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.
“The man said, ’I’ve been telling you to go since last week. You are not supposed to be here,’ ” said Ms. Nakhumicha.
But others, like Mr. Mbugua, say they are going home voluntarily and are prepared to fight.
“The people who did that are still walking around freely. If they hit back, we will hit harder. We have all promised we will hit harder,” Mr. Mbugua said. He glanced meaningfully at a machete lying by his feet and then at the distant roof of a local chief he said helped a mob wielding machetes and poisoned arrows to burn his home.
The election dispute took an ugly ethnic twist that pitted President Mwai Kibaki’s Kikuyu people against the Luo and allied tribes loyal to opposition leader Raila Odinga, who is now prime minister.
More than 1,000 people were killed and 600,000 forced from their homes as politicians stoked long-simmering tribal divisions into violence. Weeks of U.N.-sponsored peace talks led to a power-sharing agreement Feb. 28.
Last week, the government promised extra security for those returning, and police began patrolling the dirt track leading to Mr. Mbugua’s farm. But many do not trust an administration filled with figures whom they and international rights groups accuse of orchestrating the killings.
Even church leaders have confessed to inciting some of the fighting because of tribal loyalties.
The government promises security, “but if the police are the ones involved, the district officer is the one involved, the chief is the one involved, where is the security?” Pentecostal pastor Sammy Maina asked angrily at the show grounds of Nakuru, an agricultural hub in the Rift Valley.
Last month, Mr. Maina, a Kikuyu, said he buried a man who was killed when he tried to reclaim his farm in western Kenya.
In March, Mr. Maina said, he tried to go back to his home town of Eldoret, in western Kenya. But he found some streets renamed to make certain tribes feel unwelcome, and many young men who usually sell milk and vegetables had disappeared.
Many tribes claim to be the original inhabitants of the Rift Valley, dispossessed by British colonizers in the 1890s and had their land redistributed after independence in 1963 in favor of the Kikuyu. The lingering resentment periodically erupts into violence, most often at election time.
David Kuria said the December election is the fourth to render him homeless. Now the married father of seven is in a squalid tent camp and said resignedly: “I fear we will be back here in five years.”
Some who accepted the government’s offer of transportation left their camps, only to return the very next day.
A man at Molo’s Sawmill camp, who asked not to be named for fear of retaliation, described this scene from last week: Five armed police officers were sent to guard about 30 people scheduled to return home, but were quickly surrounded by a mob and fled. The people they were meant to protect quickly retreated back to their camp.
According to government spokesman Alfred Mutua, nearly 60,000 displaced people have returned and 70,000 are awaiting transportation home. He said he didn’t know how many headed home but were then forced back.
Mr. Mutua stressed that resettlement is voluntary and said the government is appealing for donations to help rebuild homes and businesses. Critics, however, note the new Cabinet is Kenya’s biggest ever and has come up with enough cash for the salaries of 90 ministers and assistant ministers, along with their cars, bodyguards, secretaries and other perks.
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