Foreign Office minister Lord Malloch-Brown was interviewed on The Today Programme on Friday 1 February about Kenya and Afghanistan.

James Naughtie: The Kenyan crisis has taken the United Nations Secretary General to Africa. Ban Ki-moon has been at the African Union Summit in Ethiopia, being attended by President Kibaki of Kenya, and he’s going on to Nairobi where violence continues and the efforts to bring opposition and Government together are still going on but haven’t yet produced much progress. We’ll talk in a moment to the Foreign Office Minister Lord Malloch Brown, he’s in Addis Ababa at the African Union Summit, first to Kenya itself and our correspondent Karen Allen in Nairobi. Karen?

Karen Allen: Yes Ban Ki-moon has already had talks with President Mwai Kibaki about the post election violence before he left Addis Ababa, he’s now meeting Kofi Annan, his predecessor at the UN, and in an hour’s time will have talks with Raila Odinga, the opposition leader who claims the presidency was stolen from him in a fraudulent elections. They’re likely to debate a proposal to allow Cyril Ramaphosa, the former Secretary General of the African National Congress, to take over mediation of the talks. Mr Ramaphosa is also expected to fly in to Nairobi later today and those talks, of course, have been stalled at times, halted briefly yesterday, by the killing of a second opposition MP, Police calling it a crime of passion the opposition calling it a political assassination.

There’s been sporadic violence in parts of Western Kenya as a result of that but in Nairobi’s largest slum, home to more than half a million people, residents are trying to assess the damage and what hopes there are for peace.

I’ve come to the Olympic district of the Kibera slum, it’s scene of some of the worst fighting in the post election period. It really does look like a war zone. There are four or five shops in front of me completely burnt to the ground, I’m standing outside Green Wood Supermarket, there’s nothing left of it, it is literally just a shell. And the violence erupted here within hours of the controversial election result being announced.

The security situation changes here literally from hour to hour. At the moment it is calm as people await the outcome of the talks that are being spearheaded by Kofi Annan. I’ve come to this part of Kibera to meet Jamahl Yaha, he’s a community leader, a Kenyan first and foremost who comes from a community that isn’t represented by Mwai Kibaki or his main challenger Raila Odinga.

Jamahl Yaha: I’m fifty two years old I was born here I studied here and I’ve been living here throughout.

KA: Have you ever seen it as bad as this before?

JY: Never in my life, I’ve never seen such a thing. It’s quite scaring. You can’t sleep you can’t move really, you’re always afraid of being attacked if you go to the wrong area.

KA: It’s hard to imagine that a few weeks ago this was someone’s home and it’s just simply been torched to the ground. I’m standing in a pile of ashes and anything that could have been looted from this property has been taken. There’s just a sandal in the corner and a child’s text book, a geography text book lying on the ground.

We’re just coming to Jamahl’s sister’s home, her name’s Aziza. Where she lives has really been the epicentre of the violence in Kibera. She lives in a house with eight family members and has been terrified by all sorts of scenes we’ve seen these past few weeks.

Aziza (Jamahl’s sister): At the first time they were just burning and looting everything regardless of what tribe you are because even if they are told okay this a (indistinct) shop they say we don’t care so they were just burning. Then afterwards is when they came around looking for a certain community asking what tribe are you (indistinct) so the tribe that were targeted ran away but we still have people running up and down on the street, like the day before yesterday we could not move from this place completely. There were people with (indistinct) you know machetes …

KA: Machetes.

Aziza: … these they were asking why, just give us your ID, they were asking for IDs.

KA: How much does tribe dominate people’s lives here in Kibera?

Aziza: This tribe issue it’s really dominating because right now I don’t think we have any Kik around all our Kiks friends are gone, all of them.

KA: All the Kikuyus are out?

Aziza: They are gone, they have left their houses, inside here you see (indistinct) houses, their, their owned house is not rented they bought these houses but now they left their houses and run away.

JY: You can see one, two, three, four, five, six in a line of six houses only two have people, the rest of the houses the windows are broken, the doors some of them are not there. It is like a deserted estate.

KA: Do people here believe that the talks that are now underway spearheaded by Kofi Annan will actually be able to resolve the situation and enable these people to come back or are they gone for good?

