyus were hacked to death in Mombasa, on Kenya’s eastern coast, Agence France-Presse reported.

The most intense fighting, though, is in western Kenya, Mr. Odinga’s stronghold, where a mix of hooliganism, political protest and ethnic violence has taken dozens of lives. The police have responded by shooting looters on sight and ordering a curfew in Kisumu, barring people from leaving home at night or walking around during the day in groups of more than two.

The Kenyan internal security minister has outlawed live television broadcasts nationwide because, he said, the coverage was inciting riots.

Many Kenyans, who take pride that their country is one of the most stable and prosperous in Africa, said they felt ashamed about the turn their nation has taken. “This is a total throwback,” said Maina Kiai, chairman of the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights. “We are going back to the days of dictatorship.”

But a lot of people have not given up on democracy. On Monday, several hundred men in a mixed Kikuyu-Luo slum held a peace march. They met in the road that divides their enclaves, distinctions nobody really cared about until a few days ago, and spoke about putting down their weapons and working out their problems.

“For all these years, we’ve been living together,” said Stanley Maina, a Kikuyu shopkeeper. “Why are we fighting now?”

One Luo man yelled out, “Let Raila and Kibaki fight! They are presidents; we are just people!”

Those in the crowd pumped their fists in the air and cheered.

The decision by Kenya’s election commission on Sunday to declare Mr. Kibaki the winner of the disputed election held Thursday has thrown the country into a crisis without an obvious solution. Western diplomats said that there was undeniable evidence of fraud at the ballot tallying level but that election officials refused to do a recount because they wanted to keep the government in power.

Mr. Kibaki, 76, faces trouble not just on the streets but in Parliament as well. More than half of his cabinet was voted out of office, and his party won about 35 seats in Parliament, compared with about 100 for the opposition.

Before the election, Mr. Kibaki was considered a courtly gentleman who stirred few passions. Now mobs of outraged voters are burning pictures of him and calling him a cheat.

It is not clear what opposition leaders will do. They had planned to hold their own inauguration on Monday and anoint Mr. Odinga, 62, the “people’s president.” But the government warned that such an event would be considered a coup and sent hundreds of riot police officers in padded suits to the Nairobi park where the ceremony was to take place. The opposition decided to postpone the ceremony until Thursday.

Mr. Odinga has rebuffed the government’s invitations to negotiate a power-sharing deal, saying that Mr. Kibaki is not the legitimate head of state. “We will bring down this government by peaceful and democratic means,” he said Monday, without specifying the means.

Western officials have become increasingly critical of the elections, and two of Kenya’s largest donors issued pointed statements on Monday. The United States, which initially congratulated Mr. Kibaki on his victory, said there were “serious problems experienced during the vote counting process” including “unrealistically high voter turnout” and “apparent manipulation of some election reporting documents.”

Canada deplored the news media blackout and said it was “very concerned about incidents of violence, and by irregularities in the post-election process and the response by Kenyan authorities.”

The mood in Nairobi was hardly festive on New Year’s Eve. Though the wealthier neighborhoods have not been hit by riots, stores were running out of food. Many people skipped parties, frightened of driving in the dark. Many roads to town were blocked by soldiers who warned drivers that if they entered the city, their cars could be burned.
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January 2, 2008
Mob Sets Kenya Church on Fire, Killing Dozens
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
NAIROBI, Kenya — Dozens of people seeking refuge in a church in Kenya were burned to death by a mob on Tuesday in an explosion of ethnic violence that is threatening to engulf this country, which until last week was one of the most stable in Africa.

According to witnesses and Red Cross officials, up to 50 people died inside the church in a small village in western Kenya after a furious crowd doused it with gasoline and set it on fire.

In Nairobi, the capital, tribal militias squared off against each other in several slums, with gunshots ringing out and clouds of black smoke wafting over the shanties. The death toll across the country is steadily rising.

Witnesses indicate that more than 250 people have been killed in the past two days in bloodshed connected to a disputed election Kenya held last week.

The European Union said Tuesday that there was clear evidence of ballot rigging, and European officials called for an independent investigation. Kenya’s president, Mwai Kibaki, who won the election by a razor-thin margin, has refused such an inquiry.

Government officials said Tuesday that they would crack down on anyone who threatened law and order, and they banned political rallies. Meanwhile, Raila Odinga, the opposition leader who lost the election, has vowed to hold a million-person march on Thursday, which many Kenyans fear could become a bloodbath.

The Kenya celebrated for its spectacular wildlife and robust economy is now a land of distress. Tens of thousands of people have fled their homes, and some are so frightened that they have crossed into Uganda.

“We’ve had tribal fighting before, but never like this,” said Abdalla Bujra, a retired Kenyan professor who runs a democracy-building organization.

As for the people burned alive in the church, Mr. Bujra echoed what many Kenyans were thinking: “It reminds me of Rwanda.”

While the bloodshed of the past few days in Kenya has fallen far short of the Rwandan genocide in 1994, many Kenyans are worried that it is spiraling out of control.

The violence has been a mix of hooliganism, political protest and ethnic bloodletting. Most of the victims have been Kikuyus, the tribe of the president and Kenya’s traditional ruling class. Kikuyus have dominated business and politics since independence in 1963. They run shops, restaurants, banks and factories across Kenya, from the Indian Ocean coast to the scenic savannah to the muggy shores of Lake Victoria in the west.

They make up only 22 percent of the population and are part of Kenya’s mosaic of roughly 40 ethnic groups, which have intermarried and coexisted for decades. But the election controversy has created a new dynamic in which many of Kenya’s other tribes, furious about the ballot rigging that may have kept Mr. Kibaki in power, have vented their frustrations against them.

