Not Kenya Too!

Recently, Kenyan opposition leader, Raila Odinga, has been accused by Kenyan Justice Minister, Martha Karua, of carrying out, along with his supporters, a systematic ethnic cleansing. With this news, I had to go back and find out what's going on here, because Kenya is the US's closest African ally and has built a reputation for being civil and stable.

What I got from my research in essence, was that both Odinga from the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM), and Mwai Kibaki, from the Party of National Unity, both ran for Presidency (along with other, barely mentioned candidates). The poles for months had Odinga in a slight lead, but on December 27, 2007; the elections were held, and under "controversial circumstances" Kibaki was determined the winner. Odinga accused Kibaki of fraud and of course, this is when violence, now televised worldwide, broke out.

In the three weeks since the election, more than 600 people have died in this violent protest and at least 250,000 people have been driven from their homes. But who in the world is to blame for all of this needless death and destruction? According to Karua, in an interview with BBC, she believes that Odinga's ODM party was "planning mayhem if they lost."

This turn of post-election events has me wondering if the outbreak of civil unrest is contagious as I ponder on the warring history of the continent with genocidal examples of Rwanda and now Sudan, the anarchy in neighboring Somalia and countless other civil wars.

Odinga and his crew claim to stand for change against Kenya's status quo, claiming that the allegations of the "calculatedly planned ethnic cleansing" Karua adamantly accuses him of are "outrageous," and it is the police who are acting on government orders to shoot particular members of certain ethnic communities. I'm not taking sides here at all, I'm just trying to wrap my mind around the facts. And one fact is, I did watch on television as one of the CNN correspondents was shot in the back with a tear gas can by Kenyan police. Surly here, the order not just to keep the peace, as I have read in other accounts, that this is what they claim to be doing. The reporter here was simply reporting a story into a camera.

The Los Angeles Times has reported that of the estimated 600 killed since the beginning of these violent protests most have been shot in the head. Some witnesses have even reported that the police have been shooting into crowds, which of course the police have denied, though the police have stated that they have shot people to protect others as the angry crowds have targeted each other.

It the police being truthful? Does the Odinga camp have a latent agenda? Plotting a coup? Initiating a genocide? Nothing is certain at the moment, and with the sudden destabilization of the country, the smoke won't be clear anytime soon. Which is so unfortunate, because so many more will die today.