NAIROBI—It’s been a hard-slogging month for Kofi Annan. Unlike Condoleezza Rice, who whisked in for a ten-hour visit last week, the former UN chief has promised not to leave until he finds a solution to Kenya’s intractable crisis. This means looking to the very people who provoked the last two months of violence to suddenly (or rather, oh so slowly) become reasonable, accountable, and amenable to each other’s point of view.

Small wonder that this has become the longest such engagement of his career, with no end yet in sight; after coming within inches of a deal over the weekend, mediation efforts sputtered to a halt on Tuesday. The Ghanaian sage looked frustrated as he announced a suspension in the peace process, pending an urgent one-on-one with Kibaki and Odinga.

Annan, a saintly figure around whom a faint aura of tragedy seems to permanently hang, will always be haunted by his decision to withhold UN peacekeepers from Rwanda until it was too late. But a success story here in Kenya, fourteen years later, might soften that legacy’s edge. On the other hand, should his efforts fail to bear fruit, he may well have two massacres associated with his name.

It’s widely assumed that Annan ’s presence is the only thing holding this country together at the moment. Every television in the country is tuned in to the nightly nine o’clock news; every farmer, businessman, gangster and student in Kenya is waiting for the cue either to resume their previous routines or gird for war. So long as Annan is here and the two sides keep talking, the message is: let’s wait and see. If Annan leaves empty-handed, the clear signal will be that violence is the only solution.

This time, it would be far worse. The official post-election death toll now stands at about 1,500; that number would be much higher if the killers hadn’t limited themselves to using machetes, clubs, stones and fire. In retrospect, it seems amazing that the only people using guns were the police. Kenyans, after all, have plenty of access to artillery, thanks to porous borders with Somalia, Sudan, and Uganda, three of the most violent nations in Africa. So why did the mobsters, to a man, use weapons from the Stone Age? No one has properly investigated this mystery, but there are indications that Odinga’s people sent word out to the chiefs who organized January’s violence not to use bullets.

Even if that’s true, such restraint is unlikely to be exercised in a second chapter. The tribes are reportedly stockpiling weapons—guns, not knives—and organizing militias to protect them in the absence of public security forces. Respect for government and rule of law has been grinding down steadily the last two months. At the same time, the outrage provoked by the forced displacement of some 300,000 people has yet to be addressed—if anything, it’s only deepened in the wake of the raiders’ impunity and a wave of revenge attacks.

It’s true that not all the news is morbid. Odinga’s team has called off the country-wide protests they had planned for Thursday, no small gesture given the potential those protests had to trigger violence. Calm remains the order of the day, and there’s no doubt the majority of Kenyans want it to stay that way; as for Annan, however exasperated he may be feeling, he hasn’t given up—thanks at least in part to the considerable backing he enjoys of every major western country.

That said, the efforts of the two antagonists to reach an amicable agreement continue to look half-hearted at best. At worst, they can be interpreted as a stalling tactic meant to buy each side enough time to arm themselves for a more conclusive round of negotiations, to be held on a battle field instead of in a conference room. As reason and accountability slip further into the horizon, hope may not yet be lost, but it’s just about the only thing left.

* * * * * *

[Appended Thursday, February 28, 10:26p.m]

Hallelujah—it looks like hope, in the hands of the right miracle worker, is enough after all. Whatever Annan said behind closed doors in the forty-eight hours following his suspension of the mediation talks, it worked. At six o’clock Thursday, president Kibaki signed a deal that will make Raila Odinga Kenya’s prime minister, with executive powers rivalling the president’s. Cabinet posts will also be shared fifty-fifty between Kibaki’s PNU and Odinga’s ODM parties.

How smoothly all this will work in practice remains to be seen—parliament is reconvening next Thursday to make the necessary constitutional ammendments —but for the first time since Christmas, all bets are on peace.

Put away the war drums. This cynic was wrong.

Tags: international, kenya

More in Notes from Nairobi | Sphere: Related Content | Blogs Home | Current Issue | SUBSCRIBE »

Posted on Wednesday, February 27th, 2008 at 5:28 pm. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.