Psyche, Science, and Society

Comments on the reception of new NEJM Iraq mortality study

I have just posted the following comments on the new NEJM study of Iraq mortality on the Media Lens Message Board, in response to heated criticism of the new study:

 I don’t think this is fair. The NEJM study is another attempt to do something very difficult: assess the consequences of the war and occupation in a situation of extreme violence. I notice that Les Roberts was fairly positive, while raising a number of important issues. [One version of Les' thoughts can be read  [url=http://psychoanalystsopposewar.org/blog/2008/01/10/les-roberts-on-new-iraq-mortality-study/]here[/url]] I think we should follow Les’ example here.

While there are many issues with the new study, there is no fatal flaw.

I think the authors assess deaths due to violence because they believe, rightly or wrongly, that they can estimate this figure more accurately than total excess mortality. Violent deaths do not rely upon an accurate estimate of prewar mortality several years earlier, while excess mortality estimates do. This is something in which the NEJM study clearly fails. This failure does suggest, as  Les suggests, that the NEJM study is an undercount. Other problems are, as Cockburn points out, the steady rate of mortality in the NEJM study.

But Cockburn attributes nefarious motivations to the fact that Iraqi interviewers were sent to Amman for training. I will bet that this was so that they could be trained by WHO staff. Remember, at this time Les Roberts and, I believe, Gilbert Burnham, went to Amman when conducting L2 and conducted the data analyses there. The reason was the same: they felt it was too dangerous for foreigners to go into Iraq.

As for the ORB study, I was impressed when it came out. but the absence of any publication of methodological details, much less their failure to post the additional results they promised for early October cast doubt upon the study. Until they publish more, it can’t be taken as meaning much of anything, alas.

I’m afraid we’re in danger of falling into a dangerous trap of defending heartily studies whose the results we like and attacking those whose results we dislike. I teach my research students that we should subject studies confirming our prior beliefs to extra scrutiny while being careful not to search mightily for methodological flaws in those studies we don’t agree with. Otherwise, we learn nothing.

If Les welcomes this study, while examining its weaknesses, I suggest we should as well. Examining violent mortality in Iraq is extremely difficult. we may never know what the true figure is. As of summer 2006, it was most likely somewhere between 150,00 and 650,000. By now, it is probably somewhere between 250,00 and 1.2 million.  In any terms, that is truly horrifying and a humanitarian catastrophe. We should work to get that message out. To fight NEJM vs Lancet will only deflect the  message and work to the right’s advantage. Let’s not give them that advantage.

I suspect there will be responses at the Media Lens Message Board. Go there and read them.

Add comment January 12th, 2008

CIA “Enhanced interrogations” from the Cold War

Proponents and critics of the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation,” a.k.a., torture, have been united in pretending that such horrors are new to the United States, in contradiction to “American values.” Christian Science Monitor reporter Warren Richey, who has provided extensive coverage of the Jose Padilla case, including his torture in the Navy brig, now reminds us that CIA torture goes back decades, even within the United States. Richey relates the story of Soviet defector Yuri Nosenko, who was subjected to extreme isolation from 1964 to 1967, out of fear that he was really a KGB mole. Richey’s account leaves little doubt that prolonged isolation is, indeed, torture. “To say it was a nightmare is not enough. It was hell,” as Nosenko himself stated in a speech to CIA employees. As Mark Benjamin has pointed out, isolation is the CIA’s favorite form of torture. Isolation was also routine for all new detainees at Guantanamo, as the leaked 2003 and 2004 Standard Operating Procedures showed.

Here is Richey’s account of the torture of Yuri Nosenko:

A cold-war case of CIA detention still echoes

The Yuri Nosenko affair unveiled US use of extreme isolation to try to ‘break’ the KGB defector.

By Warren Richey

Behind the debate over the Central Intelligence Agency’s destruction of videotapes depicting waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques lies a fundamental question: Can government officials use such aggressive tactics without violating US law?

No American court has yet ruled on the legality of Bush administration interrogation policies. But the war on terror isn’t the first time US officials have used harsh methods to try to “break” a detainee.