“We are easy targets,” said Stephen Kahianyu, a Kikuyu, staring at the embers of his home in Nairobi that was burned to the ground on Saturday.

Over the past few days, Kikuyus have fled to police stations and churches for protection.

On Monday night, several hundred Kikuyus barricaded themselves inside the Kenya Assemblies of God church in Kiambaa, a small village near the town of Eldoret. The next morning, a rowdy mob showed up.

According to witnesses, the mob was mostly Kalenjins, Luhyas and Luos, Mr. Odinga’s tribe, which makes up about 13 percent of the population. They overran Kikuyu guards in front of the church and then pulled out cans of gasoline. There were no police officers around, witnesses said, and no water to put the fire out.

Most people escaped. But in addition to those killed, dozens were hospitalized with severe burns. Witnesses said most of the people hiding inside had been women and children.

The Eldoret area has become a killing zone. Residents say dozens of Kikuyus have been hacked to death, including four who were beheaded on Monday.

In Nairobi, a much-feared Kikuyu street gang called the Mungiki seems to be taking revenge. According to residents in a Luo area, the Mungiki, who are said to take an oath in which they drink human blood, were sweeping through the slums and killing Luos.

The government is now blaming Mr. Odinga for the violence.

“This isn’t random,” said Alfred Mutua, a government spokesman. “This is part of Raila’s plan to create hysteria and trouble and make us declare a state of emergency,” which Kenya seems to be rapidly approaching, with curfews in several areas and a ban on live news media coverage.

Western diplomats have been urging the political leaders to reconcile, but the lines between those leaders seem to be only hardening.

Mr. Odinga said he would not talk to Mr. Kibaki until the president admitted that he had lost the election.

Still, he urged his followers to calm down. “This is tarnishing our image as democratic and peaceful seekers of change,” Mr. Odinga said.

Mr. Odinga and Mr. Kibaki ran together in 2002, in what was considered Kenya’s first free election. The tribal alliance they built steamrolled Kenya’s governing party and was a watershed moment. But the two fell out soon afterward, and diplomats here said that it has been very difficult trying to broker a truce.

“We just want them to meet,” said Bo Jensen, the Danish ambassador to Kenya. “But at the moment they’re quite far from each other.”

The election did not start off badly. A record number of Kenyans, nearly 10 million, waited in lines miles long on Thursday to scratch an X next to their chosen candidate.

Mr. Kibaki, 76, vowed to keep growing Kenya’s economy, one of the strongest in Africa, partly because of its billion-dollar tourist trade. Mr. Odinga, 62, ran as a champion of the poor and promised to end the tradition of Kikuyu favoritism.

Voting followed tribal lines, with a vast majority of Luos going for Mr. Odinga and up to 98 percent of Kikuyus in some areas voting for Mr. Kibaki.

Tribes, obviously, do matter in Kenya. But for the most part, the country has escaped the widespread ethnic bloodletting that has haunted so many of its neighbors, like Rwanda, Congo, Sudan and Ethiopia. In Kenya, the Kikuyu elite has shared the spoils of the system with select members of other tribes, which has helped defuse resentment.

That has led to decades of stability and is a reason why most Kenyans, including Mr. Bujra, the retired professor, do not think their country will end up like Rwanda, where nearly one million people were killed. Clearly, Kenya is a long way from that.

“In Rwanda, the conflict was between a small minority and a large majority,” he said, referring to the history of Tutsis dominating the Hutu majority. “Here, it is different, because many tribes have a stake.”

But election time in this country, where politics and tribe are so intertwined, is often bloody. Hundreds of people were killed in tribal clashes surrounding the 1992 and 1997 elections. And this time, passions were as high as ever.

The early results showed Mr. Odinga well ahead and more than half of Mr. Kibaki’s cabinet losing their Parliament seats and therefore their jobs.

But when Mr. Odinga’s lead began to vanish as further results were announced over the weekend, his supporters suspected that something was amiss. It was slow-motion theft to them, and they began to riot.

Even before Kenya’s election commission declared Mr. Kibaki the winner on Sunday, election observers said the president’s party had changed tally sheets to reflect more votes than were cast on election day. In some areas, there were more votes for the president than registered voters.

On Tuesday, Samuel Kivuitu, the election chairman, said he had been “under undue pressure” to certify the results.

Western governments, including the United States, are calling for a vote recount.

“It’s the only way forward,” said Graham Elson, the deputy chief of the European observer delegation.

Kennedy Abwao contributed reporting from Nairobi, and Matthew L. Wald from Washington.
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Post by Admin »

As received from Nairobi [name withheld]


Ismailis have been evacuated from Kisumu today by plane, some towards Kampala and the other group towards Mwanza. That was announced in Nairobi JK tonight.

The USA Ambassador in Kenya has played the Raila Odinga card, supporting him openly. Raila Odinga has played the Tribal card. For both of them failure has been difficult to swallow.

In Kenya everyone makes stories, it is not like in the Western World [though there also they do stories some times]. They may show documents and make a show but it does not mean the document is authentic.

We are in a country where even a piece of land has sometimes several owners all with a "real" title deeds. Only the courts can decide the right from the wrong. But the opposition does not want to go to court, they are pressuring the Election commission to change the results.

Since both parties have rigged the elections, chances are that a recount will just show both of them had less votes then those reported on the official election forms for each constituency [and believe me, they may find several official contradictory forms!] and the end result will probably not change with a recount. ODM is popular and got majority of seats but Kibaki is preferred as President so no wonder he got majority of votes.

