U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is urging Kenyan leaders to share power, threatening to hold back American aid money if no deal is reached.
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, left, and Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki discussed peace deals in Nairobi on Monday.
(Kenyan Presidential Press Service/Associated Press)Rice, on a one-day visit to the volatile eastern African country on Monday, met with the President Mwai Kibaki and opposition leader Raila Odinga.
"The time for political settlement was yesterday," she said after the meetings. "The current stalemate and the circumstances are not going to permit business as usual with the United States or I think with any other part of the international community."
Kibaki and Odinga have been at odds since a Dec. 27 election returned Kibaki to power for a second five-year term. Foreign and local observers say the vote was rigged and violence has raged in the country ever since, much of it pitting Kibaki's Kikuyu tribe against other ethnic groups.
Rice urges Kenyan leaders to strike power-sharing deal Last Updated: Monday, February 18, 2008 | 9:13 PM ET CBC News
More bloodshed in Kenya as crisis talks drag on
2 hours ago
NAIROBI (AFP) — At least five people have died in clashes in recent days in western Kenya, police said Wednesday, as former UN chief Kofi Annan pressed for a deal to end the crisis sparked by December's elections.
"In the last four days, three people have been killed in Molo and two others in Cherangani area," a police commander told AFP, requesting anonymity.
Police said they had boosted security in volatile western areas of the east African country that were the scene of some of the worst fighting set off by the disputed December 27 re-election of President Mwai Kibaki, in which more than 1,000 people died and some 300,000 were displaced.
Annan has spent more than a month in Kenya leading talks between the camps of Kibaki and opposition leader Raila Odinga, who claims he was robbed of victory in the widely-contested polls.
Launched by the African Union, Annan's mediation is seen as Kenya's best hope for a political solution to move beyond the violence which saw Kenyans killed by machete-wielding mobs, burnt in churches and driven off their land.
"We are working very hard to ensure that there is preservation of peace," police spokesman Eric Kiraithe told AFP Wednesday.
The crisis has tapped into simmering resentment over land, poverty and the dominance of the Kikuyu, Kibaki's tribe, in Kenyan politics and business since independence from Britain in 1963.