From 1964 to 1967, Soviet defector Yuri Nosenko was subjected to extreme isolation and sensory deprivation and was administered drugs because his CIA handlers believed he was still working in secret for the KGB. They imprisoned him in a windowless concrete cell to try to disrupt him psychologically and force him to confess his loyalty to Moscow, according to CIA documents and a congressional investigation. He never did.

The case has been examined in several books – one was published last year – and a 1986 movie depicting the intense debate over whether Mr. Nosenko was an actual defector. Lost in much of the discussion has been the legality of his treatment.

“It was reprehensible,” says Stansfield Turner, who headed the CIA from 1977 to 1981 and ordered an internal examination of the Nosenko affair in 1977. “I was aghast when I uncovered it.”

Nosenko’s experience in CIA custody in the 1960s is relevant today because of similarities between his harsh treatment and the use of some of the same techniques now, more than 40 years later, against suspected Islamic terrorists. Among them are three men who were held at the military brig in Charleston, S.C., after being designated as enemy combatants by President Bush.

Like Nosenko, all three men – Yasser Hamdi, Jose Padilla, and Ali Saleh al-Marri – were held in isolation cells in the United States with minimal human contact for three years or more in an attempt to force confessions by disrupting their ability to maintain rational thought, according to interrogation specialists and mental-health experts.

Although the US Supreme Court in 2004 upheld the president’s authority to order the military detention of enemy combatants, no US judge has ever ruled on the legality of using severe isolation as an interrogation technique. It remains unresolved even as the Supreme Court weighs the legal rights of foreign terror detainees at the US naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and as the Justice Department undertakes a criminal investigation of the CIA’s destruction of tapes documenting the use of harsh interrogation methods.

Now 80, Nosenko lives in the US under an assumed name. He was contacted by the Monitor through an intermediary but declined to be interviewed for this story.

An ‘increasingly concerned’ CIA

One indication of the CIA’s own assessment of the legality of Nosenko’s treatment was revealed last June, when the agency released documents concerning some of its once-secret operations.

“This office [CIA's Office of Security] together with the [CIA's] Office of General Counsel became increasingly concerned with the illegality of the agency’s position in handling a defector [Nosenko] under these conditions for such a long period of time,” states a memo dated 16 May 1973, nearly six years after Nosenko was released.

The memo is in sharp contrast to the 1978 congressional testimony of former CIA Director Richard Helms, who ran the agency at the end of Nosenko’s detention. He was asked who gave legal authorization for the CIA to hold a KGB defector in an isolation cell for 1,277 days with no charges filed and no access to a lawyer or the courts. Mr. Helms said then-Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach had authorized it. But Mr. Katzenbach told the congressional panel that he would never have given such legal advice.

In a recent telephone interview, Katzenbach said the CIA never shared with him any details of Nosenko’s treatment. “All they were talking about was the amount of time he was being held, which was harsh,” he says.

Katzenbach, who later served as attorney general in the Johnson administration, says the intelligence agency was operating under its own rules. “The CIA had no authority to question anybody any differently than the FBI or the local police force,” he says.

The legality of Nosenko’s treatment in the 1960s was never tested in court in part because Nosenko later waived his right to sue the US government over his detention and treatment. After his release, the agency declared Nosenko a bona fide defector, paid him $175,000, and hired him for $35,000 a year as a consultant. In 1974, he became a US citizen.

As with the Nosenko affair, the US government is working to avoid judicial scrutiny of interrogations of terror suspects. Former enemy combatant Yasser Hamdi was released in 2004 and is now living freely in Saudi Arabia after signing an agreement not to sue the US government over his treatment.

In contrast, lawyers working on behalf of the other two Charleston detainees, Mr. Padilla and Mr. Marri, have filed civil lawsuits claiming their clients were tortured in the military prison. Lawyers for Padilla also filed a second suit Friday in San Francisco against former Justice Department lawyer John Yoo. The suit says Mr. Yoo was a legal architect of the Bush administration’s harsh interrogation policies that were “intended to destroy Mr. Padilla’s ordinary emotional and cognitive functioning … to extract from him potentially self-incriminating information.”

