Alarmed African leaders urge action on Kenya
Say damage could be continent-wide
ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia - African leaders voiced a chorus of alarm yesterday about Kenya's rapid decline from regional peacemaker to the continent's biggest concern, and they called for urgent action to stop the killing.
"If Kenya burns, what is left?" the African Union's top diplomat, Alpha Oumar Konare, said in an opening speech to a three-day summit, echoing widespread shock at the once stable country's plunge into turmoil.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon told the leaders, meeting in neighboring Ethiopia, that the violence that has killed 850 people was "threatening to escalate to catastrophic levels."
Ban, who met President Mwai Kibaki at the summit, said he would fly to Kenya today to help mediation efforts by his UN predecessor Kofi Annan.
In a sign of a mounting international drive to end the crisis, South African President Thabo Mbeki said influential business tycoon Cyril Ramaphosa would also head to Nairobi to join Annan.
South Africa says Kenya's turmoil could be disastrous for the continent if it does not end soon. Ramaphosa was chief negotiator for the African National Congress in talks that produced a peaceful end to apartheid in 1994.
Konare told the 53-nation organization that Africa could not "sit with our hands folded," and Senegal's president, Abdoulaye Wade, struck a similar theme, saying before the summit that Kenya must top discussions. "It is Africa's image which is at stake in this Kenya affair," Wade said.
Kenya's crisis, triggered by the disputed reelection of Kibaki on Dec. 27, is expected to sideline the summit's official theme of industrial development.
The international community has been trying to press Kibaki and opposition leader Raila Odinga to negotiate. The outgoing AU chairman, Ghanaian President John Kufuor, told Reuters: "The most important thing is that they keep talking."
Ban said in his speech the two men must do everything possible to end the crisis. Kibaki will fly back to Nairobi today, and Ban plans to meet Odinga in the Kenyan capital. Odinga told Reuters the AU must not echo the policies of its discredited predecessor, the Organization of African Unity, in "tolerating dictators in the name of noninterference." 