By Shashank Bengali, McClatchy Newspapers Mon Mar 17 

NAIROBI, Kenya — A leading human rights group said Monday that Kenyan  
political and business leaders plotted much of the country's recent ethnic  
violence, and it urged the new coalition government to bring the organizers to  
justice. 

New York -based Human Rights Watch found evidence that hundreds of people  
were killed in planned ethnic attacks following the disputed presidential  
election in December. In many cases, the group said, the attacks were planned  and 
financed by prominent civic leaders, although the group didn't directly  
implicate any top national politicians.

In a report titled "Ballots to Bullets," the group also charged that Kenyan  
police used excessive force to break up demonstrations in opposition  
strongholds, fatally shooting hundreds of people, including children.
More  than 1,000 people have been killed and hundreds of thousands displaced 
by more  than two months of fighting, which destroyed Kenya's reputation as a 
stable  democracy. Last month President Mwai Kibaki and opposition leader 
Raila Odinga —  who claimed that Kibaki stole the election— agreed to form a 
coalition  government and a commission to investigate the violence.

"For the new government to function well and earn the people's trust, it  
needs to first heal the wounds by prosecuting those behind the violence," said  
Human Rights Watch's Africa director, Georgette Gagnon .
The fighting,  centered in the western Rift Valley region, had its roots in 
tribe-based  grievances over land that date from before 1963, when Kenya won 
independence  from Britain . Tribes native to the Rift Valley have long 
complained that  Kikuyus, Kenya's dominant tribe, were illegally granted large parcels 
of land,  and Kibaki's Kikuyu-led government has failed to address the land 
question since  coming to power in 2002.

Ethnically charged rhetoric marred the 2007 election campaign, a tightly  
fought race that saw Kikuyus overwhelmingly favoring Kibaki while a smattering  
of smaller tribes backed Odinga.
Researchers found that leaders of the  Kalenjin tribe, which backed Odinga, 
planned attacks on Kikuyu homes before the  election. One Kalenjin elder said 
he attended a meeting in the town of Eldoret  where elders "said that if there 
is any sign that Kibaki is winning, then the  war should break."
In most of the Rift Valley , Kikuyus fled to ancestral  lands in central 
Kenya . But Kikuyu gangs struck back in the lakeside tourist  town of Naivasha, 
where several witnesses told Human Rights Watch that Kikuyu  businessmen called 
a meeting at a local hotel on Jan. 23 to plan reprisal  attacks.

"This was not done by ordinary citizens; it was arranged by people with  
money," said one young man who attended the meeting. "We were paid 200 shillings  
(about $3 ) for going to the meeting, and we were told we would get the rest  
after the job. It was like a business."
Leading politicians on both sides  have denied playing any role in the 
attacks. But many Kenyan activists say that  top officials allowed the violence to 
carry on by not appealing more forcefully  to their supporters to back down.

The government commission also must investigate the police response, Human  
Rights Watch said. While police admitted to following "shoot-to-kill" orders in 
 the western opposition stronghold of Kisumu— killing more than 30 people—  
officers "made little attempt to intervene at all" when pro-government mobs 
went  on rampages in Naivasha and the Rift Valley town of Nakuru, the report  
said.
"The commission has to ask why the police were ordered to shoot (in  Kisumu) 
and not in other places," said Ben Rawlence , co-author of the report.  "There 
must have been different orders in different places."
A police  spokesman said the department had no comment because it hadn't read 
the report  yet.
( McClatchy special correspondent Munene Kilongi contributed.)
 



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