Lawlessness grips Kenyan countryside
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NANDI HILLS, Kenya: The road from Eldoret to Kericho used to be one of the prettiest drives in Kenya, a ribbon of asphalt threading through lush tea farms, bushy sugar cane and green humpbacked hills. Now it is a gantlet of machete-wielding teenagers, some chewing stalks of sugar cane, others stumbling drunk.
On Friday there were no fewer than 20 checkpoints in the span of 100 miles, and at each barricade - a downed telephone pole, a gnarled tree stump - mobs of rowdy young men jumped in front of cars, yanked at door handles and pulled out knives.
Their actions did not seem to be motivated by ethnic tension, like much of the violence that has killed more than 800 people in Kenya since a flawed election in December.
It was much simpler than that.
"Give us money," demanded one young man who stood defiantly in the road with a bow in his hands and a quiver of poisoned arrows on his back.
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On other fronts, there were signs of progress. The government and the opposition, which had been blaming each other for Kenya's rapid plunge, signed a peace plan for the first time Friday night to help defuse tensions and bring an end to the violence.
And despite fears that Kenya would explode again after a second opposition lawmaker was gunned down Thursday, there were no reports of mass revenge killings. The volatile slums ringing Nairobi, the capital, seemed to be quiet.
Ban Ki Moon, the secretary-general of the United Nations, visited Kenya on Friday and said he was "encouraged by the constructive spirit that has prevailed throughout my discussions so far," though he said he was still very concerned about the unrest.
"It has led to an intolerable level of deaths, destruction, displacement and suffering," he said. "It has to stop."
To help stem the violence, the agreement reached Friday outlined specific steps to build peace, including refraining from provocative statements, holding joint meetings to promote stability and disbanding militias.
But it was unclear how the plan would address the thornier fact that both sides still claim to have won the election. There is also a question at this point about how well Kenyans are following their leaders.
Far from the political negotiations, Kenya's countryside seems to be settling into a bizarre state of lawlessness, uncharacteristic of this country and more reminiscent of the checkpoint culture in Somalia or Darfur, Sudan.
Roadblocks have been a problem since the elections, with angry mobs demanding to see the identification cards of passers-by to determine their ethnic identities. Such clashes led to the deaths of several people a few weeks ago.
But now a different kind of roadblock seems to be taking root, one based more on opportunism than on politics. After one young man extracted a toll, of sorts, he quickly examined the bill and stuffed it into his pocket. In case there were any questions, another armed teenager stood nearby, wearing fatigues and a jaunty skipper's hat.
Kenya's troubles started in late December when President Mwai Kibaki was declared the winner of an election that outside observers called deeply flawed. Raila Odinga, the top opposition leader, who narrowly lost, said the government had rigged the election, a view that some Western observers agree with.
Many people here tend to vote along ethnic lines, and this election, perhaps more than any in Kenya's history, polarized the country.
Kibaki is Kikuyu and Odinga is Luo, two of the bigger ethnic groups. In the mayhem that erupted after the disputed vote, members of ethnic groups that backed Odinga slaughtered hundreds of Kikuyu and drove them off their land. Kikuyu eventually took their revenge, killing Luo and others.
Throughout all this, Kibaki has mostly kept quiet, leaving the opposition-bashing to his inner circle of advisers. But on Friday he accused opposition leaders of instigating "a campaign of civil unrest and violence," a statement that seemed to go against the spirit of the peace agreement.
"There is overwhelming evidence to indicate that the violence was premeditated, and systematically directed at particular communities," Kibaki said while attending a summit meeting of African leaders in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
In Kericho, a stunningly fertile area where much of Kenya's tea is grown, young men rampaged across the hillsides on Friday, looting and burning dozens of homes. They said they were avenging the death of their representative in parliament, David Kimutai Too, who was killed Thursday by a policeman.
Police officials quickly announced that Too's death was a "crime of passion," saying a policeman shot his girlfriend and Too for seeing each other behind his back.
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