Violence hits Kenya

1 January, 2008

NAIROBI: Kenya's opposition candidate called on President Mwai Kibaki to concede defeat Sunday in the closest presidential race in the country's history, accusing him of fraud after a chaotic vote count sparked widespread violence and fears of rigging.

"This government has lost all legitimacy and cannot govern," Raila Odinga said Sunday, three days after the vote.

Odinga clung onto his razor-thin lead by 38,000 votes, but the electoral commission suspended announcing results Saturday night, promising to look into allegations of fraud. If Kibaki loses, he will be Kenya's first sitting president ousted at the ballot box.

Kibaki's Party of National Unity urged patience for the official results from the Electoral Commission of Kenya.

"No other organisation has legal jurisdiction to announce the results," PNU said in a statement. "We must all wait patiently for the ECK statement."

Meanwhile, thousands of people were taking to the streets for a second day in Kenya's capital, enraged over delays in announcing the country's next president. At least three people were killed Saturday, police said.

"What you are seeing now is small," warned Moses Ogolla, amid the noise and burning vehicles. "Right now we are just trying to send a message. But if they say Kibaki wins, Kenya will never be the same again."

Others were shouting "Kibaki must go!" and waving machetes in the air as buses and shops burned.

In Washington, State Department spokesman Tom Casey condemned the violence.

"Regardless of the eventual winners of this election, we call on Kenyans across the political spectrum to work together to advance democracy and national development," he said.

On Saturday, both parties announced they had won the election but the electoral commission said counting was not finished. Despite pleas from both parties to announce results quickly, chairman Samuel Kivuitu said he would suspend announcing results until the morning to investigate any allegations of fraud.

Alexander Graf Lambsdorff, chief European Union election monitor, also voiced concerns about the counting process Sunday, saying there is "a big question mark over the tallying of results."

"Our observers have been turned away from several tallying centers without being given results," he said.

The independent Kenya Human Rights Commission appealed to Kibaki and Odinga "to reassure the public that each of them will accept the results of a free and fair election." - AFP

NYT, December 31, 2007
Disputed Vote Plunges Kenya Into Bloodshed
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

NAIROBI, Kenya — It took all of about 15 minutes on Sunday, after Kenya’s president was declared the winner of a deeply controversial election, for the country to explode.

Thousands of young men burst out of Kibera, a shantytown of one million people, waving sticks, smashing shacks, burning tires and hurling stones. Soldiers poured

into the streets to fight them. In several cities across Kenya, witnesses said, gangs went house to house, dragging out people of certain tribes and clubbing them to death.

“It’s war,” said Hudson Chate, a mechanic here. “Tribal war.”

The dubious conclusion of the most fiercely fought election in Kenya’s history has pitched the country toward chaos. The opposition rejected the results and vowed to inaugurate its leader, Raila Odinga, as “the people’s president,” which the government warned would be tantamount to a coup. As the riots spread, the government took the first steps toward martial law on Sunday night and banned all live media broadcasts.

Western observers said Kenya’s election commission ignored undeniable evidence of vote rigging to keep the government in power. Now, one of the most developed, stable nations in Africa, which has a powerhouse economy and a billion-dollar-a-year tourism industry, has plunged into intense uncertainty, losing its sheen as an exemplary democracy and quickly descending into tribal bloodletting.

With the president, Mwai Kibaki, a Kikuyu and Mr. Odinga a Luo, the election seems to have tapped into an atavistic vein of tribal tension that always lay beneath the surface in Kenya but until now had not provoked widespread mayhem.

The news media blackout made it difficult to assess the level of popular outrage. But it was clear Sunday night that the violence was spreading.

In Mathare, a slum in Nairobi, Luo gangs burned more than 100 Kikuyu homes. In Kibera, Kikuyu families loaded their belongings in cars and fled. Almost all the businesses in the country are shut. The only figures in downtown Nairobi, the capital, which is usually choked with traffic, are helmeted soldiers hunched behind plastic shields. Oily black clouds of smoke rose from the slums, smudging out the sun. At least 15 people have been killed.

