Chaos and bloodshed in Kenya, Sudan
A corrupted election in Kenya just took a bloody turn for the worse:
A mob torched a church where hundreds had sought refuge Tuesday, and witnesses said dozens of people — including children — were burned alive or hacked to death with machetes in ethnic violence that followed Kenya’s disputed election.
The killing of up to 50 ethnic Kikuyus in the Rift Valley city of Eldoret brought the death toll from four days of rioting to more than 275, raising fears of further unrest in what has been one of Africa’s most stable democracies.
The latest violence recalled scenes from the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, when more than a half-million people were killed. The question facing Kenya is whether the politicians will lose control of the mobs, triggering a civil war.
President Mwai Kibaki, who was swiftly inaugurated for a second term Sunday after a vote that critics said was rigged, called for a meeting with his political opponents — a significant softening of tone for a man who rarely speaks to the press and who vowed to crack down on rioters.
But opposition candidate Raila Odinga refused, saying he would meet Kibaki only “if he announces that he was not elected.” Odinga accused the government of stoking the chaos, telling The Associated Press in an interview that Kibaki’s administration “is guilty, directly, of genocide.”
Meanwhile, more details of the murder of US diplomat John Granville in Sudan have emerged:
A US diplomat and his driver were shot dead in a possible terror attack in Sudan yesterday while returning home from a new year party at the British Embassy in Khartoum.
John Michael Granville, 33, who worked for the US Agency for International Development, reportedly left the party and dropped off another person before being shot five times at close range at about 4am as he returned to his home near the UN compound in Khartoum.
Mr Granville underwent surgery but died several hours later. Abdel Rahman Abbas, 40, his Sudanese driver, died immediately.
The shooting resembled the murder of Laurence Foley, a US aid official shot outside his home in Amman, the Jordanian capital, in 2002. A military court in Jordan imposed the death penalty on eight Islamic militants linked to al-Qaeda – six of them in absentia… the shootings came a day after the UN took over command of the African Union peacekeeping force in Darfur. On Monday President Bush signed a law making it easier for US investment managers to divest from Sudan. Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader, has called for militants to attack UN peacekeepers in Sudan.
Granville had devoted his short life to Africa:
Africa had been “very special to John” since his time as a Peace Corps volunteer in Cameroon, his family said in a statement Tuesday, after Granville, 33, and his driver were shot to death in the Sudanese capital.
Granville, who was from Buffalo, was working for the U.S. Agency for International Development as part of a team trying to implement a 2005 peace agreement that ended decades of civil war between north and south Sudan.
“He told his mom several times … that it’s dangerous, what he’s doing, but he wouldn’t want to be doing anything else,” said U.S. Rep. Brian Higgins, who spoke with Granville’s mother, Jane Granville, after her son’s death.
Officials were working to return Granville’s body to the United States, possibly by Wednesday or Thursday, the Buffalo-area congressman said.
Granville, who last called his mother on New Year’s Eve, graduated from Fordham University and got a master’s degree in international development from Clark University, his family said. While in the Peace Corps, he helped a Cameroon village build its first school.
“John’s life was a celebration of love, hope and peace,” the family’s statement said. “He will be missed by many people throughout the world whose lives were touched and made better because of his care.”
The NYSun calls on Congress and the president to act on the cases of other murdered American diplomats.
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Political corruption and tribal politics. Pray for Kenya.
Isn’t that kind of like being the most moral prostitute in a whorehouse? The obvious solution will be to bleed the American taxpayer for more money to pay to the UN to eventually go into the coffers of yet another corrupt African official while their people starve and kill each other. So sad, such a waste on so many levels.
As to the Sudan murder, between Congress’s refusal to allow drilling for oil in ANWR and new fields in the Gulf, their refusal to fast track a new refinery through the EPA therby continuing or dependence on energy from many geo-political trouble spots, confiscatory taxes and burdensome regulation that drive businesses to outsource and produce overseas, our Vietnamesque follow-up in Iraq pre-Petreus (thanks Rumsfeld) and the blame America rhetoric from the left, our image and position has been horribly sullied and damaged internationally. If your enemies neither fears nor respects you, they will bleed you in an unsustainable warfare on every front.
Michelle’s post quoted:
/leftist sarc on/
How can this be? The U.N. is omnipotent and respected everywhere, isn’t it? Can’t we just sit down and talk to these people and solve the problems without violence?
There are no American troops in this “peacekeeping force”, are there? After all, American involvement is the reason for all the problems and unrest in the world, isn’t it?
