UK papers call for 'robust pressure' on Kibaki, Raila

By PAUL REDFERN
Special Correspondent

The escalating political violence in Kenya is the inevitable end-result of politicians “hiring thugs to do their dirty work for them,” according to a leading international academic on Kenya.

UK-based academic David Anderson, who has written extensively on Kenyan politics, including recently the respected book on the Mau Mau era Histories of the Hanged, says that violence has become a part of Kenyan economic and political life.

He says that the murder of Orange Democratic Movement legislator Mugabe Were last week “revealed how violence has permeated to the very heart of Kenya’s failing democracy,” and says that the current political violence “has been purposefully fostered by those whose political interests it serves.”

At the heart of Mr Anderson’s viewpoint is that in poorer suburbs where crime is endemic and the police ineffective and corrupt, gangs have proliferated.
These gangs are used by the politicians they serve, either as “youth-wingers” or to intimidate opponents.

“In Kenyan politics it has become the norm for politicians to hire thugs to do their dirty work, especially at election time,” Mr Anderson writes in the Independent newspaper.

With the current outpouring of violence threatening Kenya’s very stability, it is the politicians who are to blame and they are reaping what they have sown.
The UK media meanwhile, is urging the British government to back the threat given by the United States on Wednesday, to impose a settlement, if bickering leaders cannot find one.

Writing in the Daily Telegraph newspaper David Blair says that, “Effective and robust pressure has been missing from Britain’s response to Kenya’s crisis. Mr Kibaki will compromise only if the cost of intransigence is made unacceptably high. Mr Kibaki may have stolen an election and turned a blind eye to hideous violence, but he is no Robert Mugabe. He is not a ruthless, deluded megalomaniac like the Zimbabwean leader.
Mr Kibaki knows full well that Kenya is inherently vulnerable to outside pressure because its economy depends on foreign investment. Unlike Mr Mugabe, he is not willing to see his country bankrupted and its nascent prosperity destroyed. So he will move if the right levers are used.

The first step is to set out Britain’s demands. Incredibly, neither Lord Malloch-Brown nor any other British minister has publicly called for last month’s election to be re-run under international supervision.

The rigged poll was the principal cause of the violence. The only solution is for Kenya to have another election, under outside supervision if necessary.
If Mr Kibaki fails to oblige, a graduated scale of penalties should be imposed.
First, Britain could marshal the European Union (EU) and America to announce without any ambiguity that they no longer recognise Mr Kibaki as Kenya’s president.
From that moment on, he would become an international outlaw. Then Britain could ask the Commonwealth to expel Kenya. Afterwards, London could press the EU to impose penalties targeted on Kenya’s government.

Mr Kibaki and all his ministers could be banned from travelling to any EU state, while any assets they hold in European banks could be frozen. Kenyan ministers are not known for their financial probity. A measure that would deprive them of their loot and stop all shopping trips to Europe might concentrate minds.

Along the way, Western aid given directly to Kenya’s government could be halted. All this would dramatically reduce foreign investment and deal a body blow to the country’s largest single industry, tourism. Unless Mr Kibaki knows these measures are on the table — and that Britain is serious about imposing them if necessary — he will not agree to hold another election.”

Mr Blair adds that the “tragedy is that Mr Kibaki has been allowed to get away with so much.”

There are however indications that London, along with Washington is reaching the end of its tether in terms of negotiations with President Kibaki’s government.
Following his visit to Kenya this week, British Foreign office minister Lord Malloch Brown who met both President Kibaki and Mr Odinga, expressed pessimism that they could agree on an urgent solution to the crisis.

“I felt that they were talking about two different crises, with a different view of the facts and differing scenarios about what must happen and what needs to be done,” he said.
Before leaving Kenya, Lord Malloch-Brown publicly lamented the intransigence of Mr Kibaki and his key opponent, Raila Odinga to make headway on finding a political compromise acceptable to all Kenyans.

UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown has called on Kenya’s leaders to pursue constructive dialogue urgently, which he says must include “addressing the underlying issues — as they have committed to do in order to resolve Kenya’s problems and put in place the basis of governance that is representative of the democratic will of the Kenyan people.”

The Times newspaper in an editorial noted that, “Western leaders have done little except urge restraint, hint at a suspension of aid and draw up plans to evacuate their nationals. It is time that George Bush, Gordon Brown and European leaders were more outspoken in their demands, robust in their diplomacy and forthright in their denunciations of the terrible events threatening to ruin Kenya....The UN and the European Union must be ready to back peace with muscle.”

The UK has acknowledged that it is keeping its development programme in Kenya “under review” because of the current situation, but it adds “our commitment to the Kenyan people remains undiminished.”

London does however say that “The size and content of the future programme will reflect the extent to which political differences can be resolved.”

Writing in the Guardian, Madeleine Bunting says that Kenya is now “stuck in a dangerous stalemate, with no point of agreement between Mwai Kibaki and Raila Odinga.
Ms Bunting says that in Africa which has seen more wars since 1990 than it did in the whole of the previous century, “violence can be a form of communication of last resort. When all other channels for seeking justice for embittered grievances in a corrupt regime appear to have been exhausted, some will see violence as the only way to protect their interests. That doesn’t make the violence right, but neither does it make it senseless. It can have its own awful rationality.

What we are seeing in Kenya, is how human beings behave when faced with the kind of chronic insecurity that globalisation is incubating the world over. Dislocation breeds fear in which old, buried identities become an insurance policy....(But) the outcome is always tragic.”

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