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Will Kenya implode after election violence? (By Jean-Marc Mojon)

Kenya’s image as a stable, prosperous African nation thriving on tourism has been rattled by the violent aftermath of a disputed election but analysts yesterday ruled out a Rwanda-style scenario. Tit-for-tat tribal killings by machete-wielding death squads and claims of “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” by warring political parties have conjured up the spectre of the east African nation sinking into bloodshed.

Fretting at chest-thumping politics as the nation burned, Kenyan papers issued ominous warnings that the absence of a political solution could reap the kind of ethnic strife that has crippled so many neighbouring nations. But observers pointed out a number of inbuilt safeguards they predict will preserve East Africa’s powerhouse from lasting chaos.

“The sheer diversity of Kenya’s ethnic make-up means that it’s not Rwanda or Burundi,” noted Mark Bellamy, the United States ambassador to Kenya between 2003 and 2006. While Rwanda and Burundi – where ethnically-driven massacres left hundreds of thousands dead in the 1990s – consist essentially of two rival groups, Hutus and Tutsis, Kenya is home to at least 42 tribes.

Incumbent President Mwai Kibaki, whose disputed re-election last week triggered a wave of nationwide blood-letting, is from the Kikuyu tribe, which has dominated Kenya’s political and economic life in recent years. Despite being the largest tribe in the 37-million-strong country, the Kikuyus account for only 22 percent of the population, meaning no tribe can lay claim to full control to the exclusion of others.

Some observers argued that the gruesome violence that has rocked Kenya since the disputed December 27 polls was, rather than a dent in its credentials, a painful coming of age of its fledgling democracy. “While everybody thinks this is tribal, it’s not, it’s a society that is realising its rights, including the fact that no government is absolute in power,” said Kenyan lawyer and political analyst John Otieno.

Whether Kibaki or his defeated rival Raila Odinga, who belongs to the Luo tribe, “no political leader in Kenya has any interest in stoking ethnic violence,” said Bellamy, now a senior fellow at the Washington-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies. Kenyan political scientist Mary Mutua said that the opposition leader Odinga may soon change tactics.

“With the increasing death toll, Raila realises that he will soon be isolated and may want to resolve the row in a way that the public might see him as a hero,” she said. Observers also pointed out that another barrier against cynical adventurism from Kenya’s politicians is that the nation’s rich and powerful have most of their stakes in their homeland, and not abroad.

“Kenya’s big men have their money in Kenya and that’s the best reason they have for not letting the country collapse,” said one Nairobi-based foreign diplomat. More than 340 people have died since polling day, in some of the worst civil violence the usually peaceful east African nation has experienced since a failed 1982 coup.

But as tribal killings spread across the country, from western opposition strongholds to the eastern city of Mombasa, the state has yet to resort to the army, deploying only part of its Israeli-trained paramilitary police unit.

A daytime curfew was slapped on Kisumu, the country’s third city and an opposition stronghold, and should a state of emergency be declared, experts were confident Kenya’s army would not fracture along tribal lines.

-AFP

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