US: No ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Kenya
Washington distances itself from its top African envoy’s comments on violence.
On Wednesday, Frazer said machete-wielding gangs had burnt homes and businesses in the western province, and were trying to force out the Kikuyu people, the tribe of Mwai Kibaki, the president.
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“If they do document any instances of atrocities, we’ll have to look at what next steps to take, but at this point we’re not there yet,” McCormack said.
“Very often, the case with these kind of circumstances is that you don’t have a full understanding, a complete picture of what happened until after the situation is over and things have calmed down,” he said.
“There has been an organised effort to push out people from Rift Valley… It is clearly ethnic cleansing. I don’t consider it genocide,” she said.
“The cycle of retaliation has gone too far and has become more dangerous.”
“We have orders to shoot to kill these categories of people if they are caught in the act.”
“Police will henceforth be very forceful on groups of persons carrying out activities that threaten the lives and property of others,” Eric Kraithe, Kenya’s police spokesman, said.
Al Jazeera’s Yvonne Ndege, reporting from Nairobi, said that police officials had told her that there was no explicit shoot-to-kill order, but the law allowed police officers to shoot on sight any people threatening life or property.
Similar orders were given in January when police officers came under attack from gangs.
The violence led to hundreds of thousands internally displaced [GALLO/GETTY] |
Talks between Kibaki and Raila Odinga, the opposition leader who accuses the president of rigging the election, began in the capital on Tuesday with both men calling for calm.
Deng specified that he was not saying that anything that had happened so far in Kenya amounted to genocide.
Meanwhile, Amnesty International (AI), the London-based rights group, called for the protection of several Kenyan human rights defenders and activists who have received death threats.