A power-sharing agreement among Kenya's top political leaders reached on Feb. 28 began restoring peace among embattled regions but came too late to prevent nearly 300,000 people from being displaced within Kenya and Uganda. International aid organizations struggle to provide assistance and reunite families amid the threat of resurgent violence and peoples' reluctance to return to perilous areas.

The deal reached by Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki and opposition leader Raila Odinga symbolized an important step in ending the ethnic and party-based violence -- ignited by Kibaki's disputed reelection at the end of 2007 -- that has scourged the northern Rift Valley, the Western Province bordering Uganda, and the areas around the capital of Nairobi.

Relief organizations such as the International Commission of the Red Cross and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees stepped in to provide assistance at camps for displaced people -- estimated at 270,000 people within Kenya and about 12,000 in Uganda, but the number of displaced people is difficult to determine.

"It's very murky," said Michelle Gavin, adjunct fellow for Africa at the Council on Foreign Relations. "These are highly mobile populations of people who are moving from informal camp to informal camp."

When violence began in late December, families sought immediate refuge from small government organizations in their communities and eventually moved to larger aid centers.
"When they first fled their houses, they would go to whatever was available in their community -- schools, jails, medical facilities," said Bernard Barrett, regional media delegate of the International Commission of the Red Cross in Nairobi.

Because families rapidly moved into larger centers, many family members were lost or separated in the chaos.

"The ICRC tracing agency is helping to reunite families who were separated during the events, with a particular focus on unaccompanied children and the elderly," Pascal Cuttat, the head of the ICRC delegation in Kenya, said in a news release.

Several factors increase the difficulty of uniting families and returning displaced Kenyans. First, many of those who have left violence-ridden regions are reluctant to return.
"I've seen an awful lot of reports of people who have no intention of going back," Gavin said. "The worry is going back to the protests that spark these retributive bouts of violence. These are obviously catalysts for communal violence."

"It's a huge problem from a resettlement point of view. It's awfully hard to convince families that they're going to be safe and secure going home," she added.

For those displaced from urban areas such as Nairobi, many would like to return to their ancestral and tribal homelands rather than the areas they were living. Because tribal roots in Kenya go back generations and many migrated to other areas over centuries, finding familiarity in these homelands can be difficult.

"We're talking about a movement of people who are already displaced," Barrett said. "There're a lot of people going to their ancestral lands but they may have been living somewhere else. They arrive in ancestral lands, but they have no ties," he said, adding that these new residents with old roots are "putting a strain on host communities."

While Kenyan communities and camps for internally displaced people have absorbed much of the need, border towns in neighboring Uganda are stressed by refugees.

"More refugees keep flowing into Uganda to resettle at (the refugee camp) Mulanda because they are not yet secure of the Kenyan situation. On a daily basis, about 48 Kenyans cross over to Uganda," said Catherine Ntabadde, communications director at the Uganda Red Cross Society.

Landlocked Uganda faces its own challenges brought on by the Kenyan violence. Critical access to the port of Mobasa on Kenya's southern coast has been limited by the country's political strife, and Uganda faces food shortages across the country.

"Add to the rising food crisis in addition the inflated fuel prices the addition of new groups of needy people, and it's harder to be generous and receptive," Gavin said.

For now, international aid organizations have been able to handle the needs for food and shelter in both Kenya and Uganda, but rations for resources such as water and sanitation are difficult to determine in an unstable political environment.

Emergency camps were originally constructed to provide only temporary relief, but as violence continues, new calls for resources make planning difficult.

"The rainy season will start in a couple of months. We're basically constructed to serve people for a month or maybe a couple of months," Barrett said. "Right now, it's not so much a question of resources, it's a question where the long-term or the medium-term needs will be."

Kibaki and Odinga's power-sharing deal could expedite relief efforts, but aid workers are still worried about another wave of displacement among Kenyan communities.
"It remains to be seen how long power sharing can last," Gavin said.

-- By Alexis Matsui, Online NewsHour