Kibaki has shown a great deal of patience and maturity. he has disallow the press to cover and to show in real times the events and massacre done by the Oppositions supporters and averted major retaliation by Kikuyus. But there are already 200+ innocent people dead, all Kikuyu's from kibaki's tribe.

Odinga has been very arrogant and inflexible, refusing to talk with Kibaki unless Kibaki accept him as president. Odinga had said before even the announcement of the results that if he is not the winner he will refuse the results and transform the country into an Ivory Coast [he has almost succeeded]. Mediation has been called. maybe Desmond Tutu.. we will see.

I have attended the Great Lake Conference, the last Comesa Conference and the East African Head of States conference in Arusha, Kibaki has always taken a lead role. I was very much impressed.

When I came to Kenya 3 years ago, there were metal detector in every hotel lobby, safety was questionable. Only 500,000 tourists a year but within 3 years, safety has returned in city center, there are no more metal detector and there are 3 times more tourists per year. All this has been washed away by opposition supporter who have recently killed hundreds and scared away the tourists. Pray for Kenya and that peace should come back fast.
unnalhaq
Posts: 352
Joined: Sat Apr 17, 2004 8:20 pm

Post by unnalhaq »

I know it is serious there but
The solution for Kenya is very simple:
Obama for President, of Kenya, of course.
He is all yours, take 'em & keep 'em [for ever]
USAID :wink:
kmaherali
Posts: 25106
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

Post by kmaherali »

January 3, 2008
Editorial
Ambition and Horror in Kenya

The murderous tribal violence that has spread through Kenya in recent days would be horrifying anywhere. It is particularly tragic to see this happening in a country that seemed finally to be on the path to a democratic and economically sound future. There may still be a chance to retrieve some of these hopes. That will likely require stepping back from the suspicious and hastily declared election results that sparked this ugly upheaval.

Officially, those results gave a second term to President Mwai Kibaki, despite independent reports of egregious irregularities. Even the chairman of Kenya’s national election commission now says that he was pressured into an early declaration and cannot say who won.

Mr. Kibaki should renounce that official declaration and the embarassingly swift swearing in that followed. He should then meet with his principal challenger, Raila Odinga, to discuss a possible vote recount, election re-run or other reasonable compromise.

That isn’t likely to happen without outside prodding. Urgent mediation by the leader of the African Union, John Kufuor, could help bring the two together before the violence gets worse. Already, more than 300 Kenyans are dead, 70,000 have been driven from their homes and thousands have fled to neighboring countries.

How different things seemed five years ago. Then Mr. Kibaki, allied with Mr. Odinga, was the democratic reformer challenging Kenya’s longtime autocratic leader Daniel arap Moi and his handpicked candidate. Mr. Moi’s reign was repressive and notoriously corrupt. International donors grew wary and despite having some of the best agricultural land, the most attractive tourist destinations and the best urban infrastructure in East Africa, Kenya’s economy stagnated.

Mr. Kibaki promised change and won in what was the freest election Kenya has ever known. Since then, he has delivered on many of his promises. Corruption is still a serious problem, but Kenya has enjoyed an expansion of free primary and secondary education, vibrant growth and important reforms of the judiciary, civil service and economy. Now, Mr. Kibaki’s apparent attempt to rig his own re-election has put these gains at grave risk.

Tribal resentments have long played a role in Kenyan politics. They flared anew after Mr. Kibaki and Mr. Odinga fell out over the spoils of the 2002 election. Mr. Kibaki comes from the long-dominant Kikuyu group, Kenya’s largest. Mr. Odinga comes from the Luo, a smaller but politically important tribe. Much of the violence of recent days has involved these two groups. In rural Eldoret, some 50 Kikuyu were burned to death inside a church where they had sought refuge. In the vast and tribally mixed urban slums of Nairobi, rival militias have been waging open warfare.

Mr. Kibaki and Mr. Odinga cannot ignore the chaos around them. No matter their personal ambitions and resentments, they must be brought together and pushed to come up with a solution that will calm their followers and restore Kenyans’ faith in their democratic system — before the damage becomes irreversible.

****


January 3, 2008
Kenya, Known for Its Stability, Topples Into Post-Election Chaos

By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
KIAMBAA, Kenya — Daniel Kibigo said he was there, hiding in the burned cornfields nearby, as the mob gleefully stuffed mattresses in front of the church’s doors and set them on fire.

He watched women try to claw their way out of the church windows as if they were drowning as the building burned all the way down, with up to 50 people inside.

“We couldn’t do anything; there were too many,” he said of the crowd that descended on the church in the paroxysm of ethnic violence that has gripped Kenya since its deeply flawed elections last week.

On Wednesday, Mr. Kibigo slowly picked through the embers, looking for whatever was left — a dented trunk here, a bicycle burned beyond recognition there, a pair of Nike children’s shoes 6 inches long.

“The violence will end,” said Mr. Kibigo, a brick mason, “when the politicians want to end it.”

But on Wednesday, the politicians seemed as far apart as ever. Western diplomats, who have been putting enormous pressure on Kenya’s government and opposition leaders to negotiate and bring an end to the bloodletting that has killed more than 300 people in the past three days, said the two sides remained locked in a standoff.

“The government is not backing down, and neither is the opposition,” said one Western diplomat on Wednesday, speaking anonymously because negotiations were still under way. “It doesn’t look good.”

