Mapping Violence and Probability in Kenya

03Feb08

In today’s New York Times online, in an article buried beneath front page stories on the U.S. primaries, the Super Bowl, and the use of DNA to find lost World War II soldiers, you can read an AP piece about the continuing violence in Kenya.

Beyond the obvious lack of attention being paid to the crisis in the U.S. media, a lack not shared by more internationally aware counterparts like the BBC or Le Monde, U.S. coverage of the violence in Kenya has abated in scope and depth since Kofi Annan and other international figures have stepped into the fray and begun negotiations between President Kibaki and opposition leader Raila Odinga. Violence has been a part of daily life in Kenya since its highly disputed presidential election took place at the end of December.

According to the Associate Press, “Former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan brokered a deal between Kibaki and Odinga on Friday laying out a plan to end the violence before moving onto the tougher political issues at the root of the fighting. Annan said it should take two weeks to decide the immediate crisis and up to a year for the deeper problems.”

Some thought that the relative lack of violence during the opposition’s Nairobi rally in early January showed that the violence was lessening while a democratic negotiation process was growing. Yet several days later, the opposition tried again, this time with three days of planned protests. Violence swept through the city and its slums again as the police fired live rounds into the crowds and hundreds of homes and businesses burned; international agencies called the site “a massacre” in which over 30 people died from the excess use of force. A rally intended to protest the deaths was called off, however, by request of Kofi Annan.

“Two weeks to end the immediate crisis and up to a year for the deeper problems” – though the timetable seems clear and even somewhat possible if a full-fledged peacekeeping force is allowed into the country, the statement treats the violence as a superficial symptom of deeper, more entrenched political problems. Given the past month of violence throughout Kenya, and the growing organization among those perpetuating it, a two week period seems unlikely to bring the necessary peace.

But what is more troubling than flawed timetables is the tone surrounding this increasingly violent crisis – a tone that treats violence as a vague detail, offering passing commentary about the number of homes burned or the rising death toll, without providing sufficient or even approximate information about the nature and intensity of that violence. This should raise concern if for no other reason than that violence like this is more than an indicator of other social and political problems; it feeds upon itself and has become its own progenitor.

The indicators came swift and fast. Within the first few days of the conflict, the use of pangas (machetes) was commonly cited as the weapon of choice for those claiming to represent the opposition. The police force and arm of the presidency have used guns for the most part. While the initial marks of violence seemed generalized – such as looting and burning – and thus less indicative of a particular goal, news that President Kibaki’s Kikuyu tribespeople were the targets of much violence gave the crisis its early taste of ethnic predetermination. Retaliation by Kikuyu and police has similarly occurred upon ethnic lines, varying depending on location. (The Kikuyu are approximately 20 percent of the population; Raila Odinga’s Luo tribe and others have protested for years against the Kikuyu’s domination of politics and the local economy, factors to which Kofi Annan pointed as the deeper roots of this conflict.)

Below are some of the forms of violence that have taken place:

• Jan 1: A church in Eldoret was burned with dozens of people inside; up to 50 percent of those burned alive are believed to have been children. Surrounded and pushed back into the flames by paramilitary forces, over 50 people are believed to have been killed in this incident, which sparked further riots and killings around the region.
• Jan 31: Opposition MP David Too was shot dead by a policeman, followed by increased clashes between police and opposition supporters. In Kericho (a district in the Rift Valley where much of the violence has taken place), one youth told Reuters, “Let Annan do his bit but there’s going to be no resolution – the clashes will continue.”
• Feb 2: Police in the town of Keroka (which sits upon the demarcation between Kalejin and Kisii territories) fired tear gas into crowds of Kisii youth, shouting that they must “leave or risk death.”

The deaths aren’t simple, nor is their form without significance. According to several news sources, police have shot hundreds of young men ‘execution-style,’ the bullet in the back of the head clearly demonstrating two things: that the killing was intentional (versus the collateral damage of a non-specific shooting) and that the police were the ones to do it. (The opposition has primarily used machetes, not guns.) According to the same sources, gangs primarily armed with machetes have been attacking Kikuyu and anyone identified as a potential government supporter; hardly a quick or bloodless method, hacking a person to death not only achieves the short-term goal (death), but clearly and gratuitously demonstrates the killer’s willingness to cause as much pain as possible.

Other forms of gratuitous violence have grown more prevalent over the past month as well. Gang rape and other kinds of sexual violence have risen sharply according to reports by hospitals and clinics; hundreds of women, teenagers, and girls have reported the violence against them, and they are believed to be a small percentage of the total number of women who will never seek treatment because of the shame the rape imposes. Over half of reported cases involved girls below the age of 18; one victim mentioned by the BBC was a 2 year-old baby girl. Among the many traumas caused by sexual violence, a spike in HIV cases is among the most serious, particularly among women who do not come to a hospital or clinic. Of even more immediate concern to Mr. Annan and other world leaders should be this: that rape is a common tool of revenge, and that with each rape comes a sharply increased likelihood that the victim’s family will seek an even more violent revenge against the rapists. Of the thousands who have sought refuge away from their homes in the past month, the Red Cross estimates that 85 percent are women and children; those who have followed instances of rape in Darfur will know how displacement to refugee camps may only make women and children more vulnerable to attack if their needs are not provided for within a safe and secure perimeter. Growing concern over the availability of clean water further increases the vulnerability of these women, whose primary concerns are for providing for their children, with their own health as a distant second.

All in all, the situation in Kenya has continued to deteriorate over the past month in defiance of attempts to negotiate an end to the violence. Although Kofi Annan’s mediation has undoubtedly accomplished some measure of moderation in the past week, the continued violence throughout the country immediately following the announcement of Friday’s agreement does not bode well for the two-week timetable. This kind of violence – this gratuitous, widespread, scarring violence – feeds itself and provides an ongoing series of reasons to retaliate with ever-increasing viciousness. To provide a lasting peace, Kenya needs widespread intervention now, and it will still have to counteract these scars for generations to come. After all, which will be more memorable to a child: the sight of his parents mutilated and dead, or a politician’s slogans?

Filed under: International Conflict, Kenya   |  2 Comments