Opposition protesters clashed with police in Kisumu, Kenya’s third largest city, on Wednesday.
NAIROBI, Kenya - Opposition protests resumed in Kenya on Wednesday, and as many people here feared, violence erupted across the country once again.
Times Topics: Kenya
The worst clashes were in Kisumu, Kenya’s third largest city and an opposition stronghold, where mobs of furious young men hurled stones at police officers, who responded by charging into the crowds and firing their guns.
“There’s been war since the morning,” said Eric Otieno, a mechanic in Kisumu. “The police are whipping women, children, everyone. We were just trying to demonstrate peacefully.”
Witnesses said that three demonstrators were shot and one of them died. But police officials gave a very different account. According to Eric Kiraithe, a spokesman for the Kenyan police, the only people injured by police officers were hooligans destroying property and robbing people.
``What we are seeing are teams of young men trying to commit crimes,” Mr. Kiraithe said. ``You cannot call this a demonstration.”
In several areas, tensions seemed to be growing, with crowds of young men building roadblocks in the street and lighting enormous bonfires. In Nairobi, the capital, police officers sealed off the central business district and ordered everyone out, sending wave after wave of bewildered office workers trudging down the roads leading to the suburbs.
Kenya remains on edge since a flawed election on Dec. 27 ignited unrest and violence that has already claimed more than 600 lives. Mwai Kibaki, the incumbent president, was declared the winner over Raila Odinga, a top opposition leader, but several election observers said the government rigged the tallying of the results to give the president a slim, 11th hour victory. American diplomats in Kenya recently finished their own analysis of poll results and concluded that the election was so flawed it was impossible to tell who really won.
Outraged opposition supporters have attacked members of the president’s ethnic group, with many people killed by machete-wielding mobs. Most of the ethnically-driven violence has diminished, though it has left more than 200,000 people displaced.
On Wednesday, many protesters said that they would continue to wreak havoc until Mr. Kibaki stepped down. Going by the amount of live ammunition and tear gas that was fired at or near demonstrators, police officials seem increasingly determined to crackdown. Opposition leaders remained defiant as ever.
"Nothing will stop us from mounting these rallies," said Mr. Odinga, who vowed to encourage protests for at least two more days.
A major victim in all this seems to be Kenya’s economy, which powers trade and industry across a large swath of eastern Africa. Tourists, drawn by Kenya’s wildlife and beaches, are canceling trips in droves, leaving some of the biggest hotels in the country only 20 percent occupied, which could lead to layoffs.
On Wednesday morning, protesters fought with police
in the streets of Mombasa, Kenya’s biggest port and a main artery to the rest of East Africa. Witnesses said that hundreds of demonstrators, many of them Muslims, tried to block roundabouts in the city center but that police officers in riot gear chased them away with tear gas.
Previous unrest in Mombasa seriously disrupted food and fuel supplies, forcing several neighboring countries, like Uganda and Rwanda, to ration gasoline. Many Muslims in Kenya support the opposition because they feel the Kenyan government, a close American ally, has cracked down harshly on members of their community during counter-terrorism operations.
In Nairobi, a heavy rain fell overnight and continued into Wednesday morning, which at first seemed to dampen spirits and diminish the energy for another round of street clashes. But by the afternoon, police were battling with crowds in several of the city’s slums, which have been a flash point of anger since the election.
Many Kenyans are getting tired of the violence, disruptions and cloud of uncertainty that hangs over the country. They had hoped that tensions would now decrease because the opposition had demonstrated it could influence the government through its numbers in Parliament and did not necessarily need to take its grievances to the streets. On Tuesday night, the opposition party, which won more Parliament seats than the president’s party in the December elections, used its muscle to install one of its own members as speaker, which could mean serious gridlock in Kenya’s government for the foreseeable future.
Kennedy Abwao contributed reporting from Nairobi
Protests Bring New Violence in Kenya - New York Times Christophe Calais for The New York Times By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN Published: January 17, 2008
