Kenyan protesters dead, parliament on fire as thousands enter the building
Police opened fire on demonstrators trying to storm Kenya’s legislature on Tuesday, with at least five protesters killed, dozens wounded and sections of the parliament building set ablaze as lawmakers inside passed legislation to raise taxes.
In chaotic scenes, protesters overwhelmed police and chased them away in an attempt to storm the parliament compound. Flames could be seen coming from inside.
Police opened fire after tear gas and water cannons failed to disperse the crowds.
A Reuters journalist counted the bodies of at least five protesters outside parliament. A paramedic, Vivian Achista, said at least 10 had been shot dead.
Another paramedic, Richard Ngumo, said more than 50 people had been wounded by gunfire. He was lifting two injured protesters into an ambulance outside parliament.
“We want to shut down parliament and every MP should go down and resign,” protester Davis Tafari, who was trying to enter parliament, told Reuters. “We will have a new government.”
Opposition to rising taxes
Protests and clashes also took place in several other cities and towns across the country.
Parliament approved the finance bill, moving it through to a third reading by lawmakers. The next step is for the legislation to be sent to the president for signing. He can send it back to parliament if he has any objections.
The protesters oppose tax rises in a country already reeling from a cost-of-living crisis, and many are also calling for President William Ruto to step down.
Ruto won an election almost two years ago on a platform of championing Kenya’s working poor, but has been caught between the competing demands of lenders such as the International Monetary Fund, which is urging the government to cut deficits to access more funding, and a hard-pressed population.
Kenyans have been struggling to cope with several economic shocks caused by the lingering impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, two consecutive years of droughts and depreciation of the currency.
The finance bill aims to raise an additional $2.7 billion US in taxes as part of an effort to lighten the heavy debt load, with interest payments alone consuming 37 per cent of annual revenue.
Festival-like atmosphere turns
The government has already made some concessions, promising to scrap proposed new taxes on bread, cooking oil, car ownership and financial transactions. But that has not been enough to satisfy protesters.
Tuesday’s protests began in a festival-like atmosphere but as crowds swelled, police fired tear gas in Nairobi’s Central Business District and the poor neighbourhood of Kibera. Protesters ducked for cover and threw stones at police lines.
Police also fired tear gas in Eldoret, Ruto’s hometown in western Kenya, where crowds of protesters filled the streets and many businesses were closed for fear of violence.
Clashes also broke out in the coastal city of Mombasa and demonstrations took place in Kisumu, on Lake Victoria, and Garissa in eastern Kenya, where police blocked the main road to Somalia’s port of Kismayo.
In Nairobi, people chanted “Ruto must go” and crowds sang in Swahili: “All can be possible without Ruto.” Music played from loudspeakers and protesters waved Kenyan flags and blew whistles in the few hours before the violence escalated.
Police did not respond to Reuters requests for comment.
Days of protests
Thousands had taken to the streets of Nairobi and several other cities during two days of protests last week as an online, youth-led movement gathered momentum.
On Sunday, Ruto praised the protesters, saying they had been peaceful and that the government would engage with them on the way forward. But while protesters initially focused on the finance bill, their demands have broadened to demand Ruto’s resignation.
The opposition declined to participate in the vote in parliament, shouting “reject, reject” when the house went through the items one by one. The bill will then be subjected to a third and final vote by acclamation on the floor of the house.
The Finance Ministry says amendments would blow a $1.56 billion US hole in the 2024/25 budget, and compel the government to make spending cuts or raise taxes elsewhere.
“They are budgeting for corruption,” said protester Hussein Ali, 18. “We won’t relent. It’s the government that is going to back off. Not us.”
Published at Tue, 25 Jun 2024 13:39:00 +0000
In November, Avi Avraham and his wife left their home in Northern Israel’s Kiryat Shmona to attend a wedding. Moments later, a missile blasted through their third floor, shattering the windows — in effect wrecking their life as they knew it.
They and their son moved south to safety and have been living as evacuees ever since, at a hotel paid for by the Israeli government in the hills of Birya, Israel, halfway between the Sea of Galilee and the Lebanon border.
“To live in hotels is not a solution,” said Avraham, in Hebrew, speaking to CBC through a translator. The 72-year-old retired bus driver’s family has lived at the hotel for seven months, and there is no clear plan for what’s next.
