Kenya in Crisis

[Urbane Guerrilla]

My sampling of Kenya's vibe in mid 1985 told me President Daniel Arap Moi was running an undemocracy -- a mildly critical remark about him from me netted me a very white-eyed nervous look from a concierge. That sort of thing cropping up in casual public conversation is not a good sign. English-language papers ran great numbers of articles of an officialese flavor, all Arap Moi, all the time, most of the front page, as if this paper were some party organ. Another bad sign.

Cutting genocidal groups off at the ankle strikes me as more of a deterrent than Pierce is willing to credit it being: "they started doing that and the whole bunch of them got thrown in jail/shot/fixed." This tends to take the fuze out of the powderkeg, whether or not it removes the keg. At worst, it buys time to address the more tractable of the root conditions necessary for genocides, particularly an imbalance of firepower -- the easiest side of the genocide triangle to eliminate. There is nothing in particular about genocide that makes delaying it conducive to anything demonstrably more severe that I've ever heard of.

Tw is far too willing to say "We hate..." -- it's more illustrative of tw's own cast of thought than of anyone else's, singular or collective. Maladroit. Bosnia really wasn't a perfect example of anything well done, what with its ethnic cleansing and suchlike diversions. We should not be expected by anyone (sane) to give it a top grade because a Democratic President had to deal with it. That would be blatant prejudice.