/leftist sarc off/
What else should be expected? The U.N. is a totally corrupt and impotent organization. The U.N. and the American left still refuse to understand that you can’t sit down and talk with fanatics that want to kill you and whose sole purpose in life is obtaining and retaining power at any and all costs.
These problems have been ignored by the U.N. for years and allowed to fester to their current state throughout Africa and the rest of the world. The only way any of these conflicts ever get addressed is by having American involvement and putting our military troops and leadership in charge and in harms way.
I feel for the mistreated populace of these countries, but until they decide to stand up for themselves in these matters instead of continuing to be sheep being led to the slaughter nothing is going to change for them.
Also, 2 US Sailors have been found dead in Ghana.
swj,
I read this on foxnews.com this morning… I am patientlt waiting for more information.
patiently.
Genocide in Africa??????
Too bad there isn’t a Clinton in the White house…..
…..Oh wait, never mind!!!!!!!
Where’s Jimmy Carter? Doesn’t his presence always insure a fair vote in any election?
’cause someone HAS to say it:
I blame Bush.
So, things turn bad right after the Useless Nitwits take control of things. Is anyone surprised by that?
I wouldn’t trust the Useless Nitwits to run a Boy Scout Camp properly!
I read about this at thereligionofpeace.com last night. The Muslims were worried it would be like 1994 alll over again. Oh reeeeeeeally? Reeeeeally now?
Well let’s see…who was respoonsible for that genocide? Who was responsible for the mass killings of Rwanda? Was it the Christians? Ummmm…let me see if I can use my Internet tough guy abilities to remember…no it wasn’t. It was those pesky litte miority branches of that Religion of Peace that was slaughtering people by the scores for sport, leaving the ground saturated with blood in areas that made it appear to be a plague.
Now, let me see if I can use those same Internet Tough Guy powers to figure out just who locked people in a church, lit it on fire, stone, hacked, attacked those helping people that escaped, chased people into slit trench latrines for helping and chased down, hacked up with machetes, and lit on fire…all of them Christian…hmmmm could it once again have been yet again those pesky miortities in the Religion of Peace who then came forward lamenting the Rwandan mass slayings that they themselves caused?
Now…just let summon enough strength…just …one…more…use…of…Tough Guy…powers…to find out…who has the…power to stop….these slayings and…attacks before they…go any farther…yes….yes…it is the Imams and other Islamic clerics in the region who, from the Mosques and the Madrassas could, if they reeeeally wanted to earn the title of “Religion of Peace” actually preach calm, acceptance of others faiths, beliefs, and tribal relationships and politics. They could call for calm. They could put out fatwas, edicts against any and all violence against any other person, church, synagogue for any reason what-so-ever under pain of expulsion from their religion and exile from the community or any number of punishment short of torture or death.
But of course….none of that will happen. That is just me…being rational, using rational thought…thinking like a rational person using my otherworldly Internet Tough Guy Powers.
I just have to figure out how to think like a Liberal…but try as I might, I just can’t do it.
Thats funny – and so uncanny that its scary!
I think what the loons on the left would really like to say is… I blame:
George Bush
“Big Oil”
Prayer in schools
Capitalism
Conservative values
Rich people
Evangelical Christians
Tax cuts
Wal-Mart
Fox News
Guns
Rush Limbaugh
Bill O’Reilly
The Pro Life Movement
Paperless electronic voting machines
The Minute Men
“Big Medicine”
And of course Michelle Malkin
Did I leave anything out? Talk amongst yourselves.
10% of the populace are followers of the “religion of peace”. It couldn’t be that their neighbors are helping stoke the fires of unrest? OBL’s followers bombed our embassy in Kenya. Where ever you look in the world if, there is violence and unrest you will probably find radical Islam in the midst.
saw some footage of this on the news the last few days…
it’s difficult to distinguish the parts of the country that have been torn apart by mobs, and the filthy country itself.
it’s 2008. if you’re living in thatched huts, wearing cardboard sandals, and setting churches on fire, it’s not your election process that’s failed you, it’s YOU that’s failed you.
i say let them fight it out, and whoever wins is who we deal with.
ship them some small arms ammunition and hand held video cameras; i’ll build the youtube page and microwave the popcorn.
Totally agree. I’m really getting tired of being told to pray for every person on the planet. You know what? Not every person on the planet is my responsibility. Let them fix their own problems.
