KISUMU, Kenya — The young man hefting a machete at the burning roadblock was frustrated. He’d been looking for five days, but could not find a member of the Kikuyu tribe to kill.
Members of Kenya’s biggest tribe have disappeared in their thousands from Kisumu, making it the first — but perhaps not the last — city to be ethnically cleansed.
“If we find any Kikuyus, we’re going to slaughter them or burn them alive,” 19-year-old Daniel Odongo said Wednesday, who wielded the machete as a mob of hundreds of young men with rusty axes and other weapons roared their approval. “But there is none in the houses around here.”
When incumbent President Mwai Kibaki was announced as winner of Dec. 27 elections by a narrow margin after days of unexplained delays, many in Kisumu took to the streets of the city of 504,000, looting and setting shops ablaze.
The residents, mainly from the Luo tribe of opposition leader Raila Odinga, soon turned their rage on Kibaki’s Kikuyu people — a minority in the western city resented for their domination of politics and the economy. They set Kikuyu homes on fire and ordered them to leave or face death.
At the local police station, records show that officers escorted out of the city an average of 21 buses a day packed with panicking Kikuyus in the first two weeks of January. That means about 20,000 people fled Kenya’s third-largest city, leaving about 484,000 people behind them. It is not known how many Kikuyus may have fled on their own, but it is not believed to be much higher than 20,000.
Now only about 150 Kikuyus remain, camping miserably opposite the police station for protection. No buses have been escorted out since Jan. 13, although murderous young men still stop vehicles searching for victims.
‘The last Kikuyus’
“If this continues, I can say goodbye to Kisumu,” Donise Kangoro said sadly. The 50-year-old trader, who had not eaten for two days, has lived here for two decades, married a local woman from the neighboring Luyha tribe, and fathered two children.
His wife and children returned to her people, but Kangoro hung on through the madness of the first days, when angry opposition supporters torched the homes of his fellow Kikuyus, and through the tense weekend when news arrived of faraway revenge massacres.
But when he saw a howling mob hunting his neighbors through the streets five days ago, he knew there would be no mercy. He ran, leaving behind his money, food, clothes and goods to sell.
There may be a handful of Kikuyus hiding in the houses of the wealthy, he said, but he doubts it.
“We are the last Kikuyus left in Kisumu,” he said.
More than 800 people have died across Kenya in the violence, including scores in the Rift Valley region.
U.S. response
On Wednesday, the top U.S. envoy for Africa, Jendayi Frazer, said Kenya was experiencing “clear ethnic cleansing” in Rift Valley.
“There was an organized effort to push people out of the Rift Valley,” Frazer said. Now after weeks of deadly attacks, counterattacks and reprisals, she said “killing may be the object.”
But later Wednesday, the State Department backed away Wednesday from Frazer’s “ethnic cleansing” declaration, saying it was too early to characterize the situation in such terms.
In comments aimed at easing emotional reactions to the phrase and potential comparisons to Rwanda’s genocide and the ongoing conflict in Sudan’s Darfur region, department spokesman Sean McCormack indicated that Frazer had been speaking for herself when she used the term “ethnic cleansing.”
McCormack acknowledged that the situation in Kenya was of great concern and that some violent incidents and displacements appeared to be driven by ethnicity.
“There’s a serious issue of people being displaced for a variety of different reasons, including being forced from their homes based on ethnic identification,” he said.
But those incidents are being reviewed by the State Department’s Office of War Crimes Issues and no determinations have been made on defining them, he said.
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