The story appeared on swissinfo.ch
Killings or rights activista angers Kenyans
17:54 -05 hr Fri. 6 March 2009
By Andrew Cawthorne
NAIROBI (Reuters) – The murder of two Kenyan campaigners against illegal police killings aroused protests on Friday and heaped pressure on a divided coalition government.
Foreign and domestic condemnation of the killings, which occurred hours after a government spokesman accused the activists of being a front for a brutal crime gang, poured in.
“I fear we are flirting with lawlessness in the name of keeping law and order. In the process, we are hurtling towards failure as a state,” said Prime Minister Raila Odinga, who partners President Mwai Kibaki in the year-old unity government.
Unidentified gunmen killed Oscar Foundation director Kamau Kingara and programmes coordinator Paul Oulo after blocking their car on a central Nairobi street following a day of protests on Thursday by the Mungiki gang in central Kenya.
Small demonstrations broke out afterwards and a student was shot dead by police in the early hours of Friday. Police said three officers were arrested for using live ammunition against students, who had taken the body of one of the activists.
Students protested again as darkness fell on Friday and police fired tear gas at youths blocking a street and throwing rocks and bottles outside Nairobi University’s main campus.
Gathering protests against alleged extrajudicial police killings have added to widespread disillusionment with the poor record of a year-old coalition government formed to end the east African country’s bloody post-election crisis a year ago.
The unrest in Kenya, the region’s largest economy, will worry investors and make the government’s task of rebuilding the nation after last year’s violence even more difficult.
The two Oscar Foundation officials had mobilised protests on Thursday against what they said was the illegal killing of 1,721 young people and the disappearance of 6,542 others suspected by the police of being Mungiki members or sympathisers.
Other rights groups and a U.N. special investigator put the number killed in a crackdown, mainly in 2007, at about 500.
MAU MAU MOVEMENT
Five hours before the killing of Kingara and Oulo late on Thursday, government spokesman Alfred Mutua called the Oscar Foundation a “front” for Mungiki.
Odinga disowned Mutua, who is seen as Kibaki’s man.
“Dr Mutua does not speak for the Grand Coalition Government. He alone knows whom he speaks for,” he said.
The Mungiki gang, which draws support from Kenya’s young and jobless, is known for extortion and gruesome killings, including beheadings. It claims to be the successor of Kenya’s anti-colonial Mau Mau rebel movement.
Police in Naivasha town, an hour’s drive north of Nairobi, said on Friday they had arrested more than 70 Mungiki suspects trying to set up roadblocks overnight.
Some activists blamed authorities for the Oscar Foundation killings. But police said they suspected a set-up.
“The killings may have been carried out to tarnish the reputation of the police force,” police chief Hussein Ali said.
The U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, Philip Alston, who met both the dead activists during a visit to Kenya in February, called for a foreign-led investigation.
“It is imperative, if the Kenyan police are to be exonerated, for an independent team to be called from somewhere like Scotland Yard or the South African police to investigate,” Alston said in a statement in New York.
Washington offered the FBI’s services to catch the killers.
Some activists said an witness to Thursday’s killings was wounded in the shooting, and was taken away by police.
A group of civil society organisations issued a statement saying the two dead activists were attacked for sharing information with the U.N. rapporteur.
(Additional reporting by Frank Nyakairu, Humphrey Malalo; editing by Philippa Fletcher)