“It’s a sad day for Kenya,” said Michael E. Ranneberger, the American ambassador to Kenya. “My biggest worry now is violence, which, let’s be honest, will be along tribal lines.”

Mr. Odinga’s supporters are unleashing their frustrations about the election, which was held on Thursday and initially praised as fair, against people they suspect supported the president, namely Kikuyus. The Odinga camp urged election officials to recount the votes after exposing serious discrepancies between the results announced on the night of the election versus the numbers that were later entered into a national total.

It had been predicted that the vote would be close, and the final results had Mr. Kibaki winning by a sliver, 46 percent to 44 percent. But that gap may have included thousands of invalid ballots. The European Union said its observers witnessed election officials in one constituency announce on election night that President Kibaki had won 50,145 votes. On Sunday, the election commission increased those same results to 75,261 votes.

“The presidential elections were flawed,” said Alexander Graf Lambsdorff, the chief European observer.

Koki Muli, co-chairwoman of the Kenya Election Domestic Observation Forum, said she was in the room on Sunday when the election commission was presented with dozens of suspicious tally sheets — some missing signatures, others missing stamps — and most of them were from the president’s stronghold of central Kenya. In some areas, more people voted for the president than there were registered voters. “I saw this with my own eyes,” she said.

Ms. Muli said that 75 of the 210 constituencies — meaning more than one-third of the vote — had serious question marks and that the election chairman initially agreed to investigate. But later on Sunday he changed his mind.

Kenya is a close American ally, and a team of Western diplomats, including the American ambassador, tried for hours to persuade election officials to recount the votes. One Western ambassador said they knew that if the dubious results were certified and the president declared the winner based on them, Kenya would plunge into crisis. But the commission would not budge.

“The government was determined to hold onto power,” said the ambassador, who did not want to be identified because he said he feared reprisals from the Kenyan government.

About 4 p.m., the election commission announced at its temporary headquarters in a downtown conference center that it was ready to declare a winner. The Western ambassadors filed in, looking worn out. Dozens of soldiers lined the walls, some armed with assault rifles and tear gas. Opposition leaders began shouting. The soldiers pounced and the room erupted into chaos, with men in suits fleeing, chairs getting knocked over and the election chairman making a hurried exit, with a crowd chasing him, yelling: “We want justice! Kenya has spoken!”

The commission then reconvened — in front of reporters chosen by government officials — and declared Mr. Kibaki the winner, with 4,584,721 votes compared with 4,352,993 for Mr. Odinga — a spread of about 2 percent.

There were indeed irregularities, the commissioners said, but it was not their job to deal with them. “The judicial system provides peaceable avenues to address these complaints,” said the chairman, Samuel Kivuitu.

The opposition has not indicated if it will contest the results in Kenya’s courts, which are notoriously slow and corrupt. But it announced a swearing-in ceremony for Mr. Odinga on Monday and declare him the “people’s president.”

Officials with Mr. Kibaki’s party warned that such a move could bring consequences. “If Raila does this, he will be attempting a coup and he will get what he deserves,” said Ngari Gituku, a spokesman for the Party of National Unity, Mr. Kibaki’s party.

Mr. Odinga was jailed in the 1980s for several years for plotting a coup in Kenya and was beaten and tortured.

As for the restrictions on the news media, which many journalists said were a severe setback to what had been considered one of the freest presses in the world, Mr. Gituku said: “The only thing the president wants to do is to heal this nation, and the media is not part of that process. The media has been propagating hate.”

Mr. Kibaki was sworn in almost immediately after the results were announced. In a surreal scene, as gunfire rattled in the slums, Mr. Kibaki stood serenely with a Bible in his hand. It was as if he were talking about another election.

“We have demonstrated to the world we are politically mature,” he said. He called the vote “honest, orderly and credible.”

