Gender rethink urged for embattled Kenya

Efforts to restore peace in Kenya will be doomed to failure if women are not invited to the negotiating table, civil society activists warned international mediators this week. "Any further negotiations must thoroughly incorporate [women's] perspectives," said Vivian Stromberg, executive director of MADRE, a US-based international network campaigning for women's rights in a number of countries across the world. In a statement endorsing Kenyan women's call for inclusion in the talks, Stromberg observed that, like elsewhere in the world, women in Kenya have suffered the most from political violence. Many have been raped, with no or limited access to humanitarian aid. According to the Red Cross, the unabated violence in Kenya has killed more than 1,000 people and forced about 330,000 to flee their homes. Some reports claims that sexual violence against women living in displacement camps has more than doubled. Recently, a coalition of women's groups organized a meeting in Nairobi to discuss how violence was affecting women's lives. They reached the conclusion that increased economic disparity, not ethnic identity, was the major cause of violence, MADRE said. In a document handed over the former UN chief and peace negotiator Kofi Annan some two weeks ago, the coalition, called the Kenyan Women's Consultation Group, recommended "comprehensive constitutional reform that would ensure equitable distribution of national resources," as part of their far-reaching peace proposal. MADRE's researchers have drawn similar conclusions. In their view, in the case of Kenya, tribal categories have become "a shorthand for describing people's unequal access to political power and economic resources." "From day-one of the crisis that has gripped Kenya this year, much of the mainstream media has been quick to label the violence 'tribal warfare', while the top US envoy to Africa called the Kenyan clashes 'ethnic cleansing'," noted MADRE's Yifat Susskind in an analysis for her network. In Susskind's view, "the problem with those terms is that they don't actually explain anything. Yet many people hear the words 'tribal warfare' or 'ethnic cleansing' and assume that people's identity is the root of the violence in Kenya." Since Kenya won independence from Britain in 1963, a small Kikuyu elite has dominated government and business opportunities while most of the rest of the country's population continued to suffer from extreme poverty and lack of access to education and health care. When Mwai Kibaki was elected in 2002, he promised to share power and resources more equitably, but, in practice, failed to deliver much. That betrayal, in Susskind's analysis, galvanized support for Raila Odinga's opposition Orange Democratic Movement (ODM). Kenya plunged into violence last December when Kibaki declared victory in national elections. The ODM accused the ruling party of rigging the elections and demanded that Kibaki step down from power. Kenya's poor majority includes members of the Luo, Luhya, and Kalenjin tribes, who initiated the protests in December. Observers say most Kikuyus, who are not part of the governing clique, have been scapegoated in the crisis. Observers say prospects for an imminent solution remain bleak although a framework for the negotiations was agreed last week, which also included issues relating to land distribution and historical injustices. In trying to broker a deal, Annan has called for a South Africa-style truth and reconciliation committee to investigate the incidents of killing and violence. Many Kenyan rights activists have called for just such a program. "The interim government should be charged with cooling passions and starting the process of reconciliation through a Truth, Justice, and Reconciliation Commission," Maina Kiai, chairman of Kenya's National Commission on Human Rights, told US lawmakers at a congressional hearing on Feb. 6. At the same hearing, former Kenyan legislator Njoki Ndungu not only favored the idea of setting up a reconciliation commission, but also emphasized the need to address the issue of gender inequality and violence to achieve peace. "[In Kenya] masculinity [is] in crisis," said Ndungu, explaining how and why many men are finding it difficult to move from traditional to modern roles in a fast growing developing economy where women, in many cases, have taken on the role of breadwinners. "Young men, particularly in the ruling setting, spend their time in the marketplaces, mostly discussing politics," she told the US House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee. "The movement from the marketplace to the road blocks for violence should then not come as any surprise." In her testimony, Ndungu called for an intervention "to reinstate the new male model around engaging in gainful employment and equal relationships as a part of society's expectations of a progressive and modern Kenyan man."