Rice, in Nairobi, Offers Incentives to End Violence

NY Times
February 19, 2008

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

NAIROBI, Kenya — Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice held pointed talks with the leaders of Kenya’s rival political factions on Monday, and said afterward that while their differences were “not unbridgeable,” the two sides must move much faster to accept a power-sharing deal that would lead to a coalition government.

“The time for a political settlement was yesterday,” Ms. Rice said at a news conference at the home of the American ambassador here.

Ms. Rice seemed to be aiming her sharpest comments at the Kenyan government, which has widely been viewed as the obstacle to a genuine power-sharing agreement between the government and the opposition. Kenyan government officials responded by saying that they agreed a solution needed to be found as soon as possible, but sounded increasingly prickly about outside intervention.

“We will not bow down to dictation,” Martha Karua, the minister of justice and constitutional affairs, said in an interview Monday night, after sitting in on a two-hour meeting between Ms. Rice and President Mwai Kibaki. “We can listen to all our friends. We can engage with them. But the decision ultimately will be ours.”

Ms. Karua’s comments underscored the delicate task the Bush administration faces in wading into the crisis in Kenya, which erupted after a disputed presidential election in December and has cost more than 1,000 lives. With Mr. Bush already in Africa on a five-country tour to promote his foreign aid agenda, he had little choice but to make a high-profile show of concern for Kenya and announced before he left Washington that he would send Ms. Rice.

Ms. Rice knew going in that she would have to tread gingerly, and it seemed on Monday that she was bringing carrots, not sticks. As she was flying from Tanzania to Nairobi over the Serengeti, the famous game-studded plains, she insisted that she did not intend to dictate a solution and that she would instead use her meetings to dangle the prospect of additional economic help for Kenya if the rival factions could reach a compromise.

“When Kenya resolves this political conflict,” she said, “they are going to find a very supportive United States in terms of additional work on reconstruction and reconciliation support.”

Power-sharing will have to be genuine, Ms. Rice said. Both sides must have “responsibilities and authorities that matter,” she said. “It can’t be simply the illusion of power sharing. It has to be real.”

Ms. Rice said she did not want to talk about threats, sanctions or provisions that might punish Kenya’s leading politicians, who have been bitterly at odds since the election.

Hundreds of thousands have been displaced in fighting that has followed ethnic lines, segregating many areas of the country into ethnically homogenous zones. Many Kenyans believe that the only solution is for the government and opposition to share power.

Ms. Rice’s promises of more help for Kenya, which already receives more than half a billion dollars of annual American aid, fit in with President Bush’s approach of rewarding countries who embrace democracy and American-approved development programs. Though the president is trying to cement his legacy as a friend of Africa with this week’s trip, he has been criticized for not traveling to Africa’s hot spots, like Congo, Sudan and now Kenya.

Supporters of Mr. Kibaki and the top opposition leader, Raila Odinga, who lost the election amid evidence of widespread vote rigging, have battled across the country. The election dispute has stirred deep grievances over land and economic inequality that have dogged Kenya since independence in 1963.

On Monday, Ms. Rice shuttled back and forth across Nairobi, meeting with Mr. Kibaki, Mr. Odinga and Kenyan business leaders. The country’s economy, until recently one of the strongest in Africa, has been brought to its knees by the turbulence and violence.

Ms. Rice also talked with Kofi Annan, the former United Nations secretary general, who has spent the past four weeks in Kenya trying to broker a truce, and told him where she thought there were potential “points of agreement” between the parties.

The opposition has proposed a number of power-sharing possibilities, including having Mr. Kibaki remain the president, head of state and commander-in-chief of the military while Mr. Odinga becomes prime minister and is in charge of domestic affairs.

But members of Mr. Kibaki’s team have forcefully rejected that, saying they will give the opposition some cabinet posts but that the Kenyan Constitution does not allow power to be divided the way the opposition is suggesting. The fear is that unless the government gives the opposition a meaningful role in ruling the country, opposition supporters will revert to violence and Kenya will join the growing club of failed states in Africa.

Mr. Odinga has said the prime minister post is the bare minimum he would accept.
“Beyond that, we will be out of government,” he said in an interview Sunday night. He also said that Mr. Kibaki was not the stumbling block but that the problem was a small clique of “hard-liners” around Mr. Kibaki.

“I’m sure he’s willing for a power-sharing arrangement that would give him a decent way out to get our country out of this mess,” Mr. Odinga said.

Mr. Odinga gave a gloomy prognosis, saying that the negotiations would most likely fail and that Kenya would soon be ungovernable.

“The moment it is announced that the talks collapsed, I am sure there will be an eruption countrywide,” he said. “It will be chaos.”

The government has dismissed those threats and accused opposition leaders, including Mr. Odinga, of inciting their supporters to kill people of Mr. Kibaki’s ethnicity. Mr. Odinga has denied that and blamed the government for failing to protect Kenyans.

On Monday, Ms. Rice said that the back-and-forth had to end and that it was not just the American government that thought this.

“What I hear is the impatience and insistence of Kenyans that this is resolved,” she said. “It is Kenyans who are insisting that its leaders and political class find a solution.”

Kennedy Abwao contributed reporting.