After the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, rioters took to the street across Pakistan. Shops, cars, and infrastructure were burned. At least 47 people died in the riots. Rioters destroyed 176 banks, 34 petrol stations, 72 train cars, 18 rail stations, and hundreds of cars and shops. That unrest has yet to run it’s course.
In 2007, a minibike carrying 2 French teenagers collided with a police vehicle, killing the riders. There are differing accounts of who was at fault for the collision, but the end result was once again mass civil uprising, echoing the French riots of 2005. Over 70 cars and buildings were burned, including a library, two schools, a police station, and several shops.
It makes no sense. How can it? When did burning your neighbour’s cars and homes become a legitimate way of showing your displeasure with the government? While it is safe to say that individuals didn’t burn down their own homes or cars, and I’m guessing the library burners weren’t big readers anyway, as a whole the rioters engaged in the systematic destruction of their very own community.
Now we have Kenya, a country which was until the past month considered one of the most stable nations in Africa, coming apart at the seams. I was just watching some footage of a BBC reporter, Karen Allen, flying to the town of Burnt Forest, as it is just too dangerous to travel there by road at the moment. Out of the window, she could see village after village, burned to the ground.
We travelled by helicopter and from the air could see the charred remains of villages, people’s homes razed to the ground.
More than 100 people died here in clashes last week.
In the hospital I saw patients with burns, gunshot wounds and gashes from machetes and arrows.
They had been targeted because of assumptions about which way they voted in Kenya’s controversial presidential contest.
Tribal divisions, long dormant, have been given the excuse they needed to needed to bubble up into genocide. The way you voted is not known, but is assumed from your tribal affiliation. Was this inevitable, or did circumstances simply come together in just the right combination?
Sifting through possessions we stumble across a woman who had escaped. She had sheltered in the church, along with her three children.
She spoke of the minutes before the blaze began. Attackers dragged in mattresses doused in petrol and set them alight. The door to the church was bolted to prevent people running out.
She told how she managed to scramble through an open window with her three-year-old daughter in her arms.
But when the little girl reached safety the attackers outside flung her back into the flames.
“We have never seen anything like this before, burning churches. These were friends of ours before the election, now they are trying to kill us like dogs,” she said.
17 people died in that inferno, 13 of them children, murdered by their neighbours. Neighbours with oh-so-slightly different genes, and names, and ancestors. I doubt a non-Kenyan would be able to tell the difference between them at all. It’s like Bosnia, like Rwanda, like Somalia, all over again. This time, the excuse is that some tribes voted one way, and some the other. Democracy, supposed to put an end to this sort of nonsense, has in this case become the justification to hate. People are so ready to lay down their neighbours homes, and lives for their blasted cause.
Neither of the two men, President Mwai Kibaki or his opponent Raila Odinga, who have brought their country to this point, deserve to rule. Their mutual stubbornness, and greed for power, and inability or unwillingness to control their followers, has lead Kenya to a dark place, and it will not be they who lead her back to the light.
Perhaps the President of Kenya did steal the election. He would not be the first politician to do so. Perhaps it is a fiction created by his political opponents. Either way, it is not worth the death of a nation. Kibaki and Odinga should both retreat into exile, and allow someone without Kenyan blood on their hands to step forward.
Hey Ark
You need to look at the background to the conflicts. In each case, the face of it isn’t the reality of it. In France, the relationship between the police and young people is deteriorating, the gaps between rich and poor widening, and a lot of young people, particularly of ethnic minority backgrounds are leaving France as they feel they have no opportunities there. That is surely the responsibility of the authorities? Including the police?
And in terms of the situation in Kenya, as a reflection of Africa, it is no different to many other nations. Many nations suffer corruption, ethnic divide economic devastation and extreme poverty in Africa as a result of post colonial instability (it takes longer than 50 years to have a stable government), and the burden, the great burden of capitalism. Democracy is hardly the issue imo.
You’re right, of course. I guess the point I was trying to make is about how communities turn upon themselves, and only end up making the situation far worse. How fragile and thin the veneer of civilisation is. That is the only connection I was trying to make between the three cases I mentioned. I fear I might shortly be able to add Georgia to that list.
It is the responsibility of the authorities, including the police, and their often heavy-handed reactions tend to also make matters escalate, though it is difficult to know exactly what it is they could do different once serious violence is occurring. (Though it appears that in Kenya, loyalist security forces have gone well beyond anything we would consider peacekeeping.) Ideally they should have acted to prevent the anger of the people rising up to that point in the first place. That would take foresight, which is in short supply with most politicians.
I brought up democracy, as it is the cure-all of choice for the neoconservatives. That democracy instantly makes everything better is their dubious claim, not mine. I do not believe that democracy is the problem, though I do believe that it has been used as a tool by two men to stoke up tribal divisions for their own personal power. As the BBC’s Mark Doyle put it: “A more complete headline might be: “Tribal differences in Kenya, normally accepted peacefully, are exploited by politicians hungry for power who can manipulate poverty-stricken population.” “.