Kenya 2007: Ethnic Violence and the Responsibility to Protect

I recently had the pleasure of addressing the Foreign Policy Association at McDaniel College in Westminster, Maryland. Every year the group, one of many around the U.S., gathers over several weeks to discuss a nationally-chosen series of issues. One of those issues this year was the 2007 Election Violence in Kenya and the concept of Responsibility to Protect. Because of my reporting experience in Kenya, admittedly back in the 1990's, I was invited to be the guest speaker on this topic. Fortunately, I still have friends and colleagues who closely monitor current events in Kenya and could call on their assistance in preparing. And there is always the Internet.

So here is a shortened summary of my remarks:

In the worst ethnic violence since independence from Britain in 1963, more than 1,000 people are killed and an estimated quarter million made homeless as violence tears through Kenya.

Here’s just one story from the violence: a man named Haruni Njoroge Kiragu and his family just sit down around their stove to a meal of potatoes when the darkness outside their farmhouse is shattered by screams, chants and the blowing of horns. For more than an hour, several hundred Kalenjin men armed with bows and arrows and machetes try to storm the farms where Kiragu and other ethnic Kikuyu families live.

The farmers use wooden shields and machetes to fight off the attackers. But when the raiders return the next night, 62-year-old Mr. Kiragu and his family and neighbors flee, leaving behind all they own and their five acres of corn and potatoes. A week after the attack, Mr. Kiragu is encamped with hundreds of other displaced Kikuyus in the back yard of a church, with no clothes, no money and barely enough food to survive.

Now here’s the punch line: I reported on that election-related violence while based in Nairobi. Even though it sounds just like the violence you’ve read about for this Great Decisions gathering, it took place in 1993 – 14 years before Kenya was swept by a new wave of ethnic violence triggered by a disputed presidential election in December 2007.

Your lesson material on this topic admits ethnic clashes have accompanied Kenyan elections in the past, but it asserts the scale of the violence in the early months of 2008 was far worse. Frankly, I don’t see the difference – the numbers of dead and displaced are comparable. The notable difference might have been the nervous reaction of members of the international community -- like former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan who reported seeing "gross and systematic human rights abuses". Or Bernard Kouchner, the French Foreign minister, who appealed to the UN Security Council in January 2009 to react before Kenya plunged into a deadly ethnic conflict, citing what he said was "the responsibility to protect".

The reading material would have you believe the world’s response to the 2007 election violence was a rapid and coordinated reaction that serves as ‘a model of diplomatic action under the Responsibility to Protect’.

Maybe. But I am not convinced.

Let me explain. Not long after reporting on the clashes in Kenya, which, by the way, I don’t recall ever provoking any talk of some sort of international intervention – not long after that I left my base in Nairobi to go to Rwanda to report on the 1994 genocide in which three-quarters of a million people were murdered. That single experience has colored my views deeply. The international community did nothing. The U.S. government even dallied over whether to call the bloodshed genocide. I saw machete-slashed bodies stacked like cordwood, hundreds of them, just in one church on one outing. On another I saw scores of bodies floating in a river, dumped there, often tied and left to drown by the killers. I could go on and on.

But another lasting image is that of the frustration of the Canadian General in charge of UN peacekeepers who were actually in Rwanda in 1993 and 1994, General Romeo Dallaire. He told the UN Security Council plans were under way for mass ethnic killings. He told them who was behind the plans and who among the political leaders were on the “hit” list. He told them the peacekeepers knew where the killers were storing their machetes and other weapons.

And he was denied permission to do anything. By the members of the Security Council.

I witnessed more violence in southern Sudan in those same years – again ethnic based violence. Nothing was done by the international community. I also covered Somalia, where the international community tried to restore order amid factional fighting, failed and then just abandoned the country.

These examples were all, in my eyes, a betrayal of the promise heard after World War Two when the Nazi death camps were revealed, “NEVER AGAIN.”

Well, it happened and still happens again and again and again.

So in that sense I understand fully the desire on the part of some leaders and especially the UN to claim some measure of success in preserving the peace in Kenya in 2007.

But what happened there was less a case of looming genocide than a bloody demonstration of politics and corruption. As the organization Human Rights Watch has noted, “every election since the establishment of a multi-party system in 1991 (in Kenya has) witnessed widespread violence.”

Let’s recall the origins of the 2007 violence: On December 27, 2007, Kenya held presidential, parliamentary, and local government elections. While the parliamentary and local government elections were largely credible, the presidential election was seriously flawed, with irregularities in the vote tabulation process as well as turnout in excess of 100% in some constituencies.

Despite this, on December 30, the chairman of the Electoral Commission of Kenya declared incumbent Mwai Kibaki, an ethnic Kikuyu, as the winner of the presidential election.

Violence erupted in different parts of Kenya as supporters of opposition candidate Raila Odinga, an ethnic Luo, and supporters of Kibaki clashed with police and each other.

On February 28, 2008, under international pressure, President Kibaki and Raila Odinga signed a power-sharing agreement, which provided for the establishment of a prime minister position to be filled by Odinga and two deputy prime minister positions, as well as the division of an expanded list of cabinet posts according to the parties' proportional representation in parliament.

In other words, the two sides papered over their differences and opposition leaders agreed to be bought out.

And bought out is no exaggeration. In a country with 40% unemployment, where 50% live under the poverty line, government office is a route to riches. Salaries and alowances are enormous for members of the cabinet and Parliament.

And that’s just the official pay.

As Human Rights Watch has reported: “Kenya has a history of widespread corruption and systemic abuse of office by public officials… Political contests have become all the more charged because of what is at stake; those who achieve political power benefit from widespread abuses including… criminal theft of land, and the corrupt misuse of public resources—indulgences which occur at the expense of groups who are out of power.”

Ironically, the government of Mwai Kibaki came to power in 2002 pledging to correct these and other chronic failures of governance.

My good friend Michela Wrong has written a book about Kenyan politics called “It’s Our Turn to Eat” – an expression meaning the tribe in power is now able to take what it wants. The Kikuyu were out of power under President Daniel Arap Moi in the 1990’s when the violence I began this lecture with took place. That was Moi’s ethnic Kalenjins trying to displace ethnic Kikuyu. In 2007 the Kikuyu were in power but clashed with ethnic Luo, who believed their leader was wrongly denied his place as President, his place “at the dining table.” But other groups were involved as well.

For that reason Michela argues, and I agree, that to explain what happened in Kenya in 2007, "genocide" is not a useful concept.

In the Rift Valley area in 2007, for example, it’s true Kikuyu farmers were systematically targeted by Kalenjin militias. But elsewhere, tribes including the Luos were targeted by Kikuyu militias as well as the Kikuyu-led police, who were responsible for an impressive 400 of the eventual 1,000 plus deaths.

It's not simple, as in Rwanda with the Hutu versus the Tutsi or in Sudan, where the ethnic mainly Christian African tribes of the south clashed with the mainly muslim Arab forces of the north.

In Kenya, while the violence definitely took ethnic form, it was ethnic violence orchestrated by political elites in Nairobi. As Human Rights Watch has noted, “The political manipulation of ethnicity is almost a tradition in Kenyan politics, along with impunity for those implicated in fomenting political violence.”

The international community needs to focus on the coming challenges: how do you stage a fair referendum on the constitution, due this summer. Then, elections are due in 2012. Analysts like Michela Wrong call these the most important elections in East Africa for decades.

Ms Wrong says – and is recommending this in her speeches -- she would like to see the US and UK and EU and UN setting up a mechanism to have the best, most well-monitored and cleanest elections in African history. That should be the priority.

That would be an excellent demonstration of the responsibility to protect.