Within the span of a week, one of the most developed, promising countries in Africa has turned into a starter kit for disaster. Tribal militias are roaming the countryside with rusty machetes, neighborhoods are pulling apart, and Kenya’s economy, one of the biggest on the continent, is unraveling — with fuel shortages rippling across East Africa because the roads in Kenya, a regional hub, are too dangerous to use. Roadblocks set up by armed men, something synonymous with anarchic Somalia, have cropped up across the country, in towns on the savannah and in the cramped slums.

Kenya’s president, Mwai Kibaki, who was declared the victor by a narrow margin on Sunday despite widespread evidence of ballot rigging, has rejected the opposition’s offers for outside mediation.

“Are we in a civil war? Is this Somalia? Is this Darfur?” said Alfred Mutua, Mr. Kibaki’s spokesman. “Our problem is with some hooligans. And we can take care of it.”

As for the opposition, its most recent proposal was a joint government for three months and then a new election, which the government roundly rejected.

Adding to the incendiary atmosphere, Raila Odinga, the opposition figure who said he was robbed of the presidency, has vowed to go ahead with a million-person rally in the capital, Nairobi, on Thursday. The government has said the rally is illegal, and busloads of police officers in helmets and padded suits have begun to muster downtown.

“We want to appeal directly to the people,” Mr. Odinga said on Wednesday. Many Kenyans are worried the rally will turn into an enormous brawl.

The Bush administration said that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was calling both sides to urge them to do everything they could to end the violence, and the United Nations issued a statement on Wednesday saying that Ban Ki-moon, the secretary general, was “concerned with the deteriorating humanitarian situation, as large numbers of people have been displaced by the violence.”

The Red Cross estimates that nearly 100,000 people have fled their homes. Some have even crossed into Uganda. Kenya historically has been a country that accepts refugees, not creates them.

The fighting is especially brutal in the Rift Valley, which is ethnically divided between tribes that support the president and tribes that back the opposition.

In Kiambaa, a village in the Rift Valley about a five-hour drive from Nairobi, the tensions boil down to Kalenjin, the biggest tribe in this area, and Luo, the tribe of Mr. Odinga, versus Kikuyu, Mr. Kibaki’s tribe.

It was Kikuyus who were burned to death on Tuesday in the Kenya Assemblies of God church. The church was simple, made of mud and sticks, and about the size of a tennis court.

Over the weekend, several hundred Kikuyus sought refuge here. The election was on Thursday, and serious trouble started on Saturday, when the first signs of ballot rigging emerged. Members of the Luo and other tribes across Kenya, who had been encouraged by many pre-election polls to believe that Mr. Odinga would win the presidency, began to riot and lash out at Kikuyus as the news spread that Kikuyu government officials had turned in dubious election results.

In Nairobi, the slums exploded, with crowds hurling rocks at police officers and burning down Kikuyu businesses. In the Rift Valley, where the tawny veldt meets lush green farms, and mountains loom on both sides, Kalenjins and Luos began hunting down the outnumbered Kikuyus.

Kenya is a mosaic of some 40 tribes, and for most of its history, they have intermarried and gotten along fine. That is one reason the country has enjoyed decades of stability, avoiding the turbulent fate of neighbors like Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan and Rwanda. But this election, the first competitive one between political heavyweights from different tribes, seems to have cracked open a new divide.

“As soon as we heard about the Kalenjins coming, we brought our people to the church,” said John Njorge, a Kikuyu. “A church is supposed to be safe.”

Most of those who packed inside were women and children. Because it was so crowded, they left their belongings outside. On Wednesday, the mattresses, belts, shoes, pots and pans were still there, strewn in the grass. Their owners were nowhere to be found.

The Kikuyu are Kenya’s biggest tribe at 22 percent of the population. They are concentrated in central Kenya, but because they were the tribe favored by the British during colonial times, they became the privileged class and branched out across the country, running shops, restaurants, banks and factories. In the Rift Valley, many Kikuyus have small businesses and farms.

James Kimemia sells watches. He says he has never swung a machete in his life. But on Sunday, he was recruited by fellow Kikuyus to guard the church. He was given a rusty blade and told to be ready. He is 20 years old and thin.

“But I was ready,” he said.

The men slept during the day in nearby farms and patrolled around the church at night. After the election results were announced on Sunday, they went on high alert. Mobs across Kenya began massacring Kikuyus after Mr. Kibaki was declared the winner, with a 2-percentage-point advantage. In Eldoret, a big town near here, four Kikuyus were beheaded.

On Tuesday morning, Mr. Kimemia, Mr. Kibigo and their fellow guards woke up to screaming. They could not tell if the sounds were war cries or panic. It seems now they were both.

They ran to the church and found it surrounded by a mob, of mostly Kalenjins and Luos, they said.

“We threw rocks at them,” Mr. Kimemia said.

But rocks were not enough. Several witnesses said the mob numbered around 800 people. They were pumped up young men, armed with machetes, slingshots, bows and arrows and thick, 18-inch sticks, sharpened at both ends. Some of the sticks were still stuck in the ground on Wednesday.

“You can use these as a club or a spear,” Mr. Kibigo explained, extracting one from the earth and examining its points.

The Kikuyu guards said they flung themselves at the attackers but were repulsed. Mr. Kibigo said his brother, George, was slashed in the neck and died. The mob closed in. The guards fled. They said they were powerless to stop what happened next.

Mr. Njorge, a bicycle taxi driver, said the mob threw mattresses in front of the church doors so no one could get out. Then the young men set them on fire. The mattresses were made from foam. The fire quickly grew.

As the mud walls began to crumble, Mr. Njorge said, he watched one woman with a baby strapped to her back try to squeeze out a window.

