Link Banana

Turns out the plan to suspend talks earlier this week worked. We should all be glad for that.

Kenya’s rival politicians have signed a peace deal to end the violent post-election crisis in which hundreds died.

President Mwai Kibaki and opposition leader Raila Odinga agreed to form a coalition government after weeks of wrangling, mediator Kofi Annan said.

The Economist has a good update on the situation in Kenya, and the slow effort to make peace. I kind of wish I’d read it before writing this, but I don’t know how much it would have helped.

…this week they started talking to each other. A former UN secretary-general, Kofi Annan, who is the leading mediator, has persuaded President Mwai Kibaki, a Kikuyu, to enter into negotiations with Raila Odinga, a Luo, who leads the opposition Orange Democratic Movement. Both leaders have appointed representatives to resolve what Mr Annan calls “immediate political issues” and break the impasse, but he gave warning that it may take much longer, even a year, to forge a solid and comprehensive agreement.

In “No Country for Old Hatreds,” Binyavanga Wainaina contends that Kenya’s poorly-formed identity as a single people and nation is the reason for the recent ethnic violence.

Five years ago, we voted for a broad and nationally representative government. Inside this vehicle were the country’s major tribes: the Luo, the Luhya, the Kikuyu, many Kalenjin — all the people now killing one another. […]

Tragically, President Mwai Kibaki instead steered a course away from the coalition and cultivated the support of his Kikuyu community. He did a good job rebuilding the civil service and managing the economy, but he did it within a framework that was not sustainable.

When it came time to conduct our most recent election, Raila Odinga had built a movement on the back of President Kibaki’s betrayal of the spirit of 2002. His political party, the Orange Democratic Movement, was the big ethnic tent similar to the one that had first brought President Kibaki to office.

On the day we cast our vote, we thought that our optimism and desire for an inclusive and broad government would prevail. Instead, three days later — after reports that votes were being “cooked” in Kikuyu strongholds, after skirmishes in the room where the results were being announced, after the news media were ejected — Mr. Kibaki was announced the winner and a haphazard swearing-in took place. And Kenya exploded.

The BBC is reporting:

Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki says he is ready to form a government of national unity, an official statement said. […]

But opposition leader Raila Odinga says Mr Kibaki must step down as president and that his preferred option remains for new elections to be held.

I have no doubt that this comes after at least some outside pressure. And though it’s clearly not the best outcome (which would be a truly fair election), it could certainly be better than continued violence and ethnic conflict.

Though I posted about this last night, The Economist’s coverage is more thorough, troubling and heartening than the NYTimes story. The frightening bit:

The reaction to the swearing-in was immediate. Nairobi’s slums exploded in rage. The poor killed each other. The rest of the city was eerily empty, but for burning tyres. Across the country there was a swelling up of tribal violence, sometimes Kikuyu against Mr Odinga’s Luo tribe, more often Luo and other tribes against Kikuyu. Hundreds have been killed so far and 80,000 displaced. Gang rapes and mutilations are widespread. Police have orders to shoot to kill. There has been rampant looting in Kisumu, riots in Mombasa and pitched battles in Eldoret. Thousands of Kikuyu have taken refuge in Eldoret’s Catholic cathedral from roving gangs. Kikuyu hiding in another church outside Eldoret were burned alive by a mob. There will be reprisals. Some non-Kikuyus are already slipping away from Central Province.

And the hopeful bit:

The instincts of the hardliners will be to use the security services to reverse the freedoms of Mr Kibaki’s first term; anything to avoid power slipping into Mr Odinga’s hands. It is not clear that Kenya will stand for it. The government pressured mobile phone operators to suspend text messages for “security reasons”, without success. Kenya’s media is still keen to report rather than incite. The army’s strong apolitical tradition, with staff officers drawn from several tribes, looks to be holding.

They also offer the possibility that the outcome of the election could be revisited, as “A chastened Samuel Kivuitu, head of the electoral commission, now says he is not sure that Mr Kibaki won the election. The Americans and the British have been twisting arms.”

In Kenya’s recent election, the incumbent Mwai Kibaki, a Kikuyu, was victorious over the favored and hoped-for Raila Odinga. Odinga’s an ethnic Luo (like Barack Obama’s father) and after the probably-rigged election was awarded to Kibaki, riot police were immediately dispatched for fear of non-Kikuyu riots. Since then, many have died, and this New York Times report swings for the fences with a doozie of a line — which I can only hope will prove overstated — 

“We’ve had tribal fighting before, but never like this,” said Abdalla Bujra, a retired Kenyan professor who runs a democracy-building organization.

As for the people burned alive in the church, Mr. Bujra echoed what many Kenyans were thinking: “It reminds me of Rwanda.”