Thousands of villagers in northern Kenya fled their homes in fear on Thursday as new interclan violence wracked parts of the remote region after a brutal massacre and a reprisal attack killed at least 76 people this week, officials and residents of the area said.
About 2 000 people from isolated communities sought shelter from potential revenge violence in Marsabit, the regional hub about 150km south of the village of Turbi where Tuesday’s bloody raid took place, they said.
”About 2 000 people have moved into Majengo area here,” said Roba Elema, a police reservist and water-ministry employee in Marsabit. ”There is real fear here, but there are very few GSU [General Service Unit] officers.”
The GSU is Kenya’s highly trained paramilitary police force, which has been deployed in the semi-arid region near the Ethiopian border to catch the perpetrators of Tuesday’s massacre and ensure security in the wake of the violence.
Despite their presence in the area, members of the rival Borana and Gabra clans, which have long-running disputes over water and pasture, continued to clash two days after the attack on Turbi — which has been blamed on the Borana.
”Gabra people coming from Sololo say that somebody was killed, there are reports of further attacks in Moyale,” said Bonaya Godana, an MP who represents the district where the violence is occurring.
Sololo is a predominantly Borana town about 30km north of Turbi and Moyale is about 45km east of Sololo on the Ethiopian border.
In Moyale, police said tension was running very high and that they were checking reports of interclan attacks in the small community of Rawana, south-west of the town.
”The tension here is very high; the two clans are completely at odds,” deputy police commander Hezbon Kadenge said in Nairobi by telephone.
The flight of the villagers and new reported clashes come 48 hours after 300 to 500 heavily armed Borana raiders slaughtered 56 Gabra villagers, including 22 children, on Tuesday.
At least 10 of the attackers were killed during and after the raid, which was followed by a revenge attack by a group of Gabras that killed 10 Boranas, including four children, after pulling them from a car driven by a priest near Sololo.
Despite the tension, Turbi itself, about 580km north-east of Nairobi, where the victims of Tuesday’s attack were buried on Wednesday, was calm.
”There is calm in Turbi, but people are still mourning,” said Elema, the first outsider on the scene on Tuesday, and spoke then of bloody dead bodies littering the streets.
Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki on Wednesday condemned the attacks, which are believed to be the worst single episode of interclan violence yet in the country’s post-colonial history, and called for calm.
But in Nairobi on Thursday, a leading Kenyan human rights group lashed out at Kibaki’s government for failing to ensure security and neglecting the remote region, which has been beset by violence from rival clans in the past.
”That hundreds of armed criminals can terrorise a town for hours without the intervention of the country’s security forces is a clear indication that the government has little or no authority in the north-eastern region,” the Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC) said.
”Moreover, this incident is indicative of the continuous neglect suffered by Kenyans in the region since independence,” KHRC chairperson Makau Mutua said in a statement. — Sapa-AFP