President Daniel arap Moi’s party hired armed thugs to attack and intimidate likely opposition supporters during the 1997 election, according to an international human-rights group, which warned Friday that similar violence could be fomented before new balloting later this year.
The attacks in Coast province, near the port city of Mombasa, claimed the lives of an estimated 100 Kenyans. More than 100,000 others were forced to flee their homes.
No one was prosecuted for organizing the attacks, despite hundreds of arrests and a government-sponsored commission of inquiry. But in a 119-page report released Friday in Nairobi, Human Rights Watch laid the blame on Moi’s Kenya African National Union party for instigating the violence.
Researchers said they interviewed so-called hired raiders who recounted how they received weapons and other support from the party.
“This report is meant to sound a warning,” said Lisa Misol, the Human Rights Watch official who wrote the study.
Officials of Moi’s party, which has ruled this East African nation since independence from Britain in 1963, have denied involvement in the violence.
A top party official said Friday that the party has no intention of stirring ethnic rivalries during the forthcoming election, expected in December. Moi is required by law to step down then after 24 years in office.
U.S. officials and many human-rights groups said they will monitor the election, particularly because Kenya is often perceived as a bastion of stability in a region fraught with conflict.
Human Rights Watch said that to maintain their grip on power in 1997, Kenya’s leaders resorted to pitting ethnic groups against one another. The report compared such tactics to ones used in Rwanda in 1994, when elite ethnic Hutus directed the massacre of more than 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus.
“The methods employed in Rwanda’s genocide were replicated on a much smaller but still deadly scale in Kenya,” the report said.
Misol said Moi’s party masterminded the violence in Coast province to drive opposition supporters out of the area so it could win back seats in parliament lost five years earlier.
Party leaders hired and armed unemployed young men from the indigenous Digo group, who blamed their lack of jobs, land and educational opportunities on migrants from the country’s interior.
The coastal residents historically have backed the ruling party while the citizens from the interior tend to favor the opposition.
