---

---

Kenya: Violence Death Toll Hits 300

1 January 2008

---

Kampala — ABOUT 30 people, many of them children, were burned to death yesterday in a church in Eldoret, in western Kenya, where they had taken shelter from tribal clashes as post-election violence continued to sweep the country.

"I saw about 10 to 15 bodies crammed in a corner. They were charred, I could not look at the scene twice," a local reporter told Reuters from Eldoret town.

The incident raises concerns that the violence, which has now claimed nearly 300 lives, could develop into a full-blown ethnic conflict.

The reporter said about 200 people, mostly Kikuyus, had sought refuge at the church, about 8km from Eldoret, fleeing tribal clashes after President Mwai's re-election.

"Some youths came to the church. They fought with the boys who were guarding it, but they were overpowered and the youths set fire to the church," he said. Another local journalist in Eldoret said about 30 bodies lay in the church, while four more lay outside.

"This is the first time in history that any group has attacked a church. We never expected the savagery to go so far," police spokesman Eric Kiraithe told a news conference in Nairobi last night.

Reinforcements were being rushed to the area to arrest all troublemakers, he said. "Our officers are exercising a lot of restraint in maintaining the law. This restraint will not last forever," he warned.

By press time, thousands of terrified Kikuyus had taken shelter in churches in Eldoret as vigilante gangs roamed outside.

"There are four to five thousand in the main cathedral, and thousands in other churches," Father Paul Brennan, an Irish Catholic priest told Reuters from the town.

"Houses are being burned. It is too dangerous to go outside and count the dead." Eldoret, located in the Rift Valley, a stronghold of opposition candidate Raila Odinga, has witnessed some of the worst violence.

Earlier in the day, a top police commander told AFP the nature of attacks in the Rift Valley were ethnic cleansing.

"One tribe is targeting another one in a fashion that can rightly be described as ethnic cleansing," said the commander on anonymity.

In Garissa, a town in northeastern Kenya near the border with Somalia, six Kikuyu families cowered at a mosque.

"These are your neighbours, you've lived with them for long," said the mosque's leader, Sheikh Ali, in a New Year sermon, calling for peace and tolerance between tribes. World leaders called on the rival leaders to stem the violence and open dialogue.

"What I want to see is them coming together, I want to see talks and I want to see reconciliation and unity" said British Premier Gordon Brown.

"But the first priority is that the violence is brought to an end. It is unacceptable that lives are being lost."

The British premier called on the African Union and the Commonwealth to help reconcile the parties.

But Odinga refused to negotiate until Kibaki owned up to vote-rigging allegations and stepped down.

"I have asked my people to be peaceful, to desist from acts of hooliganism or thuggery, but to continue to protest peacefully until Kibaki agrees to hand over power," he said in an interview with BBC.

He had called for a one-million people mass rally tomorrow at Nairobi's Uhuru Park but the Police have banned the event.

Meanwhile, the EU election monitors released an interim report, confirming opposition claims of irregularities in the vote counting and tallying.

"The 2007 general elections have fallen short of key international and regional standards for democratic elections," chief EU monitor Alexander Graf Lambsdorff told reporters yesterday.

"Most significantly, they were marred by a lack of transparency in the processing and tallying of presidential results, which raises concerns about the accuracy of the final result of this election."

He noted "serious inconsistencies and anomalies" in the results announced by the Kenyan Electoral Commission.

"For example, in Molo and Kieni, there were significant differences between presidential election results reported by EU observers at the constituency level and results announced by the Electoral Commission at national level," his 15-page report read.

"Additionally, at the Electoral Commission headquarters, the EU Chief Observer was shown forms on which the results for constituencies 205 (Lari) and 96 (Kandara) had been changed."

For Kerugoya, it continued, EU observers reported a discrepancy of more than 10,000 votes in the official turnout given for presidential and legislative elections.

The report noted that in the Central Province, the returning officers refused to provide constituency results to EU observers "before these results were confirmed in Nairobi". It deplored that in more than a third of the polling stations visited, the results were not posted at the polling station level, "fundamentally undermining transparency measures in the process".

The observers further denounced that their expert was banned from the tallying room at the Kenyatta International Conference Centre on various occasions, and that the official figures for all constituencies were not available by the time the over-all results were announced.

Lambsdorff called for an independent inquiry to resolve the dispute over the election, and asked the Electoral Commission to cooperate.

"To enable doubts over the accuracy of the presidential results to be clarified, it is vital that an independent investigation is swiftly conducted and the Electoral Commission demonstrates maximum transparency in this period," his statement read.

"As an essential step, the results of all polling stations must be swiftly published in newspapers and on the Internet to enable an independent audit to be undertaken."

Four of the 22 Kenyan election commissioners have also expressed doubts about the veracity of the figures giving President Kibaki victory by 200,000 votes, according to the BBC.

But Finance Minister Amos Kimunya denied his party, the ruling PNU, or the government had been involved in rigging the poll.

He said if the electoral commissioners had doubts, they should have raised these doubts much earlier instead.

He denied there was a crisis and said a lot of the violence on the streets of Kenyan towns and cities was caused by thugs and criminals.

Vision Reporter and Agencies 

Read comments. Write your own.

---