JY: It’s not so easy, it’s not so easy. The people can talk, the leaders can agree even tomorrow or even today but the pain is too deep. I don’t think these people who saw what happened here are willing to come back and actually go back to their normal lives. I don’t see it coming in the next may be six or eight months or even two years. It needs time for people to feel the trust, to live with their neighbours who is of a different tribe, they need time to heal, they need time to actually build that confidence among themselves.

James Naughtie: That was Jamahl Yaya ending Karen Allen’s report from Nairobi indicating how dreadful life is for many people in the midst of this crisis. Well a few minutes ago I spoke to the Foreign Minister Lord Malloch Brown who’s at the African Union meeting in Ethiopia, he’d gone there having been in Kenya for talks within the last few days. And I asked him if there was any sign that progress was being made that could bring the parties properly together.

Mark Malloch Brown: Well I think there’s real alarm at the summit. Everybody recognises that Kenya was a poster boy for the continent as a whole with its economic success and apparent peace and so everybody is very concerned and I think there’s a lot of private messages going to President Kibaki about the need to go back and negotiate seriously with the leader of the opposition. Obviously the opposition leader is rather frustrated that Mr Kibaki has been received here at all but, you know, he remains President and so I think what you’re going to see is much more private pressure on this and already the UN Secretary General has been here, he’s leaving to go to Kenya himself, Ban Ki-moon. And so I think you’re going to see now consistent pressure stretching from the AU to the UN, which adopted a statement on this a couple of days ago in the Security Council, to the very strong statement by the EU Foreign Ministers. Where ever the two leaders look they’re going to see a united international community saying sit down and deal with each other and stop this before your country spirals out of control.

JN: Well they may be saying these things but as we’ve been reporting this morning some parts of the country, you know, look like a war zone. There is looting, there has been tribal violence and a great deal of people find it very, very difficult to see how this can be put back together again in the next few months and there must be a real fear that time is not on your side.

MMB: No that’s correct and, you know, I think Kofi Annan leading the negotiations in Nairobi is fully seized with that and he’s been pressing the Government to deploy the Army which is viewed as a relatively neutral force. Now armies are not ideal to be put in to a situation of civil unrest because they don’t have the training and skills of a, of a Police Force but the Police at this stage seem to be seen as no longer neutral and as being behind some of the killings. So I think an early area of agreement may need to be the deployment of Kenyan forces because until, Army forces, because until there is some semblance of law and order returned it’s very hard to see how the political negotiations can get real traction even, and it’s a big if, the two leaders want them to.

JN: Bernard Kouchner, the French Foreign Minister, has said that the UN Security Council should get involved, do you think it should?

MMB: Well it’s issued a statement and has moved more and Ban Ki-moon will report back on his visit early next week on Tuesday so I think it can get involved because this is clearly an issue now which has regional consequences. I was in Sudan this week as well, I’ve been meeting with leaders of other neighbouring countries, they’re all suffering the economic effects of Mombasa, the port that so many of them rely on, being essentially closed so fuel and food prices are going up and there’s a real risk that the instability will get exported to at least the sub region. So there is a role but I think we, we, we need strong international pressure but we shouldn’t let that become a substitute for the fact that this still remains an issue where Kenya’s own leaders need to show a lot more statesmanship than they’ve shown so far and deal with each other in an honest way to form a Government which all Kenyans would have confidence in. And there’s no international substitute for that.

AFGHANISTAN

JN: One question if I may on Afghanistan which also falls in your purview as a Minister, there have been a number of gloomy reports this week talking about a war, this is from an American group, that could become a forgotten war. There’s been a very gloomy report from Oxfam talking about a humanitarian catastrophe. It is an extremely dark outlook in Afghanistan isn’t it?

MMB: It’s difficult although I think it is one where, actually as a new Government coming in last summer we were a little ahead of these reports because the Prime Minister immediately initiated a kind of strategic review because clearly things were coming awry and then at the end of last year Des Browne, the Defence Secretary, and myself met with our American and Canadian and Dutch and other counterparts who are involved particularly in, in countering the insurgency in the south of the country, we had a meeting in Edinburgh. And I think not just that we the Brits but the US and Canada and the Dutch are all collectively re-tooling our strategy to kind of align it more realistically with the possibilities which means more emphasis on not just a military victory but (indistinct) political approach too in support of the Government of Kar, of President Karzai to win over those who’ve become disaffected in, in recent years, to win them back. An effort to get our economic assistance much more directly to the people affected. We recognise these problems and we’re trying to address them but yes it’s a very difficult situation.

JN: Lord Malloch Brown thank you very much.


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