The election did not start out ominously. Kenyans streamed to the polls in record numbers on Thursday. Some waited for hours in lines that were miles long.

The contest was seen as a test of Kenya’s young multiparty democracy, with Mr. Kibaki, 76, representing the establishment and Mr. Odinga, 62, a new brand of politics. Mr. Kibaki has been in government since independence in 1963 and was seen by many Kenyans as continuing an unfair political system that has favored the Kikuyu at the expense of Kenya’s 30-plus other ethnic groups. Mr. Odinga, a rich businessman who campaigned as a champion of the poor, added to his popularity by tapping into those frustrations and building a coalition of many tribes.

The first batch of results showed a sweeping victory for the opposition, with Mr. Odinga ahead by one million votes on Friday. But that lead evaporated overnight, and by Saturday the race was essentially a tie.

But the sudden reversal ignited suspicions, especially after many members of Parliament close to the president were voted out of office in a wave of seeming dissatisfaction with the government.

Ms. Muli, the Kenyan election observer, said it was clear the government had rigged the election. “This country has come a long way,” she said. “And now we have been set back many miles.”

Virulent TB in South Africa May Imperil Millions

MICHAEL WINES

NTY, 28 January

JOHANNESBURG, Jan. 27 — More than a year after a virulent strain of tuberculosis killed 52 of 53 infected patients in a rural South African hospital, experts here and abroad say the disease has most likely spread to neighboring countries, and some say urgent action is essential to halt its advance.

Several expressed concern at what they called South Africa’s sluggish response to a health emergency that, left unchecked, could prove hugely expensive to contain and could threaten millions across sub-Saharan Africa.

The director of the government’s tuberculosis programs called those concerns unfounded and said officials were doing everything reasonable to combat the outbreak.

The form of TB, known as XDR for extensively drug-resistant, cannot be effectively treated with most first- and second-line tuberculosis drugs, and some doctors consider it incurable.

Since it was first detected last year in KwaZulu-Natal Province, bordering the Indian Ocean, additional cases have been found at 39 hospitals in South Africa’s other eight provinces. In interviews on Friday, several epidemiologists and TB experts said the disease had probably moved into Lesotho, Swaziland and Mozambique — countries that share borders and migrant work forces with South Africa — and perhaps to Zimbabwe, which sends hundreds of thousands of destitute refugees to and from South Africa each year.

But no one can say with certainty, because none of those countries have the laboratories and clinical experts necessary to diagnose and track the disease. Ominously, none have the money and skills that would be needed to contain it should it begin to spread.

Even in South Africa, where nearly 330 cases have been officially documented, evidence of the disease’s spread is mostly anecdotal, and epidemiological work needed to trace its progress is only now beginning.

“We don’t understand the extent of it, and whether it’s more widespread than anyone thinks,” Mario C. Raviglione, the director of the Stop TB Department of the World Health Organization in Geneva, said in a telephone interview. “And if we don’t know what has caused it, then we don’t know how to stop it.”

Cases of XDR TB exist elsewhere, in countries like Russia and China where inadequate treatment programs have allowed drug-resistant strains of the disease to emerge. The South African outbreak is considered far more alarming than those elsewhere, however, because it is not only far larger, but has surfaced at the center of the world’s H.I.V. pandemic.

Although one third of the world’s people, by W.H.O. estimates, are infected with dormant tuberculosis germs, the disease thrives when immune systems are weakened by H.I.V. At least two in three South African TB sufferers are H.I.V. positive. Should XDR TB gain a foothold in the H.I.V.-positive population, it could wreak havoc not only among the five million South Africans who carry the virus, but the tens of millions more throughout sub-Saharan Africa.

People without H.I.V. have a far smaller chance of contracting tuberculosis, even if they are infected with the bacillus that causes TB. But because tuberculosis is spread through the air, anyone in close contact with an active TB sufferer is at some risk of falling ill.

