A scorching drought that threatens millions across east Africa may spark major tribal clashes in Kenya as competition for water and pasture turns violent, a prominent global charity warned yesterday.
"The escalating food crisis in Kenya is threatening to plunge the affected region into a level of conflict that hasn't been seen for almost a decade," Oxfam International said.
Clashes between nomadic pastoralists in drought-afflicted northern Kenya and raids from livestock-dependent herdsmen in southern Sudan and Ethiopia will intensify unless aid to the region is urgently boosted, it said.
"The knock-on impact of the [food] crisis risks sparking conflict on a scale that Kenya hasn't seen for almost a decade," Oxfam said.
"We now have a very small window in which to stop this crisis turning into a catastrophe," it said.
"The implications of failing to step up the aid effort now will not just be starvation, it could also bring large scale conflict to the region," Oxfam said. "It's not too late to avert the worst of this, but it soon will be."
Already last month, nomads from neighboring Ethiopia and Sudan staged a raid into northwestern Kenya, killing at least 38 people and violence involving Kenya's Turkana and Uganda's Karamajong tribes has also been reported.
In northeastern Kenya, where at least 40 people have died of drought-related malnutrition and associated illness since December, hundreds of thousands of livestock have perished and theft of goats and cattle have soared, Oxfam said.
Such violence is not uncommon but the drought has raised the stakes and the prevalence of automatic weapons in the hands of tribal warriors who once used spears and other crude weapons has made raids more lethal.
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