Kenya's opposition leader today called for the African Union to send peacekeepers to stem violence sparked by the country's disputed presidential election.
"The AU should bring in peacekeepers because the violence in Kenya is appalling," said Raila Odingain his home village in western Kenya .
Western Kenya has been at the centre of fighting that has killed more than 800 people and engulfed the country since the December 27th election, which returned President Mwai Kibaki to power after a tally that foreign and local observers say was rigged.
Militiamen armed with clubs, sharpened sticks and machetes patrolled roads in Kenya 's Rift Valley today, while scores of people fled ethnic attacks on their homes in heavily armed police convoys.
A Reuters reporter saw police fire shots to disperse a gang manning a roadblock, allowing a busload of refugees to flee to safety, a day before former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan was due to reopen talks trying to end a bloody political crisis.
Around 900 people have been killed and more than a quarter of a million uprooted since violence flared after the election.
Mr Annan persuaded the rival parties on Friday to agree to take quick steps to end the violence, but ethnic tension remained explosive over the weekend. Aid workers estimate at least 20 people have been killed in clashes since Thursday.
"We're just keeping the peace around here," said Charles Cheriot, at a roadblock where youths sharpened machetes on rocks and lined up arrows they said were poisoned. "The police have taken sides. We just patrol."
At a hospital in the southern Rift town of Kisii, scene of the latest clashes between Kalenjin and Kisii ethnic groups, staff said injured people were streaming in after being attacked by militiamen with bows and arrows.
"We had one patient with an arrow in the neck from clashes overnight, so that's been 18 so far," Kisii hospital medical superintendent Dr Wycliffe Mogoa said.
"It has been bad. All these arrow wounds - you have to open up the wounds then remove the arrows. But we've managed," he said, adding that he had received just one dead person, killed by a gunshot on Thursday.
Even if Mr Annan achieves a compromise between Kenya 's bitter political rivals, ethnic tensions have taken on a life of their own in a country long seen as east Africa's most stable.
What started as a political dispute has uncorked decades-old divisions between tribal groups over land, wealth and power, dating from British colonial rule and stoked by Kenyan politicians for personal gain during 44 years of independence.
Tribal gangs have burned thousands of homes and forced out occupants perceived as not native to the region. Clouds of smoke could be seen rising from smouldering homes in the Rift Valley on Sunday. Local media said a school in Eldoret was burned.
"You have a right to reside anywhere in Kenya ," shouted a bright red headline in a government statement published in the Sunday Standard. The notice warned that those who evict people from their homes would face the law.
"It is illegal to threaten ... any person from any area or declare certain areas as belonging only to one ethnic group," it said. "There will be no compromise on this fundamental right."
But the mobs burning tyres and stopping vehicles in the Rift Valley disagreed. "These Kisii, we shall kill them all," said one woman.
Agencies