In Naivasha, the centre of Kenya’s flower industry, hundreds of people from rival communities confronted each other. About 1,000 people armed with machetes, clubs and rocks retreated only when a handful of police fired live bullets into the air.
In the worst incident of the latest flare-up, eight people were burned to death while locked inside one house in Naivasha.
The atmosphere of lawlessness was heightened when two Germans, a resident businessman and a tourist, were battered to death by a gang of robbers. The robbers followed the pair to their apartment in southeast Kenya’s Diana beach resort and killed with crude weapons, police said.
Over 70 people were killed at the weekend in the Rift Valley amid fears that violence is escalating out of control. In the usually peaceful Rift Valley towns, gangs from rival communities have been fighting each other with machetes, clubs and bows and arrows.
Attacks in the immediate aftermath of President Mwai Kibaki’s win were mainly against his Kikuyu tribe — the largest and richest in Kenya — but members of that group, including the outlawed Mungiki gang, have begun fighting back, Kenyans say.
In Kisumu, an opposition stronghold, several thousand people took to the streets to complain about the deaths of members of their Luo ethnic community in the Rift Valley.
“People are mad at killings of Luo in Naivasha yesterday (Sunday). The police are firing teargas and shooting in the sky. But there are so many rioters, the police cannot handle them,” Eric Odhiambo, a motorcycle-taxi driver said.
Annan mediating
Kofi Annan, the former UN secretary general who is trying to mediate between the government and the opposition, visited troublespots in the Rift Valley over the weekend. He said the crisis had gone well beyond an electoral dispute and denounced it as “gross and systematic” human rights abuses.
Negotiators led by Annan have told the rival camps of Kibaki and the opposition leader, Raila Odinga, to select four representatives each and study a blueprint for further talks in the next 24 hours, an official involved in the mediation said.
But residents in Naivasha harboured little faith in negotiations. “Those people shouting for Raila, they don't want peace. They have been killing our people, burning our houses,” said David Gitonga, a Naivasha resident.
The Foreign Office minister Lord Malloch-Brown warned that Kenya was in danger of “falling over the edge” because of escalating violence.
The Africa minister, who has spoken to Kenya’s political leaders during his visit, said he was trying to get them take Annan’s mediation seriously and to recognise the scale of the crisis.
While public anger was sparked initially by the presidential vote, which local and foreign observers said was flawed, rivalries over land, business and power dating back to Kenya’s 1963 independence have fuelled the violence.
