Kenya leader, rival to meet

ELDORET, Kenya — For the first time since Kenya exploded into election-related violence that has killed more than 400 people, the president and the top opposition leader have agreed to meet, both sides said Monday.

Mwai Kibaki, the president who won re-election last week after a deeply flawed vote count, invited Raila Odinga, the top opposition leader who said he was cheated out of victory, to talks on Friday. Odinga indicated that he would go, if certain conditions were met.

Kenya's highest-ranking religious leaders, including an Anglican archbishop and the chairman of the Supreme Council of Kenya Muslims, were invited to attend, along with five members of Odinga's political party.

The much-anticipated meeting was announced as other progress seemed to be taking place on the political front, with the chairman of the African Union, John Kufuor, expected to arrive in Kenya this week and Odinga agreeing to call off huge protest rallies scheduled for today that many Kenyans feared would degenerate into bloodshed.

Though the political impasse seems to be easing somewhat, the two sides are still very far apart, with both Kibaki, 76, and Odinga, 63, claiming victory in the elections and blaming each other for the shocking level of violence that burst in Kenya last weekend after disputed election results were announced.

For the most part, Kenya has escaped the ethnic hatreds that have consumed Rwanda, Congo and Sudan. But this election, the most competitive in the country's history, seemed to aggravate deep-seated resentments that had been festering for years.

Many of Odinga's supporters vented their outrage toward Kikuyus, Kibaki's tribe, which has dominated business and politics in Kenya since independence in 1963. Dozens, if not hundreds, of Kikuyus across the country have been massacred in the past 10 days, and tens of thousands have been forced to flee ethnically mixed areas. Odinga is a member of the Luo tribe, and in Luo areas, mobs have hacked Kikuyus to death with machetes and burned down Kikuyu businesses.

Maina Kiai, chairman of the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights, said there was still a long way to go in negotiating an end to the crisis but the scheduled meeting "will clearly calm down the country."

"People want to see them talking," he said.

Jendayi E. Frazer, the American assistant secretary of state for African affairs, who has been in Kenya for the past three days trying to broker a truce between the government and opposition leaders, said the vote count had indeed been rigged, but that both parties could have been involved.

Election observers have said there was widespread evidence of irregularities during vote tabulations, which gave Kibaki, who had been trailing in the early stages of the counting process by as much as 1 million votes, a suspiciously thin margin of victory at the 11th hour.

"The people of Kenya were cheated," Frazer said.

Odinga has been pushing for an outside mediator to broker negotiations. Government officials initially refused, but seemed to relent over the weekend when they announced that an African Union delegation the government originally rebuffed was on its way. However, on Monday, Alfred Mutua, a government spokesman, argued at a news conference that Kufuor was not coming as a mediator.

"This is a fact-finding tour," he said.

It would be nearly impossible for Kibaki to govern without opposition support. In parliamentary elections held the same day as the presidential vote, Odinga's party won 95 of 210 seats, and half of Kibaki's Cabinet lost their seats. It was a sign of people's anger over pervasive corruption and nepotism that favored Kibaki's Kikuyu tribe.

The post-election chaos has been one of the darkest times since Kenya's independence from Britain in 1963.

An official in neighboring Uganda said over the weekend, 30 fleeing Kenyans were thrown into the border river by Kenyan attackers, and were presumed drowned. Two Ugandan truck drivers carrying the group said they were stopped Saturday at a roadblock mounted by vigilantes who identified the refugees as Kikuyus and threw them into the deep, swift-flowing Kipkaren River, said Himbaza Hashaka, a Ugandan border official. The drivers said none survived, Hashaka said.

On Monday, the government put the death toll in election violence at 486 with some 255,000 people displaced from their homes. The toll, which did not include the drownings at the border, was compiled by a special committee of humanitarian services set up by the government which extensively toured areas most affected by riots.

Information from The Associated Press is included in this report.