Padilla has been diagnosed with significant mental disabilities stemming from his three years and seven months in the Charleston brig. He was convicted last summer in a terror conspiracy trial in Miami. On Tuesday, a federal judge begins a week-long hearing to consider whether Padilla should receive a more lenient sentence because of his harsh treatment at the brig. Federal prosecutors want Padilla sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Marri remains in an isolation cell at the brig, but his conditions of confinement have eased since 2005. A federal appeals court in Richmond, Va., is currently examining the constitutionality of Marri’s detention, though not the legality of the interrogation techniques used against him. A ruling is expected soon.

One common thread running through all four men’s stories is a perceived need by the government to quickly extract information deemed essential to protect US national security.

“One of the difficulties with this kind of issue is that it is a slippery slope,” says Katzenbach. “If you can put somebody in isolation for 24 hours, why not 48, why not a week?”

Mr. Turner agrees. “There is a very tough line here. What if you really think that by torturing somebody you are going to prevent a major catastrophe?” he asks. “My inclination is that you have to stick by your moral principles and put constitutional rights of individuals first regardless of the circumstance.” But the former CIA director says the US government should not rule out any particular technique or tactic, nor should it adopt procedures automatically allowing such tactics.

A real defector from the Soviet KGB?

In the Nosenko case, the stakes were enormous, coming at the height of the cold war. Nosenko’s interrogation began in April 1964 after a group of CIA officials became suspicious that Nosenko might not be a genuine defector. They thought he was sent by the KGB to throw the CIA off the trail of Soviet moles who they feared had penetrated America’s spy network. In addition, they thought he was sent by Moscow to insulate the KGB from any connection to Lee Harvey Oswald. Mr. Oswald assassinated President John Kennedy in November 1963.

Nosenko was held for three years in extreme isolation, first in a locked attic room in a CIA safe house in Clinton, Md. Later he was transferred to a specially built windowless concrete cell at Camp Peary, the CIA training facility near Williamsburg, Va.

He was questioned and requestioned about whether the KGB had ever approached Oswald during the three years Oswald lived in the Soviet Union prior to the Kennedy assassination. Nosenko said he had personally reviewed Oswald’s KGB file and that, while the KGB had conducted surveillance of Oswald, it had never tried to recruit him.

This issue was critical because KGB involvement with Oswald might suggest Soviet involvement in the Kennedy assassination – a prospect that could have propelled the cold war into a nuclear war.

Nosenko insisted that Oswald was a “nut” and that the Soviets had deemed him unsuitable for intelligence work.

Some CIA officials were sure Nosenko was lying and was part of a larger Soviet operation. But how to make him talk? He was a trained KGB officer who knew how to resist interrogation.

According to a CIA internal investigation, agents decided to use the Soviet Union’s own techniques against him. They treated him precisely as the KGB had treated Yale University professor Frederick Barghoorn, who had been arrested in Moscow on trumped-up spy charges to set up a potential swap for a genuine Soviet spy nabbed in New York. The KGB held the professor for 16 days in October 1963 before the intervention of his friend, President Kennedy, won his release.

Isolation to ‘break’ Nosenko

Nosenko’s cell built at Camp Peary contained a metal bed bolted to the floor, a foam mattress, one light bulb, and a television camera. There were no windows. No sheets or blankets. No reading material. Just four soundproof, concrete walls – a replica of a Soviet detention cell.

“To say it was a nightmare is not enough. It was hell,” Nosenko told CIA employees in a 1998 speech.

The guards were instructed not to speak with him or acknowledge his presence. They watched him via television 24 hours a day.

Such conditions of confinement are described in a 1956 US government-funded secret report titled “Communist Control Techniques.” It discusses how the Soviets used prolonged isolation and sensory deprivation to drive detainees to the brink of insanity and condition them to confess. Isolation can work as a kind of tightening vise on the psyche, according to the report. Prison guards estimated that the average detainee “broke” in four to six weeks.

