For days, Nairobi's slums were sealed off by security forces, causing widespread hunger. In Kibera, on the city's south side, what little food there was reached prices the poor could not possibly afford. Children collapsed under barrages of tear-gas. There was not enough water to wash their eyes. Corpses lay
unclaimed in the fetid dust, some shot, others slashed. Ethnic cleansing went on despite the siege.
Thousands of Kikuyus fled their tiny shacks, escaping through the nearby Ngong forest with dirty bundles of meagre possessions to take refuge in Nairobi's showground beyond. Kikuyus trying to enter Kibera were dragged out and beaten up by Luos.
The violence was, if anything, worse upcountry, where gangs of young men from the Kalenjin group
turned on their Kikuyu neighbours in the Rift Valley. Many of the deaths there, including the burning to death of Kikuyus in a church, occurred in and around the town of Eldoret, whose Kikuyus fled, taking buses or lorries south to Nakuru, under government protection.
The conspicuously quietest bit of the country has been the Kikuyu highlands stretching up north of Nairobi to the slopes of Mount Kenya. About 97% of Central Province's voters were officially said to have plumped for Mr Kibaki. In mainly Kikuyu towns such as Thika, Luos working in government offices have fled. “We are not sure if they will come back,” says the district commissioner. “The situation is worst in the coffee estates and isolated farms. We can't offer protection there.”
Poorer Luos still working in Thika live harmoniously with other tribes in makeshift settlements on the edge of the town. “We don't say anything too loud,” says a young Luo. “The problem is the Kikuyus are too arrogant. They feel they have a right to rule.” Unsurprisingly, the Kikuyu view is different. “We're civilised and they are not,” says a Kikuyu mini-bus driver in the market-place, to applause from his friends.
So far the instability has cost the country $1 billion, says the finance ministry. The cost of borrowing abroad is likely to rise, the overvalued Kenyan shilling will fall, tourism has already been badly hit and foreign aid may be cut back. Planned privatisations will get greater scrutiny; some may falter. There may not be enough money to keep Mr Kibaki's promise of free secondary education for all. But breaking it would sorely undermine him.
Kenya's neighbours are being hurt too. Several, such as south Sudan and Uganda are landlocked, so rely on Kenya's roads and its port of Mombasa for their trade to the outside world. Uganda is particularly jittery. Its president, Yoweri Museveni, wants Kenyan troops to protect oil en route to the Ugandan border and says Uganda must build its own oil terminal to lessen its dependency on Mombasa. While Kenya's big men refuse to compromise, the country's reputation as a beacon of stability in a sea of regional turbulence is in tatters.
Copyright © 2008 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.
The Arabs
Between fitna, fawda and the deep blue sea
Jan 10th 2008 | CAIRO
From The Economist print edition
Why George Bush, touring the Middle East this week, is finding the Arabs in a gloomy mood IT IS not easy to be an Arab these days. If you are old, the place where you live is likely to have changed so much that little seems friendly and familiar. If you are young, years of rote learning in dreary state schools did not prepare you well for this new world. In your own country you have few rights. Travel abroad and they take you for a terrorist. Even your leaders don't count for much in the wider world.
Some are big on money, others on bombast, but few are inspiring or visionary.
These are gross generalisations, of course. Huge differences persist among 300m-odd Arabic speakers and 22 countries of the Arab League. With oil prices touching record highs, some Arab economies are booming. The gulf between a Darfuri refugee and a Porsche-driving financier in Dubai is as great as between any two people on earth. Yet to travel through the Arab world right now is to experience a peculiar sameness of spirit. Particularly among people under 30, who make up the vast majority of Arabs, the mood is one of disgruntlement and doubt.
Factors that contribute to the gloom include the discombobulating impact of one of the world's fastest population growth rates, failing public-education systems and the resilience of social traditions often ill- suited to the urban lifestyle that is now the Arab norm. But it is politics above all that shapes this generation's discontent.