“Her head caught on fire,” he said. She lived, he said, but she dropped her baby behind her.

A disabled man named Mwangi, known in the village as a decent shoe cobbler and a great conversationalist, also tried to escape. He made it out of the window but could not run fast because of a lame leg.

“The mob got him right there,” Mr. Kibigo said, stabbing a finger toward a spot in the cornfield.

Policemen showed up a few hours later. In rural areas, there are few. They helped collect the bodies. The Red Cross said at least 18 people died, but several witnesses said the number was closer to 50.

On Wednesday a truckload of officers escorted some of the Kikuyu men back to the church to collect what was salvageable.

Mr. Kibigo said he still felt scared. “I am fed up with life,” he said.
kmaherali
Posts: 25106
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

Post by kmaherali »

There is a related multimedia linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/04/world ... ?ref=world
January 4, 2008
Kenyan Riot Police Turn Back Rallying Protesters
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

NAIROBI, Kenya — Nairobi degenerated into violence again on Thursday, as riot police officers used tear gas, batons and water cannons to push back thousands of opposition supporters who poured into the streets to answer a call for a million-person rally that had been banned by the government.

But later in the day, Kenya’s attorney general broke ranks with the president and insisted on an independent investigation into disputed election results. It was the first clear indication of the growing divide not just on the streets but also within Kenya’s government about how to resolve a crisis that has ignited chaos and ethnic fighting across the country, killing more than 300 people in the past four days.

Starting about 10 a.m., protesters burned tires, smashed windows and clashed with the police across this capital.

Some demonstrators showed restraint, yelling to the rowdier members in their ranks, “Drop your stones!” Others tore through the slums, witnesses said, raping women and attacking people with machetes. The body of one young man who had been hacked to death lay in a muddy alley. His face was covered with plastic bags and his shoes had been stolen.

The trouble even spilled into the garden of the Serena Hotel, one of the fanciest in town. Guests in safari vests watched the turmoil from the balconies of their $400-a-night rooms. Police officers in padded suits charged a scrum of demonstrators and fired tear gas. As soon as the acrid smoke wafted up, the tourists ducked inside.

“This country is going to burn!” a protester yelled.

It has been a week since Kenyans went to the polls in the most highly contested elections in the country’s history, and the dispute over whether Mwai Kibaki, the president, honestly won the most votes continues to destabilize the nation.

The government and opposition leaders blame each other for the bloodshed, trading accusations of genocide and ethnic cleansing. They have set such strict conditions on negotiating that nothing — including the entreaties of Western ambassadors, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the cries of their own people — has succeeded in getting talks started.

Kenya’s two biggest newspapers printed the identical banner headline on Thursday: “Save Our Beloved Country.”

Kenya’s attorney general, Amos Wako, said on Thursday afternoon that an independent body should investigate the disputed vote tabulations, which gave the president, at the 11th hour of the counting process, a razor-thin margin of victory. Western officials and opposition leaders have been calling for such an inquiry.

However, it is not clear if Mr. Kibaki will agree to this. A few hours after the attorney general spoke, the president reiterated at a news conference that he had won the elections fair and square and would not relinquish power.

“I will personally lead this nation in healing,” he said.

Alfred Mutua, the government’s top spokesman, said that Mr. Wako was merely making a suggestion and that an independent investigation into election irregularities “was not necessarily going to happen.”

“The president prefers the court system,” Mr. Mutua said, meaning the opposition could file a complaint in court, which most people here think is futile. But, he added, “the president has nothing to hide.”

Foreign diplomats have been meeting day and night to find a way to ease tension between Mr. Kibaki and Raila Odinga, the top opposition leader, who says he was cheated out of the presidency.

Until last week, Kenya was one of the most promising countries on the continent, but the ethnic violence, fueled by political passions, is threatening to ruin that reputation. The economy, one of the biggest in Africa, has ground to a halt. Roads are blocked. Shops are closed. Factories are idle. The currency, the Kenyan shilling, is taking a dive.

The World Bank said on Thursday that the unrest threatened Kenya’s impressive recent economic growth and poverty reduction, citing business leaders’ estimates that the country was losing some $30 million a day.

And the ills here are hurting the entire region. Gas stations in Rwanda are now rationing fuel because their supply from Kenya has been cut. In Uganda, Sudan and Congo, displaced people are running low on food because United Nations relief trucks cannot get past vigilante checkpoints. Production in places like Tanzania is slowing because materials that come from Kenya have not arrived.

“Kenya is the dynamo of this whole region,” said Harvey Rouse, a diplomat for the European Union.

Mr. Rouse spoke from a hill overlooking an enormous slum where the police were battling protesters.

The slum, named Kibera, has become the protesters’ stage. Every morning, journalists take their spots on the hillside, police officers line up at the mouth of a road leading from the shanties to the glass towers downtown and protesters mass in the streets, screaming slogans, lighting fires and burning pictures of the president. On Thursday it was an effigy stuffed with greasy rags.

Thursday was supposed to be the day that Mr. Odinga’s supporters rallied in downtown Nairobi at a place called Uhuru Park. But they never got close.

The government has banned all political rallies, and thousands of riot police officers fanned out at dawn to seal off the main routes into the city. They refused to let any demonstrators pass.

Many of the protesters seemed harmless, like the hundreds of women carrying palm leaves and walking barefoot to town. They were chased away, choking on tear gas and clawing at their eyes.

Others’ intentions were not so clear. One young protester crouched in the street with a green leaf, the sign of peace, in one hand and a rock in the other.

“We have been patient long enough!” he yelled.

