Traveling Cat

From the BBC:

Homeless Kenyans face grim return
By Josphat Makori
BBC News, Molo

After spending the past four months in a tent in a camp for the homeless, Mary Wambui, a Kenyan mother five, jumped at the chance to return home.

“Life here is so miserable. We live in the same tent with our children; you literally have to jump over each other, to get in,” she told the BBC. “Look around, there are no toilets, bathrooms or anything else. it’s been unbearable.”

She and her family were among the first to take advantage of the government’s programme to resettle the 140,000 people still displaced by the violence following last December’s elections.

But others in the camp in Molo are not convinced that the inauguration of a power-sharing government last month really means the violence is over.

“We are not livestock to be taken back to the slaughter,” one old man said.

“Yes we want to go back home but we want to go and stay. So let the government first facilitate meaningful peace talks and then we can be comfortable to return.”

Some say that while the politicians have agreed to share jobs – and power – some of the underlying issues such as land disputes and poverty have not been tackled.

Mrs Wambui is from the Kikuyu community of President Mwai Kibaki. On New Year’s Day, a band of youths, armed with arrows, clubs and machetes attacked her home and razed it to the ground.

They also raided her storehouses and made away with her food stocks. Other Kikuyus living in the area were also targeted.

The attackers were from the rival Kalenjin group, who insist that the entire Rift Valley province is their ancestral home and that other Kenyans are “outsiders”.

Mrs Wambui was fortunate to have survived with her entire family.

When the buses and military trucks provided by the government arrived, she was one of the first people to get on board.

“This is like a miracle, I feel like I have been released from prison,” she told me cheerfully.

But that does not mean she is convinced of a warm welcome when she returns to her farm just 15km from the camp in central Molo.

She says she is still very scared of her neighbours who attacked her and chased her from her home.

And others in the camp are so apprehensive that they are not ready to return.

”I will accept to go back home only if the government provides security for us – if we go back alone, we fear we might again be attacked by the same people who forced us to leave,” said Joseph Mureithi, a father of two displaced from Muchoroini in Rift Valley.

“These people are still there and they are many compared to us. So unless we see the presence of police we are not going.”

The government, however, says security is no longer an issue, as it has deployed numerous security officers in the affected areas and built a new police station.

Some argue that peace cannot be imposed through the barrel of a gun. They say talks must be held between the rival groups to achieve real reconciliation.

At the Agricultural Showground in the Rift Valley capital of Nakuru, hundreds of homeless people have taken to the streets to protest against moves to take them back to their homes.

The protesters, most of who were displaced from the western town of Eldoret where more than 40 people were burnt in a church, vowed not to return until their safety is guaranteed and compensation made for what they lost.

‘Where do they want us to go? We’d rather die here. Let the government compensate us so that we can buy pieces of land elsewhere and rebuild our lives,” demanded one demonstrator.

For those who have returned, there was a mixture of anxiety and fear. Many came face-to-face with the immense loss their had suffered for the first time in four months. The places they were returning to now are a far cry from the homes they knew before the ill-fated presidential elections.

Mary Nyokabi, a resident of Kiambogo farm in Molo, sobbed uncontrollably at the sight of her husband’s grave.

The husband was hacked to death during the post-election violence.

Though going back home, many of the returnees had to be issued with tents that they will live in until they are able to rebuild the houses destroyed during the violence.

Although the government programme has now begun, there is no indication as to how long it will take to resettle all of them.

From the BBC:

Kenya’s cabinet learns the ropes

Kenya’s power-sharing cabinet is meeting for the first time since being sworn in more than three weeks ago. The coalition government, which was key to solving the nation’s post-election violence, has gathered for an “induction seminar”.

The BBC’s Josphat Makori in Kenya says it is a chance for former political rivals to learn how to work as a team.

Violent clashes after December’s election left some 1,500 people dead and 600,000 homeless.

President Mwai Kibaki and Prime Minister Raila Odinga agreed to share power in February after negotiations led by former UN head Kofi Annan. Weeks of wrangling followed about how to divide up the coalition cabinet.

Friday’s meeting was opened by Mr Kibaki, followed by a speech by Mr Odinga to the more than 90 ministers and deputy ministers. Our correspondent says that the induction is intended to help ministers who have not served in government before.

Issues of collective responsibility and issues of cohesion will be paramount, as some of Mr Odinga’s party ministers still talk as if they are in opposition, he says.

Before the ministers went into their closed-door session, Mr Odinga urged all ministers to work together and iron out any differences in private, not in the eye of the media.

On Thursday, a group of civil society organisations accused the new government of rushing the return of tens of thousands of displaced people, without addressing underlying ethnic tensions.