“We don’t know what will happen. That puts us in an unpleasant situation.”
Kiryat Shmona sits just three kilometres from the border in northern Israel. Most of the 22,000 residents have left.
Avraham is one of the tens of thousands in both Israel and Lebanon who’ve been displaced by the volley of cross-border missiles launched by Hezbollah, the Iran-backed group in Lebanon, and by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) in Israel, in a conflict that observers say has long been threatening to escalate into a full-blown war.
Defending the northern border
In recent days, talk of further defending this northern border has been rolling off the tongues of both Israel’s Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, before his Sunday trip to Washington, D.C., and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, during a Sunday interview with Israel’s Channel 14.
“After the intense phase [in Gaza] is finished, we will have the possibility to move part of the forces north. And we will do this,” said Netanyahu. “First and foremost for defensive purposes. And secondly, to bring our [evacuated] residents home.”
Get the latest on CBCNews.ca, the CBC News App, and CBC News Network for breaking news and analysis.
Hezbollah has been exchanging strikes with Israel almost daily since the war in Gaza erupted on Oct. 7 after a Hamas-led attack in southern Israel, with the aim of pulling Israeli forces away from the embattled Gaza Strip.
Ofer Shelah, a senior researcher with the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, says that with the longer range weapons and drones Hezbollah is now using, “the margin for error is becoming smaller,” and the conflict is edging toward a full-scale war “without either side deciding that they really want it.”
He says there’s no way to really guarantee security for displaced Israelis to go back to their homes.
“The problem is, once again, as it is in Gaza, what are you trying to achieve? What is the end state that you want to achieve? And I don’t think we’ll be able to reach a stable end state by military means.”
The end of the conflict can’t come soon enough for Yakov Naftali, another resident who’s been evacuated and is living at the hotel in Birya.
“I think that the situation as it is, honestly, has been stretched to the real brink of the capabilities,” he said in Hebrew.
Naftali, 62, held out at his home in Margaliot, nestled along the Lebanon border, until this March when his six sisters and four children finally convinced him it wasn’t safe to stay.
His parents helped found the agricultural community in the 1950s and he’d lived there all his life, but he says that after two workers on his farm were killed in missile attacks, his family finally persuaded him that it was too dangerous, so he left, begrudgingly.
“In my opinion, the solution is to go in and destroy them,” said Naftali of Hezbollah.
“There is another solution, a political one,” he said, adding he feels that would only last for a few years before the situation returns to what it is now.
Missile strikes lead to fires
At the fire station in the nearby town of Hatzor HaGlilit, firemen are left to handle the now near-daily missiles landing across the northern landscape — often in smoldering pieces.
Fire chief Dror Buhnik, 49, who was also a firefighter in the 2006 war between Israel and Lebanon, says the main difference between then and now is the intensity.
“In 2006, there were rockets, but they were weaker, and it was temporary,” he said through a translator. “Hezbollah is launching more rockets that have greater strength, and those attacks have escalated in recent weeks.”
The problem is only exacerbated by the dry, hot summer weather.
“Now, every rocket has the potential to lead to a big fire,” he said. “And it happens. In the past few weeks, we have had to deal with some very large fires.”
On the afternoon CBC News visited the fire station in Hatzor HaGlilit, there was an emergency call about a missile landing at a nearby military base. The fire trucks went out to the site and plumes of smoke could clearly be seen rising from the ground.
The IDF put out a notice on its Telegram messaging channel stating that a soldier was severely wounded as a result of a drone hit.
An uneasy holding pattern
It’s all been going on for too long for Avi Avraham.
“We have not seen anything that has changed in the slightest the situation in which we are suffering these eight months,” he said.
“I prefer an agreement. But if there will be a war, that’s the government’s decision, not mine.”
In the meantime, he longs to return to Kiryat Shmona, but has settled into a kind of uneasy holding pattern, waiting to see what happens next.
He saved a fragment of the missile that struck his home as kind of a dark souvenir, going back to his room at the hotel to grab the metal chunk to show the CBC News team.
“Now I have an ashtray,” he said.
Published at Tue, 25 Jun 2024 08:04:00 +0000