It reminds me of one of those “heroes” segments on the Glenn Beck show which showed a teen who had helped some village install a well or something similar. Why did it take a teen on the other side of the world to furnish the people with water?
The colonists left decades ago. That’s more than enough time for these people to figure out how to act civilly to each other and fix their problems.
When I read about John Granville last night-My immediate thoughts were “ISLAM” and “Who’s funding this?”
Alms for Jihad
Funding Evil
America Alone
Are the books that came to my mind.
Nothing to see here, folks. Move along. The natives are a little restless, that’s all.
/sarc off
Sometimes I wonder if Africa is capable of maintaining any type of stability. All the news I ever see that comes out of the continent deals with oppression, murder, genocide, disease, and generally anything bad happening to innocent and not so innocent people. From my own personal experience traveling through Central and the sub-Saharan area of Africa back in my active duty days I sure didn’t leave anything I will ever need to go back to retrieve.
Dysfunctional culture = dysfunctional people. This is how they’ve always settled things in Africa. Kinda blows that whole multiculti Western civ sucks meme out of the water, doesn’t it?
Why aren’t the reverends over there trying to mediate? I remember, some
years ago, a man who appeared on Johnny Carson, just before he retired,
talking about famine in Africa. He declared this was nature weeding out the
weaker members of society. Survival of the Fittest. He espoused our keeping
our hands off and waiting to see what would happen. Well, you can imagine
the outrage this caused. I’ve never seen or heard of this man again. However, this mess in Kenya could be looked at in the same way. We cannot
send troops to every uprising on this earth. If the left wants to go over there
and try to fix things…more power to them, I can’t see that George Clooney
has made any real difference in the Sudan.
I am not hardhearted. When I was younger, I would be yelling at everyone
that we had to help these people. Now, I realize that you have to pick your battles carefully and that not everyone can be helped. It’s a shame,
but it’s true.
Can’t you imagine, if they had burned down a mosque. The MSM would be livid. They should be livid about a church, where’s the outrage?
Que pasa, MSM?
As long as Christians, and Jews are being murdered there will be no outrage. It is just like during the Roman times.
Those nasty Christians, and Jews will not worship a false god like allah, buddha, mother earth, etc…
Plus, the world hates to hear about morality, and sin.
Well, let’s see here. Jomo Kenyatta was Kenya’s first president, elected in 1964. He served until his death in 1978, when Daniel arap Moi, the vice-president, took over. He served from 1978 until 2002, when he was constitutionally barred from seeking a second term. His vice-president, Mwai Kibata, was elected president in 2002, and supposedly re-elected last month.
I guess you could call that stable, but a democracy? Hardly. Three presidents in 43 years?
When my ship made a port visit to Mombasa in 1988, it was illegal to photograph either the president, or the presidential residence. About the only good thing there was the Tusker Premium beer.
Bironnetwork #15, will you run for Pres?
Tell ya what…I will set up the office pool on this. Whaddya think the over/under on dead Kenyan christians in the next six months will be?
Arm the christians and let them fight.
While we are on the subject, this insistance that the radical islamists have on trying to start a holy war seems sorta stupid to me…do they REALLY want a holy war, or just an excuse to kill as many christians as possible without TRULY pissing us off? I mean, if it came to “no holds barred” War (that is war with a capital W, like we fought WWII once we got our manufacturing power up to speed), we would hand them their ass on a plate in about a week.
Heck, give them a hand with some aerial refueling and stay out of the way, and the Israelis could take care of our light work for us.
Another analogy? This is like Univ. of Hawaii wanting to play the “big boys” to prove how good they are, so they beat up on inferior competition for a while and convince themselves (and a decent portion of the populace) that they have a chance. Then they enter the playing field, and the Univ. of Georgia absolutely pounds on them, dang near killing their quarterback in the process — it was actually painful to watch.
This is what would happen to the islamists if we let them have their little war. Yes, some innocents would die in the process, and we as a country do not have much stomach for innocents dying. But it is what would happen…
Pray for Kenya, & all Christians everywhere. Check out the threads on some of the ‘local’ blogs!….always open season on Christians….
esp.Catholics….never a shortage of bashing….so long as it doesn’t leave visible marks & drive away traffic!!!…jus’say yer an atheist!
http://youtube.com/watch?v=gwCkMrVEYGg
Thanks, Michelle, for posting about Kenya. If you recall, my biological father is Kenyan and lives in the countryside. As of last night, he was ok.
Al quedia strategy: Never attack what your enemy defends. That includes USAID.