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"Those calling for peace must also acknowledge the grievances that caused the dispute." - Harun Ndubi - Lawyer and Civil Rights Leader - January 2008

Kenya - Circa 2002...

Five years ago, we voted in the Kibaki administration on a platform of zero tolerance to corruption. We voted for a broad and nationally representative Government. Sadly Kibaki went in the opposite direction starting with the Anglo Leasing saga and subsequent exile of Anti-corruption Czar John Githongo.

We wanted this arrangement to quickly introduce a new and more inclusive Constitution, deal firmly with corruption and start a process of defining the nation in terms that included everybody.

President Mwai Kibaki tragically steered a course away from the coalition and cultivated the support of his Kikuyu community and surrounded himself with a power hungry elitist cabal. To give credit where it is due, he did a good job of rebuilding the civil service and managing the economy, but he did it within a framework that was not sustainable.

He even did the unthinkable and reneged on the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that had bound the NARC (National Rainbow Coalition) together.

His nemesis, Raila Amolo Odinga, rebelled and he, together with the others, was fired from the cabinet. Kibaki's undoing. So much so that when it came to the national referendum in 2005 to vote for or against the constitution that had mutated and been altered severely from what Kenyans had agreed on at Bomas, to the Naivasha and finally Kilifi draft, Kibaki was soundly beaten and the ODM (Orange Democratic Movement) was born.

In the run-up to the recently concluded General Election, Raila Odinga had built a movement on the back of President Kibaki's betrayal of the spirit of 2002. His political party, the ODM, cut across all ethnic divides like the one he'd created to bring Kibaki to office.

Kenya 27TH December 2007...

On December 27th, a record 65% of registered Kenyan voters rose as early as 4am to vote. Stood in lines for up to 10 hours, in the sun and rain. It was widely acknowledged as an impressive election turn-out and Kenyans were commended for their dignity and courage.

As the results trickled in, Kenyans cheered as minister after powerful minister lost their parliamentary seats. Voters from the Rift Valley categorically rejected the three sons of Daniel Arap Moi. The country spoke through the ballot, en masse, against the mind-blowing greed, corruption, human rights abuses, callous dismissal of Kenya's poor that have characterized the Kibaki administration.

Kenya 28TH December 2007...

The media is relaying the votes as they are announced by returning officers via live broadcasts from the ground at the polling stations where the counting is taking place. ODM Presidential candidate, Raila Amolo Odinga is in the lead over incumbent Emilio Mwai Kibaki in the range of 1.2 million votes.

Kenya 29TH December 2007...

The Government calls a press conference and says that the only valid results are the ones that are being announced by the ECK (Electoral Commission of Kenya) no matter how slow. ECK Chair, Samuel Kivuitu echoes the Governments sentiments.

Citizens start getting impatient because they do not understand why the media is ahead of the ECK. The ECK says that they only wait for the Returning Officers to officially hand them the results, but Kivuitu says that he suspects that the delayed results are being "cooked" somewhere and if they are brought forth he would reject them. He talked of "fugitives" and "burning of the country". But he didn't reject the delayed and "cooked" results when they were presented to him. He even wondered aloud if the returning officers thought they were witchdoctors and if they stayed with the results longer they will "change" them.

He further says that he cannot get hold of his returning officers in some constituencies and that when he tried calling them, their phones were "switched off". He then said that some of his officers had "disappeared" with ballot boxes.

The Government does not explain why the Parliamentary and Civic winners are being announced but not the Presidential ones yet the counting is done at the same time with the Presidential votes being the first to be completed.

Media outlers stopped airing of Presidential votes as they have been instructed that it was causing anxiety but they continued with the Parliamentary ones. Clearly something is amiss with the Presidential tallying at the ECK nerve centre and media briefing venue at the KICC (Kenyatta International Conference Centre).

Kenya 30TH December 2007... THINGS FALL APART!!

As we sat in our living rooms with calculators, the figures being announced by Samuel Kivuitu do not add up. He gives a briefing showing Raila in the lead with close to 700,000 votes, two hours later with only two more constituencies added and a challenge and prompting from ODM member Honorable Najib Balala to announce the Presidential tally as it stood, he gives us figures showing that Raila is now in the lead with only around 40,000 votes! Kivuitu looks a clearly harassed man as he does not explain where the votes Mwai Kibaki has narrowed the gap with came from - certainly not from only two constituencies!

All hell breaks loose at the KICC!

When it became clear that the ECK was announcing vote tallies that differed from those counted and confirmed in the constituencies, there was a sudden power blackout at the KICC. They have backup, but the power did not come back. Hundreds of GSU (General Service Unit) paramilitaries suddenly marched in. All independent media houses except the Government mouthpiece KBC (Kenya Broadcasting Corporation) are ejected. It was as if the fearful Samuel Kivuitu was under arrest as he was herded by armed paramilitaries to the basement.

Children started getting scared. My own daughter had never seen hundreds of paramilitaries and she kept asking what was happening at the KICC. Fifteen minutes later, Kenyans watched, shocked and dumbfounded, as Samuel Kivuitu declared Kibaki the winner. Barely twenty minutes later, we watched in disbelief and outrage, as he handed the certificate Mwai Kibaki on the lawns of State House. Strangely, a few selected guests most from Kibaki's PNU (Party of National Unity) were already seated as was the Attorney General and the Chief Justice Evans Gicheru, waited, fully robed, to hurriedly swear Kibaki in.

Citizens felt betrayed . Technology took front seat and rumors were rife. Text messages spread like bush fire. Claims that the ECK Chair was threatened with the execution of his entire family if he did not name Kibaki as Presidential winner were rife - that was why, they said, he was herded out at the KICC by armed paramilitaries.