It is difficult to tell which way things are going here. In the past two days, there have been no big attacks, like the one on Tuesday in which up to 50 people hiding in a church were burned alive in a village in the west. But reports from the provinces indicate the killings are still going on.
kmaherali
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Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

Post by kmaherali »

January 5, 2008
Opposition Seeks New Vote as Violence Ebbs in Kenya
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

NAIROBI, Kenya — If the price of cabbage is any indicator, things here in Kenya’s capital may be edging back to normal.

Before last week’s election, a head of cabbage in Mathare, an enormous slum, cost 15 shillings, or about 20 cents. After the much-debated results were announced on Sunday and the country exploded into chaos, cabbage prices doubled. By Thursday, as the police tear-gassed protesters in the streets and gangs from opposing tribes hacked one another to death — some of it right here in the sour-smelling, garbage-strewn footpaths of Mathare — cabbage prices shot up to 100 shillings.

But on Friday, many shops opened up for the first time since election day and the price of cabbage dropped to 50 shillings. Not normal, for sure, but better than it was, which seems to be the story in many parts of the country.

“A few days ago things were very, very bad,” said Dominick Mutuku, who runs a small restaurant in Mathare and was hit in the head with a rock over the weekend. “But now it’s over.”

Kenya’s crisis is probably not over, though many Kenyans clearly wish it was, but for the first time in a week tensions have cooled somewhat. The overnight death toll on Friday, according to local news reports, was fewer than 10, compared with the more than 300 people killed in a few shocking days of violence earlier this week.

Politically, some space seems to be opening up as well. Mwai Kibaki, the president who narrowly won re-election, and Raila Odinga, the opposition leader who contends that the government rigged the results, have yet to meet or even agree on how to do so. They are still negotiating about negotiating.

But the government on Friday said that it would hold a new election — as opposition leaders are demanding — if a court so ordered. And Mr. Odinga has dropped his insistence that before any talks take place, the government admit to rigging. Just a few days ago, Mr. Odinga accused the president of pulling off a “civilian coup.” Now Mr. Odinga says he will consider some type of power-sharing arrangement with Mr. Kibaki.

“We want a revote, but we are not being so rigid as saying that is the only option,” said Salim Lone, a spokesman for Mr. Odinga.

Alfred Mutua, the government’s top spokesman, said Friday, “We are willing to talk with anybody.”

But Mr. Mutua reiterated the government’s stance against having those talks mediated by outsiders. Opposition leaders are confident that foreign mediators will side with them. Already, the European Union, the United States, Japan and just about every major donor to Kenya have said that the presidential election results were deeply flawed. That may be why the Kenyan government has refused to sit down with a foreign mediator and why Kenyan officials put the brakes on a visit from the president of Ghana, who was planning to fly in earlier this week.

“This is a Kenya problem, and we can solve it ourselves,” Mr. Mutua said.

That said, the government has been willing to entertain some high-profile foreign visitors eager to get Kenya back to its old self as one of Africa’s most stable countries and a regional economic powerhouse. Mr. Kibaki met with the retired South African archbishop Desmond Tutu on Friday to discuss options for reconciliation. And Jendayi Frazer, the American assistant secretary of state for African affairs and the highest ranking Western official to come to Kenya since the unrest began, was scheduled to land in Nairobi on Friday night and meet with Mr. Odinga and Mr. Kibaki over the weekend.

Obviously, there are still political differences. Mr. Odinga and Mr. Kibaki both insist that they won the election. The opposition controls the most seats in Parliament, and more than half of Mr. Kibaki’s cabinet was voted out of office. Accommodation will have to be made if the government is going to accomplish anything in the next five years, the length of the presidential term.

Of more concern, though, are the tribal issues. This election stirred up strong undercurrents of ethnic-based hatred that will not recede any time soon. Mr. Kibaki is a Kikuyu, known as Kenya’s privileged tribe, and Mr. Odinga is a Luo, a tribe that has long felt marginalized. The voting followed mostly tribal lines. After Mr. Kibaki was declared the winner, despite disputed vote tabulations that gave the president a razor-thin margin of victory at the 11th hour of the counting process, Luos and members of other tribes lashed out at Kikuyus. Mobs swept through towns across the country, looting Kikuyu stores, attacking Kikuyus and in one case burning to death up to 50 Kikuyu women and children who were taking refuge in a church.

Thousands of Kikuyus have evacuated ethnically mixed areas and are streaming back to central Kenya, their homeland and a Kibaki stronghold. Aid officials said more than 100,000 people had been displaced. Many are still scared.

“Kenya has changed,” said Francis Mwaniki, a Kikuyu who said gangs destroyed his home. He has no plans to go back.

But in Kisii, a town in western Kenya that had been the scene of brutal clashes among tribes, people returned to work. For the first time in a week, farmers were loading bananas and lettuce into trucks bound for Nairobi. In Mombasa, Kenya’s biggest port, several hundred people demonstrated outside a mosque and the police fired tear gas at them. But fuel and freight were beginning to flow again, which is crucial for the rest of East Africa.

In the Eldoret area, where the church was burned, the town was still tense, residents said, but no episodes of violence were reported.

Mathare, the giant slum, seemed to represent the national mood. Things were hardly cheery here. Two bodies were found by the river on Friday morning, and dozens of families were still camped out by an air force base seeking protection.

But the stores were open and the streets full, and Chuck Norris movies were playing again on Biashara Street.

