New Fighting in Kenya

The Associated Press

Street battles engulfed a western Kenyan city tense with ethnic rivalries on Friday, leaving bodies in the roadways with gashes in their heads and arrows lodged in their torsos in the latest fighting set off by the disputed presidential election.

The western Rift Valley has seen some of the worst of the postelection violence but its capital, Nakuru, had been largely untouched even as politicians in Nairobi, under international pressure to find a way to share power, remained far apart on the key question of who won the Dec. 27 vote.

Local reporters said the fighting pitted people from President Mwai Kibaki’s Kikuyu people against groups of Kalenjin, Luhya and Luo, who support the opposition leader Raila Odinga. The other ethnic groups’ resentment of the Kikuyu, who have long dominated politics and the economy in Kenya, has spilled over since the election.

The trouble in Nakuru, Kenya’s fourth largest city, began late Thursday, when people heard that Kibaki was insisting he was Kenya’s "duly elected president," said Pastor Richard Nato of the African Faith Gospel Church.

Odinga accuses Kibaki of stealing the elections, and international and local observers say the vote count was rigged. Riots and protests following the announcement quickly turned to ethnic clashes. At least 685 people have been killed and some 255,000 people have been forced from their homes across the country.

"Raila is our president. Kikuyus go out of Rift Valley," some armed men yelled in Nakuru on Friday.

Barack Obama, whose father was Kenyan, issued a statement saying "President Kibaki must permit the opposition meaningful participation in the government." The U.S. Democratic presidential contender also said Raila Odinga, the opposition leader, "must seek a peaceful resolution and reject violent protest and disorder."

One battle in the west of Nakuru left a dozen people lying in the street, with deep cuts to their heads and arrows lodged in their chests and backs, a reporter said. It was not clear if the victims were dead or injured.

Police tried to talk to the aggressors, then fired in the air to halt the fighting.

A second reporter said she saw two people killed Friday morning – a man carrying beans to the market who was stoned to death at the main bus station, and a man stabbed near the main bar, which was looted.

She also said she saw at least two bodies in a police truck at Nakuru’s Kaptembwa slum – one hacked to death, the other struck by an arrow.

Scores of people streamed from the slum, some balancing bundles of belongings on their heads as clashes erupted in the town center.

In Nakuru’s industrial area, smoke plumes and flames burst unimpeded from a two-story veterinary supply store and a gas station. Soldiers and police looked on, helpless. The town’s only fire engine was set ablaze earlier in the day.

"The dead bodies and injuries are coming in. I cannot give you a figure now," said the medical superintendent at Nakuru Hospital, Dr. George Mugenya.

Elsewhere in the Rift Valley overnight, half the town of Total Station was burned down and at least two people were killed and 50 wounded by clubs and machetes, the secretary-general of the Kenya Red Cross Society, Abbas Gullet, told reporters Friday. Aid workers said that violence involved Kikuyus and Kalenjin.

"The spiral effects of counterattacks and reprisals is getting out of hand in the Rift Valley," said Gullet. He showed film of people fleeing for safety to a mosque and police station with columns of flames and black smoke rising in the background.

He said up to 50,000 people had fled their homes in recent days in other Rift Valley clashes around Molo, 100 miles northwest of Nairobi.

The police commander there, Achesa Litabalia, said a group of Kikuyus attacked Kalenjins near Molo overnight and three of the attackers were killed. His and Gullets comments indicated that Kikuyus previously attacked by Kalenjin in the area are seeking revenge.

Human Rights Watch said Thursday it had evidence that opposition party leaders "actively fomented," organized and directed ethnic attacks in the Rift Valley, and plans were in the making to attack camps of displaced Kikuyu there.

The allegations were vigorously denied by William Ruto, a senior opposition party official and legislator for one of 49 constituencies in the Rift Valley.

Across the country since the vote, at least 685 people have been killed in riots and ethnic fighting and some 255,000 people have been forced from their homes.

On Thursday, Kibaki and Odinga talked for the first time since the election, but the president angered the opposition by insisting after Thursday’s hour-long meeting mediated by former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan that his position as head of state was not negotiable.

Friday, the opposition said Kibaki should not be allowed to send a delegation to an African Union summit planned next week in neighboring Ethiopia.

"We are telling the world, including the African Union, that Kibaki’s government is not the legitimate government," said Salim Lone, spokesman for Odinga’s Orange Democratic Movement.