In the Kenyan slum of Kibera these days, the ancient cadences of the Muslim call to prayer compete with election propaganda blaring from loudspeakers.
With opposition candidate Raila Odinga holding onto a razor-thin lead over incumbent Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki, every pollster describes tomorrow's race as too close to call. It's a rare tight race on a continent where sitting presidents are usually re-elected, and in a country where an incumbent has never before faced a credible challenge.
Kenya's 3.5 million Muslims -- out of a population of 34 million -- may be the deciding factor.
PHOTO: AFP
"It's the first time that religious issues have played such a prominent part in national politics," said Karuti Kanyinga, a political scientist at the University of Nairobi's Institute for Development Studies. "Because the race is so close, candidates are looking for any issue that may pull voters over to their side."
And so, a campaign that has featured promises to clean up Kenya's notoriously corrupt government, thinly veiled appeals to tribal loyalties -- crowds of people supporting the rival candidates shouted tribal epithets and threw rocks at each other during rallies on Monday, prompting police to fire tear gas -- and bouts of violence have also focused to an unusual degree on Muslim grievances.
There are perceptions among Muslims they are being targeted in a war on terror in which Kibaki has allowed terror suspects to be deported from Kenya and sent to neighboring Ethiopia for questioning, in some cases by US agents. There are also concerns about delays in granting mainly Muslim ethnic minorities national identity cards, without which they cannot work, vote or own land and the constant poverty in the slums and along Kenya's coastline, where many residents are Muslim.
When Odinga signed an agreement in August with one leading Muslim forum promising to end the deportations and launch an inquiry into the issue, it dominated headlines for days.
Kibaki, who has said little about the deportations, responded in October by setting up a committee dedicated to looking at Muslim grievances, including the deportations.
An investigation by The Associated Press earlier this year confirmed some terror suspects were being deported to Ethiopia for questioning. Human rights activists have criticized the Ethiopian government's human rights record.
Saidi Osman of the National Muslim Leaders Forum said that before Kibaki "no president in Kenya or Africa had removed citizens of his country to another country without due process."
After widely publicized protests over the deportations, "Muslims in Kenya have decided to punish Kibaki and vote him out," Osman said.
Sheik Mohamed Dor, secretary-general of the Council of Imams and Preachers of Kenya, has taken the lead in organizing Muslim voters and demanded that candidates address the community's concerns.
"For the last 40 years Muslims did not take the issue of voting seriously. But the trend is changing now," Dor said.
He established the council in 1997 as a religious group and to educate people on their rights and the importance of voting.
In Kibera, a key battleground and Odinga's home constituency, the Nubian community is less worried about deportations than government delays in processing their identity cards and land titles.
Many members of the 200,000 Nubian community are descended from Muslim Sudanese soldiers who served in the British colonial army. Despite being entitled to citizenship because their families have lived in Kenya for generations, many still lack identity documents that would allow them to vote or own land.
The government insists that progress is being made, pointing to attempts to streamline the process of identification cards.
But for Kenyan Muslims without documents, the arguments make little impact.
"The government should know that it is not doing favors for minorities when giving them IDs, birth certificates and passports," said Al-Amin Kimathi of the Muslim Human Rights Forum. "It is their rights."
Showcasing phallus-shaped portable shrines and pink penis candies, Japan’s annual fertility festival yesterday teemed with tourists, couples and families elated by its open display of sex. The spring Kanamara Matsuri near Tokyo features colorfully dressed worshipers carrying a trio of giant phallic-shaped objects as they parade through the street with glee. The festival, as legend has it, honors a local blacksmith in the Edo Period (1603-1868) who forged an iron dildo to break the teeth of a sharp-toothed demon inhabiting a woman’s vagina that had been castrating young men on their wedding nights. A 1m black steel phallus sits in the courtyard of
HIGH HOPES: The power source is expected to have a future, as it is not dependent on the weather or light, and could be useful for places with large desalination facilities A Japanese water plant is harnessing the natural process of osmosis to generate renewable energy that could one day become a common power source. The possibility of generating power from osmosis — when water molecules pass from a less salty solution to a more salty one — has long been known. However, actually generating energy from that has proved more complicated, in part due the difficulty of designing the membrane through which the molecules pass. Engineers in Fukuoka, Japan, and their private partners think they might have cracked it, and have opened what is only the world’s second osmotic power plant. It generates
JAN. 1 CLAUSE: As military service is voluntary, applications for permission to stay abroad for over three months for men up to age 45 must, in principle, be granted A little-noticed clause in sweeping changes to Germany’s military service policy has triggered an uproar after it emerged that the law requires men aged up to 45 to get permission from the armed forces before any significant stay abroad, even in peacetime. The legislation, which went into effect on Jan. 1 aims to bolster the military and demands all 18-year-old men fill out a questionnaire to gauge their suitability to serve in the armed forces, but stops short of conscription. If the “modernized” model fails to pull in enough recruits, parliament will be compelled to discuss the reintroduction of compulsory service, German
Hundreds of Filipinos and tourists flocked to a sun-bleached field north of Manila yesterday, on Good Friday, to witness one of the country’s most blood-soaked displays of religious fervor, undeterred by rising fuel prices. Scores of bare-chested flagellants with covered faces walked barefoot through the dusty streets of Pampanga Province’s San Fernando as they flogged their backs with bamboo whips in the scorching heat. Agence France-Presse (AFP) journalists said they saw devotees deliberately puncturing their skin with glass shards attached to a small wooden paddle to ensure their bleeding during the ritual, a way to atone for sins and seek miracles from
RSS