By then, a detainee loses “many of the restraints of ordinary behavior,” the report says. “He may soil himself. He weeps, he mutters, and he prays aloud in his cell. He follows the orders of the guard with the docility of a trained animal. Indeed, the guards say that such prisoners are ‘reduced to animals.’ ”

But there are exceptions. “Those convinced of their innocence and familiar with KGB methods may be able to stand up under isolation for a long time,” the report says.

Nosenko told CIA employees in his 1998 speech that one way he survived the mental strain of isolation was by keeping his mind active. Twice he created a chess set out of threads pulled from his clothes. Twice the guards confiscated it. Once he found a piece of paper in a toothpaste box listing ingredients. Excited to have something to read, he tried to position himself away from the TV camera so the guards wouldn’t see that he was reading. They confiscated that, too, he said in the speech.

When his mind began to deteriorate, Nosenko said he fought back by yelling and complaining. Finally, his jailers gave him a blanket. Later they let him go outside into a small exercise cage where he could see the sky.

At one point, he said, he was given LSD and it almost killed him. The guards revived him by dragging him into the shower and alternating the water between hot and cold.

Former CIA Director Helms told a congressional hearing in 1978 that a request had been made to use certain drugs against Nosenko to make him talk. He said he refused to allow it. In contrast, Turner wrote in his 1985 book “Secrecy and Democracy” that Nosenko was administered drugs on 17 occasions in an attempt to make him talk.

Turner ordered an investigation of the Nosenko matter and released its findings to the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Included was a memo written one month before Nosenko was placed in isolation. It outlined a plan for “hostile interrogation.” It noted: “Subject must be broken at some point if we are to learn something of the full scope of the KGB plan.”

CIA investigators also recovered notes said to have been written near the end of the detention, outlining possible ways to end and cover up the Nosenko affair. The objective: “to liquidate & insofar as possible to clean up traces of a sitn in which CIA cd be accused of illegally holding Nosenko.” Among the options were to “liquidate the man,” “render him incapable of giving coherent story (special dose of drug etc.),” and “commitment to loony bin w/out making him nuts.”

In his 2007 book “Spy Wars,” former CIA officer Tennent Bagley acknowledges that he wrote the notes but says he had no murderous intent. He says in his book that he was merely “giving vent to frustration in the way a baseball fan might shout, ‘Kill the umpire!’ ” Suggestions of killing Nosenko or rendering him crazy were “impossible and impractical,” he writes. He still believes Nosenko was a Soviet plant, decades after the CIA formally embraced him as a bona fide defector.

For his part, Nosenko has said that while he was angry about his treatment, he never blamed the CIA. Instead, it was a small group of CIA officers whom he calls “the ugly ones.”

In his 1998 speech, Nosenko urged young intelligence officers to “never allow a repeat of such cases.” Defectors should be allowed to remain free but kept under tight surveillance, he said. Locking people up under “ugly conditions” achieves nothing, he said.

Nosenko ended that speech by telling his audience that he came to the US in 1964 but that his life in America began in 1969. “I love this country,” he said. “I am a very proud American.”

To the chagrin of Mr. Bagley, Nosenko’s former handler, they gave him a standing ovation.

Add comment January 12th, 2008

Background on the Kenyan crisis

Last month Kenya had an election. Early vote counts suggested a major opposition victory. After some strange actions, the existing President was declared the victor. Protests, rioting, and ethnic strife ensued. I have been looking for an informative background article to post. I finally found this excellent article by Gérard Prunier, who has written an excellent book on the colonial roots of the Rwandan genocide:

Kenya: roots of crisis

by Gérard Prunier

To many people in the world - and even to many Kenyans themselves itself - the violence which followed the elections in Kenya on 27 December 2007 has come as a surprise. Unfortunately, it shouldn’t have. The combination of economic and ethno-political factors in Kenya had created an explosive mix which was just waiting for the right - or rather “wrong” - circumstances to explode. The 2002 elections had been a lucky near-miss; this time, the favourable configuration that operated then did not repeat itself.

