Word: odinga
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...While Odinga displayed evidence of police abuses, it was unclear how many of the people who voted for him were willing to join in his cause. Despite the violence in Nairobi's slums and in Kisumu, a town dominated by Odinga's Luo tribe in the western part of Kenya, most of the workers in the capital carried on with their lives. Across the country, people seemed weary of a crisis that has now lasted for more than two weeks without face-to-face negotiations between Kibaki and Odinga. In Kibera, a group of women shouted down...
When he announced the three days of protests, Odinga called on supporters to meet him for a mass rally in Nairobi's Uhuru - or Freedom - Park. On Wednesday, Odinga's chief advisers, known as "The Pentagon," got as far as a few of Nairobi's finer hotels before police with truncheons and shields barred their way to the park. Eventually, they gave up and went home. The main police targets just across from the park were journalists, who were repeatedly tear-gassed and charged by police on horseback...
Government officials have pointed to the low turnout for the days of protest as signs that support for Odinga's Orange Democratic Movement is waning. They have justified their ban on public rallies by claiming that ODM supporters are raping women in Kibera, and that the group's leaders are simply fomenting violence. "They are just waking up at 10 o'clock, eating eggs and sausages, giving interviews and planning how to disrupt people's lives," government spokesman Alfred Mutua told reporters...
...Like Odinga, Mutua insists that the government is open to dialogue, and the world will see how far both sides are willing to commit when former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan arrives in the coming days. Annan had originally planned to arrive on Tuesday night, but postponed his trip when he fell ill with...
While many Kenyans clearly do want to get on with their lives, there are signs that suggest the police are also using firepower to intimidate and harass Odinga's supporters. Odinga, after all, got 4.35 million votes in the election, and one mystery has been that so few of those who cast ballots for him have heeded his call for action. On Thursday, the police allowed only women to leave the Kibera slum, and any man who came too close was threatened with four-foot-long wooden sticks. Many were beaten...