Kenyan crisis is chilling but talk of ethnic cleansing is premature

World View: A chilling report from Kenya during the week spoke of how violence there is tearing apart the social fabric as people from mixed neighbourhoods are threatened by neighbours telling them to "go home" to where their tribes are in a majority.

On foot of which the term "ethnic cleansing" acquired a sudden new salience. It was used by Jendayi Frazer, the US secretary of state for African affairs, at the African Union summit in Addis Ababa to describe what is going on in Kenya. If that is so the political conflict there is reaching a new and dangerous intensity.

Former United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan, who is mediating political talks between Mwai Kibaki, whose re-election is disputed, and opposition leader Raila Odinga, gave a harrowing account of the communal violence he had seen in western Kenya, involving human rights crimes and ruthless revenge attacks between Kikuyu and other tribes. He appealed for a recognition of the multiple identities that have characterised the country, in which there are an estimated 42 different ethnic and tribal groups which have intermingled peacefully for most of its life as an independent nation.

Should that complicated social fabric become unravelled in an escalating civil conflict there would be terrible consequences for Kenya and its neighbours. The AU chairman, Alpha Konare, said that while Kenya once offered hope for the continent, "today if you look at Kenya you see violence on the streets. We are even talking about ethnic cleansing. We are even talking about genocide. We cannot sit with our hands folded. If Kenya burns, there will be nothing for tomorrow."

Kenya's role as a regional economic hub and a trading centre for the whole of east Africa has become more clear during the intensification of events since the flawed December 27th elections. It is much the most developed state, whose transport systems give poorer interior states access to the Indian Ocean. It is also a tourist hub which has had rapid growth in recent years. Politically, too, Kenya has been assumed to have a higher level of development, capable of withstanding the intersecting conflicts over power, status, land, wealth and inequality which have erupted in the last month.

It is important to be clear about the terminology used to describe and define these conflicts. The official United Nations definition of ethnic cleansing is "rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove from a given area persons of another ethnic or religious group". It comes somewhere between nonviolent pressured ethnic emigration and genocide in the scale of war crimes identified by international courts. Ethnic cleansing became a widely-used term in the 1990s arising from the conflicts in former Yugoslavia, where it originated during the 1940s among Croatian fascists, who drew on Nazi and Stalinist usage.

The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) argued that a clear distinction must nevertheless be drawn between "physical destruction and mere dissolution of a group. The expulsion of a group or part of a group does not in itself suffice for genocide", the deliberate elimination by murder of a whole population.

That is an important difference in a gruesome catalogue of war crimes which, whatever about the vocabulary used, has a much broader and more ancient lineage than Yugoslavia alone. It should counsel care and caution on using the terms about what has happened so far in Kenya, even if there are well-based fears that, unchecked, the conflicts there could develop into a civil war leading to a real campaign of ethnic cleansing.

It is doubtful that the cycles of reciprocal revenge between the Kikuyus (who voted overwhelmingly for Kibaki and who have historically enjoyed a privileged position in post-independence Kenya) and the Luos, Luhyas and Kalenjins who support Odinga, amount so far to ethnic cleansing. The scale of the casualties -, a reported 850 deaths and 200,000 refugees in a population of 32 million - is not of Yugoslav proportions and certainly is qualitatively different from the Rwandan genocide, as several Irish missionaries and development workers have pointed out. But the murder of two pluralist opposition politicians this week raises sinister questions about whether a transition to a more deliberate strategy is under way.

A lot depends on whether both leaders have concluded there is no basis for reaching a compromise involving powersharing, fresh elections, constitutional change and redistribution of land and wealth that would be necessary to resolve this multi-faceted conflict. If they do so conclude the army will be drawn into the conflict, which has so far been dealt with mainly by the paramilitary police. In a civil war scenario the ethnically heterogeneous army would split, creating a terrible potential for inter-communal fighting. Thus a great deal is at stake in these negotiations.

In his recent landmark study based on a comprehensive survey of the historical evidence, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing, the sociologist Michael Mann identifies several accumulating factors that explain how such crises escalate from political breakdown to conflict, violence and mass murder.

He argues that murderous ethnic cleansing is predominantly the product of democratising states in which two meanings of the people, "ethnos" and "demos", become confused. Normally ethnic sentiments predominate over those of class, although they overlap. In "bi-ethnic" situations polarisation is most dangerous, especially where these rivalries are relatively modern and stoked up by rival claims to legitimate statehood. External intervention and geopolitical instability also encourage radicals to call for ethnic "purification", whose horrendous consequences they do not necessarily foresee. There are usually three kinds of core perpetrator: party elites, paramilitaries and mass (though not majority) groups. By then it becomes tragically normal for ordinary people to be drawn into murderous acts.

Many such conditions help to explain the Rwandan genocide of 1994-1996 and others can be seen in Sudan. Some preliminary elements of them are becoming visible in Kenya. That is why the very use of the terms "ethnic cleansing" and "genocide" should be taken with the utmost seriousness.