Kenya’s “democratic” politics

To understand the Kenyan crisis in the context of its national, regional and global situation, it is necessary to examine the regime which followed independence in 1963. Britain’s withdrawal from the country had taken place amidst a considerable fear that the Mau Mau anti-colonial insurrection of 1952-1960 might impinge upon the politics of the new state and lead to further violence. Nothing of the sort happened - partly because of the elevation to the presidency of the leader of the nationalist movement Jomo Kenyatta, who once in power swerved from radical nationalism to conservative bourgeois politics.

Kenyatta was a Kikuyu (or Gikuyu) and the enigmatic Mau Mau movement had largely been a Kikuyu phenomenon (most of the 12,000 rebels or “suspects” killed by colonial forces in a brutal campaign were Kikuyu). This had caused the British wrongly to conclude that Kenyatta was the leader of the Mau Mau. But in any case, on becoming president Kenyatta - head of the Kenya African National Union (Kanu) in an effectively one-party state - embraced extreme tribalistic politics and packed the new “Kenyan” bourgeoisie he promoted with Kikuyu and members of related tribes such as the Embu and the Meru. At the time of his death in 1978 most of the country’s wealth and power was in the hands of the organisation which grouped these three tribes: the Gikuyu-Embu-Meru Association (GEMA).

Kenya has forty-eight tribes, with three - the Kikuyu, the Luo and the Luhyia - together representing almost 65% of the population. Meanwhile, the GEMA tribes during Kenyatta’s time (1963-78) composed perhaps 30% of Kenyans, almost all concentrated in the highlands of the central province. These figures meant that in order to square the ethno-political circle in Kenya, power-brokers had to forge deals between the three big groups and somehow relate to the shifting gaggle occupying the fourth corner.

In Kenyatta’s time the deal was simple: the Kikuyu and their smaller relatives, after making an agreement with the minority tribes, ran everything. The Luo, who eventually tried to challenge this ordering, were forcefully marginalised as the prudent Luhyia looked on. After Kenyatta died in 1978, his vice-president Daniel arap Moi - who was from the Kalenjin minority tribe - inherited the mantle of power on the understanding that he would not upset the arrangement designed to keep the two other large tribes (and particularly the Luo) out of power.

But Daniel arap Moi proceeded to use his new status to cleverly divide his Kikuyu allies (amongst them the man who would be his successor as president, Mwai Kibaki), so as progressively to sideline them. By 1986, Moi had concentrated all the power - and most of its attendant economic benefits - into the hands of his Kalenjin tribe and of a handful of allies from minority groups (see Peter Kimani, “A past of power more than tribe in Kenya’s turmoil”, 2 January 2008).

But Kikuyu ascendancy had been reined in only, not destroyed. Under Jomo Kenyatta, the Kikuyu - claiming martyr status for their sufferings during the Mau-Mau “emergency”, and relying on tacit government support - had spread beyond their traditional territorial homelands and “repossessed lands stolen by the whites” - even when these had previously belonged to other tribes. Thus Kikuyu “colonists” had fanned out all over Kenya, often creating strong rural antagonisms.

Kenyatta’s successor, Daniel arap Moi, used a consummate juggler’s skill to keep the ethno-political balance working in his favour. At the same time, the first two multi-party elections after other movements emerged to challenge Kanu (in 1992 and 1997) were occasions for carefully state-managed ethnic violence designed to achieve two objectives: keep the dangerous Kikuyu underfoot, and pit the Kalenjin’s minority allies against each other in order better to control them.

By the time of the 2002 election, however, the system had run its course: foreign donors were alienated, President Moi (having ruled for twenty-four years) was getting old, and a “democratic” opposition was gaining momentum. But if everybody agreed on the principle of ridding Kenya of its Kalenjin-based authoritarian state, the question of who and what would be the replacement remained open.
Moi had a brainwave: he thought that the best way for him to maintain his influence over politics after leaving the presidency would be to pick as the governing party candidate Kenyatta’s own son, Uhuru. This artful move, Moi calculated, would rally the Kikuyu behind a prestigious but empty symbol (Uhuru was not overly bright and his name spoke louder than his personality). But the stratagem backfired completely and the opposition united behind the veteran Kikuyu politician, Mwai Kibaki, thus creating a unique situation in which both leading candidates were Kikuyu.

