BRIEFING: Kenyans warily return home

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.

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