“We want to go back to normal,” said Anthony Irungu, a shopkeeper, as he put a fresh coat of green paint on his stall. “We are trying.”
kmaherali
Posts: 25106
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

Post by kmaherali »

There is a related moving multimedia linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/world ... ?th&emc=th

January 6, 2008
Kenyan City Is Gripped by Violence
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
KISUMU, Kenya — Oginga Odinga Street, the main thoroughfare in town, is a testament to rage.

Dozens of stores have been looted, torched and smashed by rioters and then picked clean by an army of glue-sniffing street children searching for whatever was left. The scorched Ukwala supermarket looks as if a bomb blew up inside it. The gates of Zamana Electronic are mangled.

People here say this is just the beginning.

“We will never surrender!” yelled a man who attended a rally for opposition leaders on Saturday.

“We want guns, guns!” another man added.

While much of Kenya is trying to get back to normal after a week of post-election violence that has claimed more than 300 lives nationwide, Kisumu, Kenya’s third-largest city, is still quivering with anger. Few places have been so thoroughly gutted by the turbulence as here.

With Kenya’s leaders still at an impasse despite the efforts of Jendayi E. Frazer, the American assistant secretary of state for Africa who met with both sides on Saturday, it looks as if the tensions will linger dangerously for some time.

Kisumu is the stronghold of Raila Odinga, the opposition leader who said he had been cheated out of the presidency, and the town’s main street is named after his father, a local hero.

The people here followed the election so closely that they remember the precise hour last weekend, on Saturday, when the vote count suddenly changed, and Mwai Kibaki, Kenya’s president, went from trailing badly to winning with a suspiciously thin margin of victory.

The town exploded, and a furious mob stormed up Oginga Odinga street. The biggest businesses are now in ashes. Fuel, food and cellphone credit are in short supply. And around 2,000 people from Mr. Kibaki’s tribe, the Kikuyu, are camped out at the police station, trying to escape a wave of revenge killings.

“If I stay here, I’ll be lynched,” said Waweru Mburu, a Kikuyu, as he nervously waited outside a supermarket, one of the two open in this town of half a million people. His wife had been waiting for hours, trying to buy milk.

Trucks carrying Kikuyu and evacuees from another tribe, the Kisii, many of whom supported Mr. Kibaki, are jeered at as they pull out of town. Those doing the jeering are mostly Luo, like Mr. Odinga, who live here in great numbers.

“Traitors!” some Luo shouted on Saturday as a truck passed.

People on both sides said the tensions would not ease as long as Kenya’s political leaders refused to even speak to each other, which has been the situation since the election on Dec. 27.

On Saturday, Mr. Kibaki indicated that he was ready to form “a government of national unity.” Mr. Odinga did not reject that outright but said he would not entertain any offers until the two sides sat down in the presence of foreign mediators.

The government initially rebuffed outside help, but seems to have relented slightly and sent a diplomat to Ghana to discuss a role for the African Union, according to Reuters.

Ms. Frazer met separately with Mr. Kibaki and Mr. Odinga and urged them to work together to solve the crisis, which has dented Kenya’s image as one of the most stable countries in Africa and could cause permanent economic damage if peace is not restored soon.

It seems that momentum is growing toward negotiations. “There is slow progress being made,” said Salim Lone, a spokesman for Mr. Odinga.

Kenyans are waiting. Some areas, like the capital, have quieted down considerably. In the Rift Valley, the area most torn by violence, fewer killings have been reported in the past few days, but tens of thousands of people are displaced and in need of food.

In Kisumu, the killings have stopped, for the most part. But the banks are running out of money, few stores are open and the looting continues.

There is some opportunism to all this. The rage that swept through town was selective, striking at electronics shops, cellphone kiosks and shoe stores but leaving the drapery dealer alone.

On Saturday, Monica Awino tiptoed through the shattered interior of a Bata footwear store. Glass was everywhere. She used to work here and now is out of a job at the best time of year. No after-Christmas or back-to-school sales for her.

“I’m angry at everybody,” she said.

Up the street, Bernard Ndede, a high school English teacher, watched street children carefully sift through inches of rubble on the floor of a charred supermarket, as if they were urban archaeologists.

He said he did not approve of the looting, but he understood the anger.

“People woke up so early that day to vote for change,” he said, referring to election day and the millions of people who voted for Mr. Odinga. “They felt robbed.”

For some, the disappointment was lethal. On Saturday, Albert Ojonyo, an insurance agent, went to the city morgue to pick up the body of his brother, Daniel. More than 40 people were killed here in election-related violence. Many bodies have not been identified and wait in a sweltering room under strips of red cloth with their feet poking out.

Mr. Ojonyo said his brother, who was 27, had been shot in the head, most likely by police officers trying to quell the rioters.

“Daniel felt very strongly about these elections,” he said. “Afterward, he was a very bitter boy.”
kmaherali
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Post by kmaherali »

January 7, 2008
Kenya Kikuyus, Long Dominant, Are Now Routed
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
NAKURU, Kenya — Kenya’s privileged tribe is on the run.

Over the past few days, tens of thousands of Kikuyus, the tribe of Kenya’s president, have packed into heavily guarded buses to flee the western part of the country because of ethnic violence. On Sunday, endless convoys of buses — some with their windshields smashed by rocks — crawled across a landscape of scorched homes and empty farms.

It is nothing short of a mass exodus. The tribe that has dominated business and politics in Kenya since independence in 1963 is now being chased off its land by machete-wielding mobs made up of members of other tribes furious about the Dec. 27 election, which Kenya’s president, Mwai Kibaki, won under dubious circumstances. In some places, Kikuyus have been hunted down with bows and arrows.

