Jan. 9, 2008
Desire for land driving post-election violence in western Kenya
By TODD PITMAN
KIAMBAA, Kenya (AP) _ In village after deserted village across Kenya's fertile Rift Valley, the story is the same. Rampaging mobs have chased away Kenya's most powerful tribe, the Kikuyu, burning homes to the ground and killing hundreds in the worst ethnic bloodletting in 15 years.
The violence erupted amid accusations President Mwai Kibaki, a Kikuyu, stole the Dec. 27 vote. But for many here, it's all about one thing: land.
"They think all of Kenya is theirs," Felix Biwot, an ethnic Kalenjin, said of the Kikuyus. "But this land belongs to all of us."
Land Rift
Running Scared
Jan. 11, 2008
Kenya's champion runners haven't been spared trauma of country's postelection violence
By TODD PITMAN
KUINET, Kenya (AP) _ When world marathon champion Luke Kibet goes running, he likes to focus on finishing first. But on one run during Kenya's postelection upheaval, the 25-year-old star had something else on his mind: staying alive.
Kibet was knocked to the ground by a large rock that struck his head on New Year's Eve as violence swept the country after the disputed Dec. 27 presidential vote. Regaining his senses with blood oozing from his skull, he looked up to see a mob of machete-wielding men approaching.
He got up and started running _ this time for his life.
"I was thinking about my family. I was thinking I might die there," said the married father of two, recalling the attack near his home in the western Rift Valley village of Kimumu.
On the Brink
Jan. 6, 2008
Violence and 250,000 displaced: Kenyan unrest takes toll on once-peaceful nation
By TODD PITMAN
KACHIBORA, Kenya (AP) _ Armed with bows and arrows and automatic weapons, hundreds of attackers poured through the camp where the terrified had sought refuge Sunday. They fired into the air, sparking a brief gunbattle with police before fleeing into the hills.
Hours later, after the bodies of a woman and her baby shot dead were carted away, aid agencies arrived to hand out emergency sacks of food to the hungry masses.
It sounds like a scene from war-ravaged Congo or Darfur. But this is Kenya, a country long known for welcoming refugees from troubled neighbors _ not producing them.
Fleeing the West
AP Photo by Ben Curtis.
Terrified Kenyans flee troubled west to escape wave of ethnic violence
Jan. 5, 2008
By TODD PITMAN
CHEPTIRET, Kenya (AP) _ Thousands of refugees fled western Kenya Saturday on buses escorted by armed soldiers, streaming down roads strewn with downed power lines, burnt out vehicles and the corpses of others killed when they tried to escape an explosion of postelection ethnic violence.
Behind them, thousands more huddled at church compounds and a police station in the city of Eldoret as wailing relatives tried to identify hacked, burned and strangled family members in a mortuary so full of bodies they lay piled wall-to-wall across bloody floors.