Kenya's new refugees take stock of their losses

|PIC1|Until a few days ago, Paul Kariuki had only seen refugees of African conflicts on television - it never occurred to the Kenyan small trader that he might one day become one.

"It's my first time to be a refugee. I can't quite believe it," he said, as he left a queue for maize handouts he could not have imagined needing before this week.

"I feel humiliated," he added, adjusting the collar on his smart, blue fleece jacket. "I had money, I had children in secondary school, I was selling milk and wheat to the market. Now I've got nothing because they burned it all."

Kariuki is one of 250,000 Kenyans uprooted by days of riots, looting and ethnic violence that has convulsed Kenya after a controversial poll returned President Mwai Kibaki to power amid opposition accusations of rigging.

The violence has been worst in the Rift Valley, where gangs of disaffected youths supporting opposition challenger Raila Odinga have targeted Kibaki's Kikuyu tribe, seen by many as having a stranglehold on east Africa's biggest economy.

Scores have been killed in attacks with machetes, sticks and fires. Hundreds of homes have been burned. The United Nations has rushed to get food to tens of thousands facing hunger.

Thousands of people have taken shelter in churches and police stations across Eldoret town, the main city in the fertile Rift Valley about 300 km (190 miles) north of Nairobi.

"ABSOLUTELY NOTHING"

Eldoret was the scene of similar ethnic reprisals against Kikuyus in violence linked to the 1992 and 1997 elections that displaced some people, but never on this scale.

"We saw refugees in Congo and Sudan, here in Kenya we housed refugees from Ethiopia and Somalia here, but we never expected to be refugees in our own country," said Florence Njeri, 37.

Those lining up in a field in Tarakwa, where some of the worst clashes have taken place, seemed far from the stereotypes of ragged refugees in torn clothes and pot-bellied children with flies buzzing around them. Many were relatively well dressed.

A teenager in a denim jacket and suede boots sat on a straw sack full of maize. A woman with metallic yellow-coloured earrings and clean, bright dress lay on a blanket.

"I was to apply to university for studying maths," said Gad Mburu, 18. "But my high school certificate burned in my home."

Though hardly Kenya's affluent professional class, most of the Kikuyus displaced are not subsistence farmers either: they farmed, but sold produce to markets. Now they are penniless.

"A lot of people left their homes with absolutely nothing. For some, that was a condition of their leaving (alive)," said World Food Programme spokesman Marcus Prior.

Kikuyus are resented as having had it too good, dominating a government that scores poorly on corruption indices.

Other tribes suspect Kibaki's people to have been fattened up on graft at the expense of their own neglect and had hoped Odinga would change that. Destroying property was a message.

"We wanted to make life hard for everybody, not just us," said protestor John Kilwa, 29, as police cleared his road block away. "Otherwise they'd never listen to us."