Most if not all of the 52 people who died in the initial outbreak of XDR TB, at the Church of Scotland Hospital in a KwaZulu-Natal hamlet called Tugela Ferry in 2005 and early 2006, had AIDS. Most died within weeks of being tested for drug-resistant tuberculosis, a mortality rate scientists called unprecedented.

Since then, South African health officials say, they have confirmed a total of 328 cases of XDR TB, all but 43 in KwaZulu-Natal. Slightly more than half the patients have died.

Those numbers are deceptive, however. The Tugela Ferry outbreak was reported in part because the hospital there was part of a Yale University research project involving H.I.V.-positive patients with tuberculosis. Because South Africa’s treatment and reporting programs for tuberculosis are notoriously poor — barely half of TB patients are cured — virtually all experts contend the true rate of infection is greater.

“We’re really concerned that there may be similar outbreaks to the one in Tugela Ferry that are currently going undetected because the patients die very quickly,” said Dr. Karin Weyer, who directs tuberculosis programs for South Africa’s Medical Research Council, a semiofficial research arm of the government.

Some other researchers and experts say they share Dr. Weyer’s concern. They say South African health officials have lagged badly in assembling the epidemiological studies, treatment programs and skilled clinicians needed to combat the outbreak, and say the government has responded slowly to international offers of help.

Dr. Weyer said the council “shares the concern that not enough is being done, quickly enough, to get on top of the problem.” In particular, she said, officials have yet to carry out epidemiological studies or address a “shocking” lack of infection controls in hospitals that could allow TB and other infections to spread freely among H.I.V.-positive patients
“It’s an emergency, and we’re not reacting as if it were an emergency,” said Dr. Nesri Padayatchi, an epidemiologist and expert on drug-resistant TB for Caprisa, a Durban-based consortium of South African and American AIDS researchers. “I think we have the financial resources to address the issue, and we’ve been told the Department of Health has allocated these resources.”

Although the government was first told of the outbreak 20 months ago, in May 2005, “to date, on the ground in clinics and hospitals, we are not seeing the effect,” she said.

In KwaZulu-Natal’s major city, Durban, the sole hospital capable of treating XDR TB patients has a waiting list of 70 such cases, she said.

Dr. Weyer said the waiting list indicates that “capacity is becoming a problem” in KwaZulu-Natal, the outbreak’s center. “I’m quite sure we may find a similar situation in other provinces,” she added.

A spokesman at the hospital said it could not easily determine how many patients were awaiting treatment.

But the manager of South Africa’s national tuberculosis program, Dr. Lindiwe Mvusi, said such complaints were misplaced. The Durban hospital in question, she said, is under renovation, and officials are “looking for accommodations in other hospitals” while construction proceeds.

Hospitals in other provinces have enough beds now for XDR TB patients, and some are expanding isolation wards to handle any spread of the disease, she said.

She said other responses to the outbreak were under way, including a rough assessment of TB cases in hospitals nationwide. A more comprehensive national survey of TB cases may be conducted late this year, she added, and health officials in KwaZulu-Natal have begun surveillance programs to detect new cases of drug-resistant TB in the province.

Dr. Mvusi also rejected the notion that the tuberculosis had moved beyond South Africa’s borders. But in interviews, a number of TB experts and epidemiologists raised that concern, including Mr. Raviglione at the world health organization, Dr. Padayatchi, Dr. Weyer and Dr. Gerald Friedland, director of the AIDS program at the Yale University School of Medicine.

Dr. Raviglione of W.H.O. said that South African health officials were cooperating on responses to the outbreak, and that an official of his organization would arrive in Pretoria within days to discuss placing a team of global TB experts in the country.

“W.H.O. is ready to come to South Africa and to help in any place, for anything, whether surveillance, or detection, or infection control,” he said. However, those arrangements have not been completed.

Dr. Mvusi, the government’s TB program head, said global health experts were welcome, but “in an advisory role, because we want the capacity locally.”