In the world at large, things have not looked good for the Arabs for a long time. The generation that emerged after the second world war came to believe in the inevitability of an Arab renaissance after
centuries of domination by Ottoman Turks and European imperialists. Within this scheme of Arab progress, the problem of Palestine stuck out like a troublesome nail. Defeat in the 1967 war with Israel shattered many dreams. Yet even after Israel's victory Palestine remained a touchstone for Arabs everywhere. Sooner or later, it was felt, justice would be done.
That confidence has taken a beating of late. Few Arabs expect the peace initiative George Bush launched in Annapolis last November to achieve anything. And the schism between Hamas and Fatah has shaken underlying assumptions. If the Palestinians cannot unite in their own cause, why should other Arabs help them? And which side to support? For fellow Arabs, as for Palestinians themselves, the clash between a heart that cries “resist” and a head that counsels compromise has seldom been more perplexing.
As in Palestine, so in Iraq. In 2003 America's invasion produced all but universal Arab outrage. From afar, Iraqi “resistance” looked both natural and noble. But as Iraq has grown messier, the rights and wrongs have grown harder for Arabs to disentangle. There are few heroes in a cast that includes mass killers from al-Qaeda, brutal Shia militias, criminal gangs, Kurdish separatists and corrupt politicians as well as the American occupiers.
Elsewhere in the region, it has become harder for thoughtful Arabs to blame the government-inspired slaughter in the Darfur region of Sudan or the stalemate between Lebanon's religious sects on a
nefarious American foreign policy. Many Arabs still see Mr Bush's “war on terrorism” as a crusade against Islam. But many also note that al-Qaeda-style jihadism has killed more Muslims, from Morocco to Saudi Arabia to the squalid Palestinian refugee camps of Lebanon, than “infidels”.
In past decades, Arabs looked to leaders for guidance. Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat, Tunisia's modernising secularist, Habib Bourguiba, and Kings Hussein of Jordan, Hassan II of Morocco
Reuters
and Faisal of Saudi Arabia were all flawed men. Yet they, and even monsters such as Saddam Hussein and Hafez Assad, enjoyed some popular appeal as nation-builders. Most of today's leaders, by contrast, lack an inspirational project. Nor is any single country a natural leader of the Arabs. Egypt under the 26- year-long rule of Hosni Mubarak is no longer the champion of “Arabism”. Saudi Arabia has vast oil wealth but a mixed record in diplomacy: its attempt last year to reconcile Fatah and Hamas unravelled with humiliating speed.
It may be a good thing that the personality-based leadership of the 1960s and 1970s has fallen out of fashion. Unfortunately, it has not been replaced by more institutionally-based systems of rule, let alone—
for all the aid and speechifying of Western do-gooders—by democracy. Elections are more frequent and opposition parties and the press somewhat freer. But this is often a case of adopting the outward shape of reform without the substance. Regimes point to the existence of parliaments, while hiding the tricks used to pack them with friends and exclude real opposition. They can trumpet privatisation programmes that reduce the role of the state, while obscuring the fact that many of the beneficiaries are regime cronies.
The marginally freer press makes for more colourful news-stands. But some opening was probably inescapable, due to the impact of hard-to-block new media, via satellites and the internet. Governments have simply switched from absolute control of information, for example through state television
monopolies, to enacting laws that criminalise “spreading false information” or “disrespecting state institutions”. The supposedly liberalising, pro-Western governments of Morocco, Jordan, Tunisia and Egypt have all used such means to stifle dissent. Syria under Hafez Assad used to hurl dissidents into prison without much ado. His “modernising” son Bashar has them tried first. But they still end up in the slammer.
Stratagems such as these suck the vitality out of politics. Morocco is one of the bolder Arab reformers.
Yet despite rising prosperity, a relatively free press and multi-party elections, Moroccans have grown increasingly sceptical of a political process that remains tightly, if elegantly, circumscribed. As a result, voter turnout has steadily declined over the past two decades. In Egypt, fewer than one in ten voters bothered to turn out for recent polls.
Political scientists have long blamed oil wealth—and the rentier economy that so often goes along with it—for the survival of Arab authoritarianism. No taxation without representation, said America's
revolutionaries. Arab governments have inverted this refrain: by appropriating national energy resources and other rents, they neatly absolve themselves of the need to levy heavy taxes and therefore to win the consent of the governed.