The hospital in Nakuru, a town in the Rift Valley, is full of Kikuyu men with deep ax wounds, fingers cut off and slash marks across their faces.

“It was the Kalenjin,” said Samuel Mburu, a Kikuyu farmer with rows of stitches in his head, when asked who had nearly killed him. The Kalenjin are one of the bigger tribes in the Rift Valley, and they have fought fiercely with the Kikuyus before, mostly over land.

Many Kalenjin are unapologetic. Robert Tutuny, a Kalenjin farmer, stood on a hillside on Sunday with an iron bar in his hands and looked down at the charred remains of a Kikuyu village that was razed a week ago.

“We hate these people,” Mr. Tutuny said.

The election — and the unresolved battle about who won — has ignited old tensions in Kenya, which in a week and a half has gone from being one of Africa’s most promising countries to another equatorial trouble zone.

The political impasse continued Sunday, with Jendayi E. Frazer, the American assistant secretary of state for African affairs, meeting again with opposition leaders and government officials, but no resolution was in sight.

The heavy fighting that claimed more than 300 lives last week has subsided and many people have gone back to work in the capital, Nairobi. There, people from different tribes live side by side and often work in the same office. They are aware of ethnic differences and sometimes joke about them, but it usually does not go further than that.

But out here — where little towns rise from the veld like mirages and where there is so much wide-open space it seems incongruous to fight over land — these differences matter. A tribal war is shaping up between the Kalenjin, who mostly support Kenya’s opposition leaders, and the Kikuyus, who voted heavily — up to 98 percent in some areas — for the president.

Tens of thousands of Kikuyus are camped out at police stations and churches for protection, waiting for buses guarded by military escorts to evacuate them to the central highlands, the traditional Kikuyu homeland. There, amid the lush tea fields and rolling green hills, they are safe because almost everyone who lives in the highlands is Kikuyu.

Ethnic conflict is now threatening the decades of stability that has set Kenya apart from so many of its neighbors, like Congo, Rwanda, Somalia and Sudan. But Kenya has struggled with ethnic violence before. Its rare bursts usually come around election time.

“You have to understand that these issues are much deeper than ethnic,” said Maina Kiai, chairman of the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights.

“They are political,” he said, and “they go back to land.”

The last time the Rift Valley was this violent was in 1992, another election year in Kenya and a time of turbulent transition between dictatorship and democracy. Kalenjin militias, stirred up by politicians who told them that the valley was Kalenjin ancestral land, massacred hundreds of Kikuyus in a bid to steal their farms.

Since then, Mr. Kiai said, “Emotions have been festering, resentments have been building and we sat around pretending ethnicity didn’t exist.”

Kenya has more than 40 tribes, but the Kikuyus have almost always been on top. They run shops, restaurants, banks and factories across the country. One reason Mr. Kibaki has engendered so much resentment from other tribes is because many of the top officials in his government — including the ministers of defense, justice, finance and internal security — are Kikuyus.

The Kikuyus are the biggest tribe in Kenya but far from a majority, at 22 percent of the population. The Kalenjins make up about 12 percent.

In the Rift Valley, the anti-Kikuyu grudge goes back to independence, when the British government bought out Britons who owned huge, picturesque farms. But instead of redistributing that land to the impoverished people who had lived here for centuries, like the Kalenjin and Masai, the newly formed Kenyan government, led by Jomo Kenyatta, a Kikuyu, gave much of it to Kikuyus from other areas.

Most of the Kikuyus here are hardly rich. The men lying on bloody sheets at the Nakuru hospital are emaciated farmers with threadbare clothes. The same goes for the Kikuyus who have been slaughtered by gangs of opposing tribes in Nairobi’s slums, causing an exodus from there, too. They lived in iron shanties just as their non-Kikuyu neighbors do.

But in many cases, the Kikuyus own kiosks or small patches of land or they are related to someone who does, and that makes them a little better off by local standards.

“Land is very important to us,” said Anthony Kirunga, a Kikuyu, who sells spare car parts in Nakuru. “It’s not our fault that other people are jealous.”

This election stirred up anti-Kikuyu jealousies like never before. Raila Odinga, the top opposition candidate and a member of the Luo tribe, built his campaign on a promise to end Kikuyu favoritism and share the fruits of Kenya’s growing economy with all tribes.

Early election results had him way ahead and his party winning the most seats in Parliament. But at the 11th hour of the vote-tallying process last Sunday, Mr. Kibaki surged. Election observers have said the president’s party rigged the results to stay in power.

Millions of opposition supporters across Kenya were outraged. Not only did their candidate lose, but it also seemed to them that their system, which until the election had been celebrated as one of the most vibrant democracies in Africa, had cheated them.

In western Kenya, where Kikuyus are vastly outnumbered, they became easy targets. In Kisumu, the third-largest city in the country, Luos went on a rampage, burning down Kikuyu shops and ransacking the downtown.

In the Rift Valley, Kalenjin gangs stormed Kikuyu farms. Police officers seemed reluctant to intervene. Dozens of Kikuyus were massacred, including up to 50 women and children hiding in a church who were burned alive. What has kept the death toll from rising even higher is the fact that few people here have guns; most of the clashes have been fought with clubs, knives and stones.

Jeremiah Mukuna, 75, a Kikuyu farmer, was attacked by a Kalenjin mob last Monday while he was sitting on the porch of his shack, his family said. His head was split open with an ax. On Sunday, he lay in a coma in the Nakuru hospital, taking short, shallow breaths.

His wife, Grace, said she was leaving the Rift Valley.

“I will never come back,” she said.
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