Death Toll Climbs to 800 in Fresh Wave of Kenya Violence

Rampaging mobs torched buses in the western Kenyan town of Kisumu today, burning a driver to death, as the death toll from post-election violence climbed to 800.

In Naivasha, the center of Kenya's flower industry, hundreds of people from rival communities confronted each other. About 1,000 people armed with machetes, clubs and rocks retreated only when a handful of police fired live bullets into the air.

In the worst incident of the latest flare-up, eight people were burned to death while locked inside one house in Naivasha.

The atmosphere of lawlessness was heightened when two Germans, a resident businessman and a tourist, were battered to death by a gang of robbers. The robbers followed the pair to their apartment in southeast Kenya's Diana beach resort, police said, and killed with crude weapons.

Over 70 people were killed at the weekend in the Rift Valley amid fears that violence is escalating out of control. In the usually peaceful Rift Valley towns, gangs from rival communities have been fighting each other with machetes, clubs and bows and arrows.

Attacks in the immediate aftermath of President Mwai Kibaki's win were mainly against his Kikuyu tribe - the largest and richest in Kenya - but members of that group, including the outlawed Mungiki gang, have begun fighting back, Kenyans say.

In Kisumu, an opposition stronghold, several thousand people took to the streets to complain about the deaths of members of their Luo ethnic community in the Rift Valley.

"A Molo Line bus has just been burnt, the road linking Kisumu to Kakamega is blocked, almost the whole of Kisumu is up in smoke," Eric Odhiambo, a motorcycle-taxi driver told Reuters. "People are mad at killings of Luo in Naivasha yesterday. The police are firing teargas and shooting in the sky ... But there are so many rioters, the police cannot handle them."

Kofi Annan, the former UN secretary general who is trying to mediate between the government and the opposition, visited trouble spots in the Rift Valley over the weekend. He said the crisis had gone well beyond an electoral dispute and denounced "gross and systematic" human rights abuses.

Negotiators led by Annan have told the rival camps of Kibaki and the opposition leader, Raila Odinga, to select four representatives each and study a blueprint for further talks in the next 24 hours, an official involved in the mediation said.

But residents in Naivasha harbored little faith in negotiations. "Those people shouting for Raila, they don't want peace. They have been killing our people, burning our houses," said David Gitonga, a Naivasha resident who had been manning a roadblock until the army cleared it away.

"Now it's our turn to have justice."

The Daily Nation newspaper called on the two political rivals to compromise quickly to halt the bloodshed that has badly tarnished Kenya's reputation for stability.

"They must quickly agree to resolve the political stalemate by eschewing their hardline positions. What more must happen to convince the two principals at the heart of the poll dispute that the country is collapsing and that they stand to lose everything they are haggling over so fiercely?" the paper said in an editorial.

The Foreign Office minister Lord Malloch-Brown warned that Kenya was in danger of "falling over the edge" because of escalating violence.

The Africa minister, who has spoken to Kenya's political leaders during his visit, said he was trying to get them take Annan's mediation seriously and to recognise the scale of the crisis.

"This country is hurting," he said. "Its economy is way down. Tourist receipts are way down. It's a country which at points this weekend seemed almost physically divided, with roadblocks preventing people moving from one side of the country to another."

While public anger was sparked initially by the presidential vote, which local and foreign observers said was flawed, rivalries over land, business and power dating back to Kenya's 1963 independence have fueled the violence.

Analysts say colonial Britain's divide-and-rule policies among different communities created wounds that have festered ever since, worsened by unfair post-independence land policies.