In other ways, however, they were very different: one embodied the ghost of yesterday’s near-dictatorship while the other was seen as offering the hope of a democratic opening. This contrast felicitously de-ethnicised the election, turning it into a contest between the old and the new. At the time Raila Odinga, the leading Luo politician, tirelessly campaigned for Kibaki and deployed his tribal followers behind a man who - albeit a Kikuyu and a Kikuyu with a past - was seen as the candidate for change. The economic stagnation of previous years meant that many of the expectations that were invested in Kibaki were of an economic nature: Kibaki, it was hoped, would restart the economy and then proceed to share out its benefits more equally.

The Kibaki administration

Mwai Kibaki was elected president in December 2002 with over 62% of the vote. The country’s foreign backers were only too quick to salute the polls as “a triumph for democracy”. In a way they were right - the polls had been free and fair, and the candidate for change had been elected. But in another way this was a hasty form of wishful thinking because the ostensible “de-tribalisation” of the election had been due more to a series of fortuitous coincidences than to a real decline in the appeal of ethnic politics.

The key words in the campaign, however, had been “hope” and “change”, and to some extent the new Kibaki administration managed to deliver the goods. The economy did pick up and Kenya witnessed a spectacular economic recovery, largely based on Keynesian economic recipes and helped by a favourable international environment.

This can be illustrated by the annual rate of growth in 2002-07, which reveals a gradual improvement from -1.6 % in 2002 to 2.6% by 2004, 3.4 in 2005, and an estimated 5.5% in 2007. But this was only one side of the economic coin. Social inequalities also increased; the fruits of economic growth went disproportionately to the already well-off (and, among those, to the Kikuyu well-off); and corruption reached new heights, matching some of the excesses of the Moi years. When John Githongo, the man appointed by President Kibaki to fight corruption, blew the whistle in January 2005, he had to flee to Britain in fear of his life (see Michael Holman, “Kenya: chaos and responsibility”, 3 January 2007). Githongo is himself a Kikuyu, and his denunciation of a massive series of financial scandals in which hundreds of millions of dollars had vanished was seen as a betrayal of his tribe as well as of the government he served.

Moreover, the security situation in Kenya deteriorated steadily in these years, with the ordinary people bearing the brunt of a triple process:

* a growing wave of routine crime in urban areas

* rival agrarian claims leading to pitched battles between ethnic groups fighting for land, particularly around Mount Elgon and in Kisii

* a running feud between the police and the Mungiki sect, which left over 120 people dead in May-November 2007 alone.

Mungiki is a bizarre cross between pre-Christian Kikuyu neo-traditionalism and an extortionist gang. The sect ran protection rackets on the matatu (collective taxi) routes, helping it to prosper among the poorest urban neighbourhoods and among the landless-peasant squatters in central province; it also has a tradition of hiring its muscle-boys to political candidates during election campaigns. In 2002, the Mungiki had backed the losing Uhuru Kenyatta camp. This cost it dearly in terms of political clout, and it had desperately tried to recover the lost ground by intensifying its terroristic hold on the slum population and on the matatu owners.

The accumulating result of these various processes was a feeling of deep dissatisfaction - not so much with President Kibaki as a person but with his entourage, with his robbing cronies, and with his incapacity to sympathise and do something about the plight of poor Kenyans (made all the more shocking by the level of economic growth the country was enjoying). Raila Odinga, the candidate of the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM), was then able to capitalise on that frustration in a way that fused various types of motivation:

* ethnic (the Kikuyu have grabbed everything and all the other tribes have lost)

* political (Kibaki betrayed his promise for change)

* social (crime and violence are out of control)

* economic (what is the point of economic growth when it does not bring any benefits to the ordinary citizen).

As the electoral campaign neared its climax in December 2007, the ODM opposition enjoyed a widespread lead in opinion polls and seemed ready to sweep Kibaki’s Party of National Unity (PNU) out of power.

