"Supporters of Raila Odinga are involved in ethnic cleansing," said spokesman Alfred Mutua as the death toll from four days of clashes rose to about 250. "We don't want this to tarnish Odinga, to be seen to be conducting ethnic cleansing."
Odinga's supporters, drawn mainly from his Luo tribe, have made similar charges against Kibaki, whose Kikuyu have dominated political and business life in East Africa's biggest economy.
Western powers have called for calm and Britain has urged the African Union and Commonwealth to try to reconcile Kibaki and Odinga whose parties accuse the other of vote-rigging during the December 27 election.
"There are independent reports of serious irregularities in the counting process," said Foreign Minister David Miliband and U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in a joint statement. They called for an end to violence and "an intensive political and legal process" to end the crisis.As young men armed with machetes manned roadblocks in rural areas, a trickle of office workers in the capital Nairobi made it through police cordons to begin the new working year.
"They call this democracy," said a central bank worker, delayed by police as he tried to get to work.
"They should stop instilling fear in us and let us go back to our work," he said, asking not to be named.
The turmoil caused delays and confusion in local markets.
Currency trading was postponed for several hours, stocks opened a few minutes late, and both tea and coffee auctions were being postponed. "If some normality comes back, we will resuscitate the business," a tea broker told Reuters.
On Tuesday, about 30 Kikuyus died when a mob set fire to a church where they had taken sanctuary in the western town of Eldoret -- reviving memories of the slaughter in churches of hundreds of thousands in Rwanda's 1994 genocide.
The Eldoret attack was one the worst episodes of violence that has uprooted nearly 100,000 Kenyans, many of them fleeing across the border to Uganda. It sparked reprisal attacks.
