Kenya Countdown

Does Africa have the resources to deal with these conflicts?
There aren't any African troops to be parachuted into Kenya. The second thing is, the Kenyan army is one of the best armies in the region, and they don't seem to have been thoroughly mobilized in this internal conflict. They're not used to dealing internally; they're not an army that's been used to repress their own people too often. If there were a unified government, [a] new coalition government might authorize the army to prevent the mayhem. And once security is restored, one's going to see very little of this tit-for-tat violence.

And what should the international community, neighboring governments, and others do if we don't see improvement like what you've described?
If within a week Kofi Annan hasn't successfully brought the opposition and the government together and created a modus vivendi, a way of moving forward that eliminates the violence, then it's probably important for the U.N. to try to round up some peace enforcers who can go in, whether Bangladeshis or Fijians or somebody, to hold a ring between the contending forces and put down the violence. So we've only got a week, I think a week at most, before one can intervene. If Kofi Annan leaves town in disgust, that's the moment for Ban Ki-Moon to go to the Security Council and get a rapid peacekeeping force. There's one trouble with that, and that's that the U.N. doesn't move quickly enough once it has a resolution, so it might mean that there might be a need for a European or British battalion to move in—under U.N. authorization of course.

Could you go into a little more detail about the distinction between characterizing this situation as tribalism versus a conflict over resources?
The important thing is this is not some nasty bunch of Africans being "tribal," this is violence for political ends. Kenya's a very sophisticated state. It ranked 15th in the last index of African governance that I put together, published in September. That's pretty high up, out of 48 states. So it's not a Congo; it's not a Sudan. It has been a reasonably well-governed state. The populace snapped when the government's ability to be fair was questioned because of the election manipulations, so people began to lash out and attempt to gain back resources they had lost over decades of rule by the ruling party. And naturally people try to hold on to their resources—resources meaning either land or transport routes or factories or access to the railway, anything like that that would improve their standard of living. That's what they've been doing all these last few weeks.

© 2008