More than 25 organisations said the resettlement operation must be handled with greater sensitivity if Kenya was to achieve lasting peace. They called for greater consultation with communities and compensation to help displaced people rebuild their homes. The Kenyan government says it expects to complete the programme of resettling the 140,000 people still displaced within a month.

From the NY Times:

People driven off their land in Kenya began returning home on Monday

May 6, 2008
Scarred by Strife After Election, Kenya Begins to Heal
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

MOLO, Kenya — The bus was full. Expectant faces pressed against the windows. Soldiers stood guard with their guns.

It was time to go home.

“I’m ready,” said Dominick Ngigi, an 80-year-old farmer, stoically clutching a plastic bag with no more in it than a sweater and a flashlight.

For the first time since Kenya’s disputed election erupted in crisis in December, the government has started a large-scale operation to resettle thousands of people violently driven off their land.

Many have been living in squalid, wet camps that turned into breeding grounds for disease, crime, idleness and frustration. They have been languishing for more than four months, since the disputed election set off a wave of ethnic and political bloodshed that pitted neighbor against neighbor and drove upward of 600,000 people from their homes. More than 1,000 people were killed, and Kenya, once celebrated for its stability and relative harmony in a tumultuous region, ripped apart along ethnic lines.

Operation Rudi Nyumbani (Operation Return Home), which began in full on Monday, was all about stitching the country back together.

Packed buses with heavily armed soldiers in tow rumbled across a scarred landscape, past homes with roofs burned off, past trees downed in January to block roads, past the very spots where farmers, laborers, mothers and children were killed by machetes, arrows and fire.

The buses disgorged the occupants into familiar settings, but now with a strange dynamic: new arrivals in their old homes.

“I feel lucky to be back,” said Meshak Njata, a farmer, as he inspected a few baby pineapples in his weed-choked garden.

Still, not everyone felt that way.

At one camp in Molo, a large town in the Rift Valley where much of the fighting occurred, a mini-protest broke out Monday morning when hundreds of displaced people refused to leave.

Peter Ngoge, a shopkeeper, shook a piece of notebook paper listing several demands. He spoke for many, as evidenced by the feisty crowd behind him, when he said he would not leave the camp until the government improved security and paid compensation to those displaced.

“There’s no peace out there,” he said.

“What do you think is going to happen?” a man in a grubby sweater next to him asked. “They will kill us.”

Molo is emblematic of the us-versus-them problem still festering in Kenya. The town is nestled in a breathtaking sweep of rolling hills and impossibly green farmland. But it lies on a fault line between the Kalenjin and the Kikuyu, two powerful ethnic groups that battled viciously after the election. The Kalenjin mainly supported the opposition, and the Kikuyu mainly supported the government, which is led by president Mwai Kibaki, a Kikuyu. Most of the families driven off their land were Kikuyus.

Kenya’s leaders face a growing economic and food crisis, and they decided that, ethnic tensions aside, now is not the time for miles of productive farmland to go to waste. As part of Operation Rudi Nyumbani, the government is promising food, tools, new houses and even cash for those who return to their farms.

To make its plan work, the government has said, there must be genuine ethnic reconciliation. Over the past several weeks, local administrators have held meetings, seminars and soccer games to build trust between the Kikuyu and Kalenjin.

“It’s a process,” said Katee Mwanza, Molo’s district commissioner.

And that process may be bearing fruit. Some Kalenjin elders, who just a few months ago had insisted that Kikuyus leave the Rift Valley, came to the Molo police station on Monday to welcome the Kikuyus back home.

“The war’s over,” said Samuel Kirui, a Kalenjin elder.

The change of heart came, he said, because “our leaders have agreed to work together, so why can’t we?”

But are the leaders really working together? Mr. Kibaki, who was declared the winner of the election despite widespread evidence of vote rigging, finally named a unity government in April, appointing his top rival, Raila Odinga, as prime minister. But the government’s first joint exercise, a tour of the turbulent Rift Valley, was marred by protocol wars centering on who was more senior, Mr. Odinga or Kalonzo Musyoka, the vice president and a Kibaki ally.

Those squabbles frustrated many Kenyans, especially at a time when the country is still suffering from self-inflicted wounds. The election crisis has crippled the safari business, one of Kenya’s biggest industries, with recent figures showing tourism down more than 50 percent. Inflation is shooting up, and jail guards recently held a violent strike. Teachers and nurses have threatened to follow suit. Yet the president’s cabinet is bigger than ever, with more than 90 ministers and assistant ministers and a record-breaking budget.

Meanwhile, many displaced people are returning to nothing.

“No cows, no sheep, no house, no corn,” said Mr. Ngigi, the farmer, as he got ready to board a bus. “All that is bad. But life in a camp is worse.”