Kenya Opposition Turns to Boycott
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN, New York Times
NAIROBI, Kenya — Protests cooled in Kenya on Friday as opposition leaders, still furious about last month’s presidential election, announced that they were switching tactics from street demonstrations to boycotts.
After three days of nationwide rallies that degenerated into battles with police officers, the country was mostly calm, save for a few flash points. Witnesses said that police officers shot and killed at least two people in Kibera, a huge slum on the outskirts of Nairobi, the capital. Earlier in the day, vandals uprooted a length of train tracks that run through Kibera, where a freight train had been looted on Thursday.
In Mombasa, Kenya’s second-largest city and a key port for all of East Africa, hundreds of protesters emerged from mosques to call for a new election. Police officers responded with teargas and gunshots. Witnesses said at least one person was killed, bringing the deaths from this week’s disturbances to more than 20, including several children.
The zero-tolerance policy of the Kenyan police is drawing increasing criticism, with Western diplomats in Nairobi urging the government to allow peaceful rallies — which are currently banned — and to stop using lethal force against unarmed demonstrators.
Opposition leaders and their supporters have been protesting the elections in December in which Mwai Kibaki, Kenya’s president, was declared the winner by a narrow margin, over Raila Odinga, the top opposition leader, despite widespread evidence that election officials had tampered with results during vote tallying because of the heavy turnout for Mr. Odinga.
On Friday, a consortium of Kenyan election monitors and human rights groups announced that there were so many glaring irregularities in the poll that it was impossible to tell who really won, a position echoed by American diplomats who have done their own analysis. The consortium issued a report called “Countdown to Deception: 30 Hours that Destroyed Kenya.”
David Ndii, a researcher for the anti-corruption group Transparency International, said that election officials had siphoned away votes for Mr. Odinga and boosted the number of votes for Mr. Kibaki during the tallying process.
“The suspicious votes are sufficient to alter the outcome of the presidential elections,” Mr. Ndii said.
But it is not clear how much impact this will carry because Mr. Kibaki and the tight circle of advisers around him have insisted that the president won the election fairly and that there will be no re-run.
The issue now seems to be power sharing, and opposition leaders said they are amenable to discuss any arrangement with Mr. Kibaki, as long as the talks are held by international mediators, a condition which the government has so far rebuffed.
As for the boycotts, Salim Lone, a spokesman for Mr. Odinga, said the plan was to target businesses owned by Mr. Kibaki’s allies, like one of Kenya’s biggest dairies and a bus company in Nairobi.
“The strategy is to weaken those who are hard-liners and using their wealth to undermine democracy,” Mr. Lone said.
The government has said that Kenya’s economy, which up until last month was the dynamo of East Africa, has been hurt enough. Tourists are leaving, trade has stopped and the currency is weakening.
“Let us please leave private businesses out of politics,” was the message that Alfred Mutua, a government spokesman, sent via mobile phones on Friday.
Also on Friday, police officials arrested three foreign journalists, including a filmmaker following Mr. Odinga, on charges of terrorism after accusing them of filming vital installations.
Kennedy Abwao contributed reporting.
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