That action that made the Chair of ECK announce results which he was not comfortable with plunged the country into anarchy.

Samuel Kivuitu while announcing the Presidential result on TV looked tormented, sounded confused and contradicted himself. Saying, among other things, callously, that he did not resign because he "did not want the country to call me a coward", but you "cannot state with certainty that Kibaki won the election". Following that with the baffling statement "there are those around him [Kibaki] who should never have been born."

The camera operator with a sense of irony kept panning the camera several times to a poster on the wall behind him that read: "Help Me, Jesus."

After the haphazard swearing in, where they even forgot to play the national anthem before and after the swearing in - Kenya exploded into civil strife.

JANUARY 2008

Things get worse. Chair of ECK, Samuel Kivuitu publicly, on live TV, says he does not know who won the Presidential vote. When probed further, he says he doesn't know if Mwai Kibaki is the President of Kenya!

When asked why he announced results, he had said - on live TV - he suspected election results were "being cooked somewhere". He said he had "not seen the pot in which they were cooked!"

The Kenya Chapter of the ICJ (International Commission of Jurists) rescinds the Jurist of the Year award they had bestowed on him. The Law Society of Kenya strikes him from their Roll of Honour and disbars him.

Almost a thousand Kenyans have lost their lives and more than half a million displaced from their homes. Thousands have fled as refugees into Uganda and more thousands are trapped in police stations, churches, any refuge they can find. Schools have been burnt and almost forty women and children were locked up in a church and set ablaze in Eldoret.

A humanitarian crisis arises across the country. Thousands are without food, water, toilet facilities and blankets. People have turned on one another with machetes and slashe d and hacked one another to death. Police bullets have felled protestors. Mortuaries in Nairobi, Kisumu, Eldoret, Kakamega and Mombasa are full.

Women and young girls have been gang-raped. Smoke rises from the torched homes in the Rift Valley, the gutted city of Kisumu, the slums of Nairobi and Mombasa.

The Red Cross and Chairman Abbas Gullet have worked to the bone with logistics, they have warned of an imminent cholera epidemic in Nyanza and Western Kenya, deprived for days now of electricity and water.

Containers pile up at the Port of Mombasa, as ships, unable to unload cargo, leave still loaded. Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Southern Sudan, the DRC (Democratic Republic of the Congo), all dependent on Kenyan transit for fuel and vital supplies, grind to a halt.

A repressive regime rolls out its panoply of oppression against legitimate dissent as it disintegrates decades of struggle, bloodshed, faith and suffering that went into creating this fragile beautiful thing we called the "democratic space in Kenya."

Ten days into January 2008...

Natumaini, Ninaishi, Najitolea daima Kenya... Ni hakika ya bendera...
Nyeusi ya wananchi, na Nyekundu ni ya damu, Kijani ni ya ardhi, Nyeupe ya amani... D
aima mimi MKenya... .Mwananchi Mzalendo...

('I hope for, I live for, I sacrifice myself forever for Kenya... The purpose of our flag...
Black for the citizens, and Red for the blood, Green for our land, White for peace...
Forever I am Kenyan... .A patriotic citizen... ')

The words of Eric Wainaina's song 'KENYA ONLY' reverberates across various homes. The song was adopted as the unofficial song of mourning soon after the August 1998 terrorist bombing in Nairobi. The moving song, seen as Kenya's alternative national anthem, is back on air and used as a peace anthem since mayhem and chaos broke across the country as Kibaki was declared president from 209 constituencies with 4,584,721 votes against ODM's Raila Odinga's 4,352,993.

As I leave our house in the morning I encounter just outside our gate, on a path that leads to a sprawling slum known as 'Bangladesh', lorries and truckloads of the dreaded paramilitary GSU (General Service Unit), commonly referred to as 'Red Berets' or ' FFU' (Fanya Fujo Uone) They have in the past few days being restoring calm and imposing an 'unofficial' curfew on paths leading from the informal settlement area into the middle class estates. Gunshots in the night have become the norm rather than the exception.

In the evenings and nights the police have kept vigil and formed a man wall surrounding and ringing in the slum dwellers who can't leave their shanties to access medical care and emergency relief.

[CONTINUES NEXT EDITION - Ed.]

The meeting was attended by over 50 people from both sides of the divided community who had lost family and loved ones in the conflict.

The Group, appointed by the former Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Peter Hain, is led by co-chairs, Lord Eames, former head of the Church of Ireland and former Catholic priest and signatory to the MacBride Principles fair employment campaign, Denis Bradley, has eight other members and two international advisors. Since their formation they have met privitately with over 60 groups and individuals.

At the beginning of their deliberations the Group was bombarded with questions from the audience to clarify news reports which many had heard just prior to the meeting suggesting that the Group were considering an amnesty as part of the healing process. Lord Eames declined to comment on the reports stating that he had not heard any of the broadcasts while Mr. Bradley stated that amnesty was something that was neither "ruled in, or ruled out".

Veteran victims rights campaigner, Raymond McCord, whose son was killed by the leader of a loyalist paramilitary group who also acted as a British agent, called on the group to resign and allow victims relatives to be appointed. Many representatives expressed their views that victim survivors and victim relatives needed to be better represented on the committee.

Representatives of former paramilitary groups from both sides of the community including; Joe Doherty, of the IRA, (Who fought a nine year legal battle against extraditon from the United States.) and Jackie McArthur, from a Christian organization working with ex-prisoners lobbied for more help for former paramilitaries who wish to leave their past behind and integrate into the workforce and community.

Further meetings are scheduled in Derry, Bangor, Ballymena, Enniskillen, Armagh, and Omagh, between now and January 17.