50 churchgoers killed as Kenya election violence rages

A mob torched a church sheltering hundreds of people fleeing post-election violence in Kenya today, killing up to 50 people, including many children, as four days of rioting and ethnic clashes marked one of the darkest times in the country’s history.

The church fire in Eldoret, some 185 miles from the capital, Nairobi, killed at least 50 people, said a Red Cross volunteer who counted the bodies and helped the wounded.

She said gangs were checking the tribal affiliations of aid workers.

President Mwai Kibaki, sworn in on Sunday after a vote opponents said was rigged, said political parties should meet immediately and publicly called for calm.

The violence has killed at least 270 people in what had been east Africa’s most stable and prosperous democracy.

The opposition candidate, Raila Odinga, said he would refuse to meet the president to try to end the chaos.

“If he announces that he was not elected, then I will talk to him,” Odinga said in an interview. He accused the government of stoking the violence and said Kibaki’s administration “is guilty, directly, of genocide”.

The violence has erupted throughout Kenya, from the shanty towns of Nairobi to resort towns on the sweltering coast, exposing tribal resentments that have long festered in the country.

Kibaki’s Kikuyu people, Kenya’s largest ethnic group, are accused of using their dominance of politics and business to the detriment of others.

Odinga is from the Luo tribe, a smaller but still major tribe. In the slums, which are often divided along tribal lines, rival groups have been going at each other with machetes and sticks, as police fire teargas and live rounds to keep them from pouring into the city centre.

Anne Njoki, a 28-year-old Kikuyu, said she fled her home in the slums after she saw Kikuyus being attacked and their homes looted. She was camped out near a military base with her sister, three-year-old nephew and seven-year-old niece.

“They have taken our beds, blankets, even spoons,” she said of the looters. The children had not eaten for days.

The European Union and the United States have refused to congratulate Kibaki, and the EU and four Kenyan electoral officials called for an independent inquiry.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown urged Kibaki and Odinga to hold talks.

“The violence must be brought to an end,” he said.

Odinga insisted he would continue with plans to lead 1 million people in a protest march in the capital on Thursday against Kibaki, who had been trailing him in early election results and opinion polls before pulling ahead.

The government banned the demonstration, but Odinga said: “It doesn’t matter what they say.”

The widespread violence and growing international pressure could lead Kibaki to seek a compromise with the opposition. Riots have also been raging in opposition strongholds in western Kenya, the tourism-dependent coast and the Rift Valley.

In Nairobi’s Mathare slum, Odinga supporters torched a minibus and attacked Kikuyu travellers, witnesses said today.

“The car had 14 people in it, but they only slashed Kikuyus,” witness Boniface Mwangi said. Five were attacked by the machete-wielding gang, others robbed, he said.

In Nairobi’s slums, home to a third of the city’s population, parents searched for food, with many shops closed because of looting.

Winnie Nduku, 34, said she and her three young children had not eaten in three days and the family had no money because her husband, a minibus driver, had been unable to find work.

“My eldest daughter keeps asking what am I going to do, and the small one is crying from hunger,” she said.

Kibaki, 76, won by a landslide in 2002, ending 24 years in power by Daniel arap Moi.

Kibaki is praised for turning the country into an east African economic powerhouse with an average growth rate of 5%. But his anti-corruption campaign has been seen as a failure, and the country still struggles with tribalism and poverty.

Odinga, 62, cast himself as a champion of the poor. His main constituency is the Kibera slum, where some 700,000 people live in poverty, but he has been accused of failing to do enough to help them in 15 years as a Member of Parliament.