The December 2007 election

The election on 27 December 2007 was both a parliamentary and a presidential one. At the legislative level, 2,548 candidates from 108 parties were vying for 210 seats; at the presidential level, three candidates - the incumbent Mwai Kibaki , ODM leader Raila Odinga and former foreign minister Kalonzo Musyoka (who had split from the ODM) - were competing.

Everybody (including himself) knew that Kalonzo Musyoka had no chance of winning and that he was simply angling for the position of a strategic post-election ally who could sell his support to a probable minority victor in need of additional backing. Kalonzo Musyoka is a Kamba, and the Kamba - although closely related to the Kikuyu - had chosen the British camp during the Mau Mau emergency. This gives them a hybrid status in the Kenyan ethno-political landscape, in which they hold the capacity to swing either with the Kikuyu or against them.

The polls were a messy business for a number of reasons. The voters’ rolls had been poorly updated or at times not updated at all. Some dead people were still on the rolls and electors who had changed residence had not been properly struck off in one place and re-registered at their new address. The rules governing the help which could be given to illiterate voters (up to 80% of the electoral body in some remote constituencies) were poorly enforced. Foreign and national observers were not always given free access to the polling stations, and later to the ballots.

But all in all, the parliamentary segment of the election proceeded smoothly. The definitive results have not at the time of writing been officially posted, but a provisional tally (based on 181 out of 210 seats) is possible. Twenty-two parties won seats, although only four can be considered as “serious” (the eighteen others have between one and three MPs, sharing twenty-eight seats between them): :

* Raila Odinga’s ODM, which won ninety-two seats

* Mwai Kibaki’s PNU, which won thirty-four seats

* Kalonzo Musyoka’s splinter ODM-K, which won sixteen seats

* Uhuru Kenyatta’s Kanu, which won eleven seats.

The results speak for themselves: with 45% of the MPs, the opposition has a clear majority over the incumbent administration .

This is what makes the results of the presidential election definitely suspect. Kenya’s electoral commission (ECK) declared on 30 December that Kibaki had garnered 4,584,721 votes against 4,352,993 for his rival Raila Odinga, and immediately proceeded to inaugurate the incumbent president as the winner. This tight margin (little more than 230,000 votes, about 2.5% of those cast) is very fragile in view of the following facts.

In seventy-two of the constituencies, the figures on the ballot forms signed by the ECK returning officers and the agents of the candidates differ from the figures released by the national counting centre. At Ole Kalou constituency, for example, local ECK figures gave Mwai Kibaki 72,000 and Raila Odinga 5,000 out of 102,000 registered votes. But by the time the figures for that same constituency were released at the central level, Kibaki’s winning tally had jumped to 100,980 votes (i.e. 99% of the registered voters).

The pattern was repeated elsewhere. In Elmolo constituency, Kibaki was said by local ECK officials to have won by 50,145 votes, which then translated itself into 75,261 votes at the national level. In Kieni the discrepancy was between 54,337 (local level) and 72,054 (national tally). In various other constituencies (Lari, Kandara, Kerugoya) thousands more had “voted” in the presidential election than in the legislative one, even though the two ballots had been held concurrently .

All this points to a limited but widespread form of rigging which would not have had such catastrophic consequences had not the race been so closely contested. (After all, if several constituencies have probable rigging levels of 10,000-30,000 votes, there is no way a victory by 230,000 votes be considered solid.) On 1 January, Samuel Kivuitu - the respected chairman of the ECK - admitted : “I don’t know who won the election and I won’t know till I see the original records, which I can’t for now until the courts authorise it”.

It seems that what happened was that the Mwai Kibaki vote was artificially inflated rather than that Raila Odinga’s vote was tampered with. The evidence seems clear: even if gerrymandering had distorted the legislative vote vis-à-vis the presidential one (during the Moi years, the “enemy” Kikuyu constituencies had seen their demographic weight systematically eroded in this way), how could the pro-ODM trend at the parliamentary level turn itself into a contradictory support for the anti-ODM president? The possibility of such a split-personality vote is remote, as it requires that almost all those voting for minority parties would also have voted for Kibaki.

