Word: rifts
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...first sign of trouble comes around two hours from Eldoret in the hills of Kenya's Rift Valley. Several pine trees have been felled across the road, forcing a detour through the forest. A few minutes later, we come across a road-sign barrier bent across the highway. "You cannot imagine that this is Kenya," mutters Preston, my driver. We come to several more roadblocks manned by men sitting by the side of the road. Their breath smells of banana beer, and they want money and news of Nairobi. Some of them check Preston's tribe. I congratulate myself...
...travel up the Rift valley, the scale and fury of Kenya's southern division becomes ever more apparent. We enter a village called Kamosong, and 15 men surround the car. One is carrying a foot-long knife, another a hockey stick, a third a bow and arrow, a fourth a wooden club. A man who introduces himself as Thomas tells us the men are from the Kalenjin tribe of former President Daniel Arap Moi. "Have you got anyone in the back?" they ask Preston. "What's your name? Are you Kikuyu?" A few minutes further on, there is another roadblock...
From the air, Kenya is a country on fire. Plumes of blue smoke rise from villages across the Rift Valley. More fires burn in the sprawling townships on the edge of the capital, Nairobi. On the ground, the city is gripped by fear. Police officers man roadblocks across its main arteries and sirens wail on its outer edges. Violence is sporadic, and sudden. In the slum of Karobongi, witnesses said the feared Mungiki sect - a group that weaves Kikuyu tribal mythology with gang rule in the slums - hacked to death several people from rival tribes in reprisal killings, leaving...
...Turkish incursion into Iraq to stop cross-border raids into southeastern Turkey by the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, which is listed by the U.S. as a terrorist organization. But what better moment to enlist U.S. help against the PKK than when Washington's fears of a damaging rift with Ankara are at their height...
...Part of that inner-Orange rift could stem from Tymoshenko's previous agreement to cede the Speakership of the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine's unicameral parliament, to Yushchenko's forces. Now, however, with former Speaker Volodymir Lytvyn's bloc having made it back into parliament, Tymoshenko might co-opt his tiny faction as a makeweight, and give him the speakership as a "balancing" force. However, with their dramatic neck-to-neck racing, Yanukovych still retains a chance to get ahead of Tymoshenko and finish first. In this case, though, "makeweights" of the Lytvyn block and the Communist party who is also...