SCOTT SIMON, Host:
Thank you very much for being with us.
STEPHEN MORRISON: Thank you, Scott.
SIMON: Supporters of President Kibaki and Mr. Odinga have both used the word genocide to describe the violence. Is that - I don't want to get caught up in semantics, and obviously people have died - but is that the word you'd use?
MORRISON: As to meeting the definition of genocide, I don't think you can say this is state-directed genocide. I don't think that it approaches the intent to destroy an ethnic entity. What it amounts to is a spasm of interethnic violence in communities that are in very close range of one another. We've seen this in earlier electoral contests in Kenya in which one community felt that it was robbed of its just rewards electorally and resorted to violence.
SIMON: When you accuse leadership of both sides of in some ways abetting, if not exactly inventing this violence, what do you mean exactly?
MORRISON: Well, what I mean by this is that each side has resorted increasingly to use of youth gangs to enforce their will in local electoral settings. This is a trend that has gotten a lot of note from close observers there who were, back in the latter part of '07, warning that these instruments of local violence were in place and were being used as enforcers in the electoral process and could be turned against innocent civilians.
SIMON: What kind of resolution can you foresee, Mr. Morrison?
MORRISON: There's a couple of very obvious steps that need to happen, and these are the steps that are under negotiation right now. One is a cooling-off period, a return to some kind of interim-shared governance. Keep in mind for the first period of the Kibaki government, Raila Odinga was a partner within that coalition. There's no reason why you couldn't come to some sort of interim arrangement and then set the clock back and rerun the elections under more guarded circumstances.
SIMON: The phrase that keeps coming up is a made-in-Kenya solution as opposed to something brokered by the U.S., the European Union, the United Nations.
MORRISON: I think that is accurate and telling about Kenya as a society and as a polity. It was the initiative of independent, prominent, respected Kenyan figures who stepped forward and put these ideas on the table, and then rallied and invited Bishop Tutu to come in, and engaged with the diplomatic community leadership to bring them around on this. And that's a source of great promise and hope, I believe, for Kenya.
SIMON: Stephen Morrison, who is director of the Africa Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, thanks very much.
MORRISON: Thanks, Scott.