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As talks break down, army is Kenya's best hope
(...)
Julian Borger, diplomatic editor
The Guardian, Wednesday February 27 2008

Britain yesterday said that the Kenyan army is now "by far the best option" to stop a sectarian bloodbath as peace talks in Nairobi between the government and opposition were suspended. Britain yesterday said that the Kenyan army is now "by far the best option" to stop a sectarian bloodbath as peace talks in Nairobi between the government and opposition were suspended.

The foreign office minister for Africa, Asia and the UN, Mark Malloch-Brown, said that there was a serious risk of renewed bloodshed if talks broke down irrevocably. (...)

"We're going to have to stop the violence," Malloch-Brown said. "The Kenyan military is by far the best option. The question is, can the army be brought in in a non-divisive way?"

He argued that the army is still respected by the Kenyan public as a genuinely national and multi-ethnic institution, unlike the police, but that its generals are reluctant to get involved because they want to maintain its status and unity. (...)

Richard Dowden, the director of the Royal African Society, said the deployment of the Kenyan army could be extremely risky.

"The army has always been non-political. It's very professional, it does a lot of peacekeeping, it's trained by the Brits, it's a regular contingent in UN forces," Dowden said. "The last thing they would want to do is step in. But the bigger danger to them is that as this gets more ethnic and tribal, a middle ranking officer finds his grandmother has been killed and takes off, and once bits break off, the whole army unravels. The whole army holding together as a non-ethnic entity is the last barrier between Kenya and complete meltdown."

Full text:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/feb/27/kenya1
 
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