Diplomacy falters as Kenya burns

By Paul Reynolds
World affairs correspondent, BBC News website

Kenya is in chaos as diplomacy seeks a way forward

Diplomatic efforts to try to stop the violence and encourage political reconciliation in Kenya faltered on Thursday.

Ghana's President John Kufuor was unable to get to Kenya to launch a mission on behalf of the African Union because he did not receive an invitation from the Kenyan government. He continues to hope for one.

Many governments, including the British, have promoted this mission as the best hope for progress.

Meanwhile the United States has sent its Assistant Secretary Jendayi Frazer, an influential figure in Africa.

The State Department spokesman said she intended "to meet with both of the political leaders, as well as others in Kenyan civil society, to see what ideas they might generate in order to find a way out of this political crisis".

Jendayi Frazer's intervention might unlock what had been a stalled process. Diplomats said that the Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki has been "playing hard to get".

His policy seems to be to stand fast and hope that in due course the violence dies down and his position will be strengthened.

The problem is that Mr Kibaki does not see why he should make major concessions as he was declared the winner. He says he will talk but only when things calm down.

For his part, Mr Odinga has been unwilling to give up his major weapon, street protests, and wants Mr Kibaki to acknowledge that the election result was false.

On the other hand, diplomats also think that the street protests are not going to deliver the result that Mr Odinga wants.

So the diplomatic policy now is that political dialogue is the way forward.

Diplomatic disarray

How far the US will press that dialogue remains unclear.

The US and UK, which issued a joint statement on 2 January calling for a "spirit of compromise", are now differing in how far they will go in publicly proposing solutions.

The British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has openly called for a government of national unity in Kenya, but the United States will go no further than calling for talks and reconciliation.

Britain and the US do seem to agree that it is unrealistic at this stage to expect a recount.

The US and the European Union, which has got into the diplomatic process rather late because of the end-of-the-year holiday and a change in the EU presidency, have even got into a dispute.

The EU has swung behind the idea of the national unity government (the British government will have been influential in this stance) and claimed that this was agreed in a call between the EU foreign policy representative Javier Solana and the US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

However, the State Department later indicated that it would not "dictate the outcome of any discussions between the two parties".

Britain and the US do seem to agree that it is unrealistic at this stage to expect a recount. Nobody knows how far the Kenyan Attorney General Amos Wako's call for an independent inquiry into the result will get.

The diplomatic efforts will continue, because Kenya has been a model for political development in Africa, and everyone wants that model to be saved. But the model is cracking and diplomacy is not proving easy.

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