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NAIROBI — Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki and opposition leader Raila Odinga have agreed to meet for the first time since the disputed Dec. 27 presidential elections, which sparked weeks of ethnic violence, former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said Thursday.
Kibaki had insisted on direct talks with Odinga, who refused to meet without the presence of a mediator. Annan is leading a mediation mission of the African Union.
Some 700 people were killed in violence that erupted after Kibaki was declared winner of the elections despite a deeply flawed vote tally.
THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — Kenya's president assured former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan Thursday he wanted talks to resolve a political crisis that has sparked deadly violence, but it was unclear the president welcomed any outside mediators.
New York-based Human Rights Watch, meanwhile, said Thursday it has evidence that opposition party leaders "actively fomented," organized and directed ethnic attacks in Kenya's western Rift Valley, where some of the worst violence has been perpetrated in the aftermath of a disputed presidential election. Human Rights Watch said more attacks are being planned members of President Mwai Kibaki's Kikuyu tribe. An opposition legislator from the region denied the charges.
Kibaki has been hostile to international mediation, wanting to resolve the conflict through direct talks with opposition leader Raila Odinga, who accuses Kibaki of stealing the Dec. 27 election. A distrustful Odinga says he will only negotiate with Kibaki through a mediator.
A government statement after Annan and Kibaki met Thursday said "President Kibaki also informed Mr. Annan ... on steps his government was taking to open political dialogue and ensure national reconciliation and healing." It mentioned no role for Annan in mediating that dialogue.
Previous mediation failed to get the two men to agree to even meet. International allies, saying the vote tally was rigged, have been urging Kibaki and Odinga to negotiate a power-sharing agreement that might create a new position of prime minister for Odinga.
The Pan-African Parliament on Thursday belatedly published a report from its election monitors in Kenya saying the process did not meet democratic standards and concluding "an election rerun ... would be the most pragmatic and ideal solution."
Annan won a concession Wednesday, his first day of mediation, persuading Odinga to call off protests planned Thursday in defiance of a government ban. Scores of Odinga's supporters have been gunned down by riot police in earlier demonstrations.
On Wednesday, dozens of protesters set fire to a government office building, forcing workers to crawl out windows. The melee erupted after police fired tear gas at stone-throwing youths during a memorial service organized by the opposition to honor those killed in Kenya's postelection violence. The government says 685 people have been killed in riots and ethnic fighting. Some 255,000 people have been forced their homes by the violence.
While the spark was politics, much of the violence also has been ethnic.
Wednesday in Limuru, about 15 miles outside Nairobi, police shot and killed two men in a machete-wielding mob that blocked a road and demanded to know the ethnicity of people trying to pass, a police source and a witness said.
Another two people were found dead Wednesday in the capital's slums, police said.
Aid workers reported scores of people were fleeing Molo, 100 miles northwest of Nairobi, in Kenya's western Rift Valley. Mobs in the Rift Valley earlier this week set dozens of homes ablaze and a man was burned to death in his car because he could not speak his attackers' language.
Human Rights Watch, citing interviews with numerous members of the Kalenjin people native to the area, said its investigations indicated that "opposition party officials and local elders planned and organized ethnic-based violence in the Rift Valley." It said they "arranged frequent meetings following the election to organize, direct and facilitate the violence unleashed by gangs of local youth."
The human rights organization said the same sources confirmed plans were being made to attack camps of displaced Kikuyu. It called for police to protect displaced people.
"Opposition leaders are right to challenge Kenya's rigged presidential poll, but they can't use it as an excuse for targeting ethnic groups," said Georgette Gagnon, acting Africa director at Human Rights Watch.
The charges were vigorously denied by William Ruto, a senior opposition party official and legislator for one of 49 constituencies in the Rift Valley.
"For my constituency, nothing, absolutely nothing could be further from the truth. There was to the best of my knowledge, no organization that could put together the kind of logistics that could enable the kind of violence that we saw in that part of the world," Ruto told The Associated Press. "That was a spontaneous reaction to the results."
Opposition party officials have denied similar charges made recently but could not immediately be reached for comment Thursday.
Both sides in the dispute have traded accusations of who is behind the violence, with the government and the opposition each saying they will take the other to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands.
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AP writers Elizabeth A. Kennedy, Tom Maliti, Tom Odula and Karel Prinsloo contributed to this report.
