BRIEFING: Kenyans warily return home

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MOLO, Kenya (AP) — Afternoon sunshine warmed Samuel Mbugua as he hammered down a tarpaulin over the ruins of his burned and looted home. But the peace that brought him back to his Kenyan farm is as fragile as the plastic stretched over the weathered beams.

The 45-year-old carpenter is in the first wave of people that the government started helping return home last week, four months after they were driven away by violence following the presumably rigged Dec. 27 presidential election.

Mr. Mbugua willingly went back to the ashes of his belongings and the tangle of overgrown weeds where his neighbor bled to death from arrow wounds. With Mr. Mbugua were his wife and three children.

But many uprooted Kenyans refuse to return without better protection and a firm offer of compensation for their losses. Some trying to go home have met hostility that chased them back to the makeshift camps.

Witnesses say police are forcing thousands of displaced people to leave a refugee camp in the western town of Kitale, sometimes beating people who refused to leave.

Remi Carrier, of Doctors Without Borders, said local officials accompanied by armed police officers were going from tent to tent yesterday in a camp housing 9,000 people in the western town of Kitale and ordering people to leave in a matter of hours.

A woman who objected was beaten unconscious, witnesses said.

Catherine Nakhumicha said a high-ranking district official hit her 23-year-old cousin, Dorcas Nelima, in the face. When she collapsed and began screaming, he seized a log of firewood and beat her for several minutes until she was unconscious. The official, accompanied by armed police, threatened others with the stick when they came to investigate the screams, she said.

Efforts by the official to revive Mrs. Nelima were unsuccessful and she was hauled off by police, witnesses said.

Her cousin said Mrs. Nelima objected to leaving the camp because she was going to be dumped with her two toddlers in the burned-out ruins of her house, with no shelter in the rainy season.