The bloody aftermath

The results of this manipulation have been disastrous. Almost as soon as the ECK hastily proclaimed Kibaki to be the winner, both the Nairobi slums and the western province exploded - the violence of the slum-dwellers reflecting their social frustration and the westerners’ arson-cum-machete attacks stemming from their hatred of the Kikuyu “colonists”. The political violence should thus be seen as both tribal and socio-economic; because, even if far from all Kikuyu are rich beneficiaries of the regime, many rich beneficiaries of the regime are Kikuyu. Such a situation recalls - especially for the Luo - the frustrations of the 1960s and 1970s.

The vote itself was primarily anti-establishment rather than crudely anti-Kikuyu, however: only six members of the cabinet survived the landslide, and many of the victims - including vice-president Moody Awori, planning minister Henry Obwocha, roads minister Simeon Nyachae, and tourism minister Moses Dzoro - were not Kikuyu. Even the few Luo or other westerners who were also PNU members lost their seats. Several Moi administration survivors - such as former minister Nicholas Biwott or Moi’s own son Gideon Moi - were also axed, often by nearly unknown candidates who took their seats with ease. This is one reason why the minority parties won so many seats: incumbency was a distinct liability and voters appeared ready to elect anybody who seemed ready to promote change.

It is when that trend towards long-awaited change appeared about to be blocked once more by the man who had already betrayed it after 2002 that violence exploded. The configuration of two relationships - Luo-Kikuyu, and Kikuyu with power - meant in the circumstances that it could not but be anti-Kikuyu. At the time of writing there have been at least 600 “official” deaths (as registered in hospitals and by other reliable sources); but this total is almost certainly an underestimate, especially if information from all the isolated rural areas where old scores are being settled were available.

While Luo have slaughtered Kikuyu settlers in their midst in the west, Mungiki thugs have rallied to the tribe and have been busy killing Luo in the Nairobi slums, hoping to ingratiate themselves with the big bosses of Kiambu, Nyeri and Murang’a. There are already as many as 250,000 internally-displaced persons (IDPs) and refugees (into Uganda). Factories are idle, many roads are closed, and food and humanitarian crises loom. In Uganda, Rwanda and the eastern DR Congo, the interruption of fuel supplies coming from Mombasa is threatening transport. Even Tanzania is beginning to feel the economic aftershocks of the disturbances. By a conservative estimate, the Kenyan economy is losing $30 million a day and the loss for the whole region - though anybody’s guess - must be far greater.

On 2 January 2008, President Kibaki announced that he was “ready to have a dialogue with the concerned parties”. This was a good start but, once more, the 76-year-old president seemed to be a prisoner of his past (and, perhaps, of his entourage). He stalled Desmond Tutu on the bishop’s arrival from South Africa in the effort to mediate (in contrast to Raila Odinga, who had immediately met Tutu); and when on 3 January attorney-general Amos Wako announced the creation of three committees designed to find a solution to the crisis (on peace and reconciliation, on the media aspects of the situation and on legal affairs), they were packed with burned-out politicians like Simeon Nyachae, Njenga Karume or George Saitoti, most of whom had just lost their seats in the election.

On 7 January, it is reported that Kibaki has invited Ghana’s president, John Kufuor, to re-engage in the mediation effort that was proposed as the violence first escalated; and that he has offered to create a government of national unity with the opposition which (an official statement says) “would not only unite Kenyans but would also help in the healing and reconciliation process”.

It is an artful departure from the boast of his precipitous acceptance speech of 30 December, when President Kibaki had declared: “Fellow Kenyans, you have given us a vote of confidence in the values and principles…that we began five years ago. You have chosen the leaders you wish to serve you during the next five years”.
In the circumstances, the claim was neither truthful nor realistic. It is unclear whether Mwai Kibaki’s latest manoeuvres represent a genuine shift of position or a tactical adjustment to desperate conditions. In any case, the creation of a government of national unity is now the sole, albeit painful compromise available if Kenya’s violence is to be contained and some sort of progress beyond this nightmare made. After that, a just and truthful reckoning with what has happened in Kenya must be attempted.

1 comment January 12th, 2008