Kenya's embattled opposition vowed another day of rallies yesterday, setting the stage for more violence amid a political deadlock between the president and his chief rival, who claims the closest election in the country's history was rigged.
The US and Europe pushed for reconciliation, but said a "made-in-Kenya solution" is needed to end the violence that has killed 300 people and displaced 100,000 since President Mwai Kibaki was declared the winner of the Dec. 27 polls.
Jendayi Frazer, the top US diplomat for Africa, planned to leave on Thursday for talks with Kibaki and opposition leader Raila Odinga, US State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said. McCormack said Frazer would not serve as a mediator -- Kibaki has rejected such outside help. McCormack said she would try to encourage the leaders to get together and work toward a political solution. It was not clear how long Frazer would be in Kenya.
Nairobi was calm early yesterday, but Salim Lone, a spokesman for opposition chief Raila Odinga, said "we are not going to give up our right to assemble peacefully."
"We will not back down until there is a clear solution for the crisis caused by the stolen election," Lone said.
On Wednesday, riot police fired tear gas and water cannons to beat back crowds of opposition protesters in Nairobi, where postelection violence in what had been one of Africa's most stable countries left shops, cars and a church in flames.
"War is happening here," 45-year-old Edwin Mukathia said on Thursday.
He was among thousands of people who poured out of Nairobi's slums on Thursday to heed Odinga's call for a million man march in the city's Uhuru Park.
Mukathia and the others were kept at bay by riot police, who choked off the roads and fired live bullets over their heads. Opposition leaders canceled the march but said they would hold it yesterday, setting the stage for yet another day of upheaval as one of Africa's top tourist draws and one of the continent's most stable democracies approaches chaos.
The violent images -- of burning churches, machete-wielding gangs, looters making off with petrol -- are heartbreakingly common in a region that includes war-ravaged Somalia and Sudan. But Kenya had been spared.
The dispute has degenerated into violence pitting Kibaki's influential Kikuyus against Odinga's Luos and other tribes.
In the Mathare slum on Thursday, rival groups of men hurled rocks at each other. The corpse of a man lay face down on a muddy path, and a wailing wife pulled her battered husband from the waters of the Nairobi River, where he had been dumped and left for dead.
The upheaval stretches from the capital to the coast to the western highlands. Hundreds of young men marched on Thursday in the coastal resort of Mombasa but were quickly repulsed by security forces. Police shot one protester in the head and he was taken to a hospital, said witness Moses Baya.
Kenya's electoral commission said Kibaki had won the Dec. 27 vote, but Odinga alleged the vote was rigged and international observations say it was flawed. On Thursday, Attorney General Amos Wako called for an independent probe of the counting.
Wako did not elaborate or say whether an independent body would include foreign observers, and it was unclear whether he had Kibaki's backing or had made the statement independently.
Also See: After election, two men hold the fate of Kenya in their hands
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
VIOLENCE: The teacher had depression and took a leave of absence, but returned to the school last year, South Korean media reported A teacher stabbed an eight-year-old student to death at an elementary school in South Korea on Monday, local media reported, citing authorities. The teacher, a woman in her 40s, confessed to the crime after police officers found her and the young girl with stab wounds at the elementary school in the central city of Daejeon on Monday evening, the Yonhap news agency reported. The girl was brought to hospital “in an unconscious state, but she later died,” the report read. The teacher had stab wounds on her neck and arm, which officials determined might have been self-inflicted, the news agency