Corsi is author of
The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality, a best-selling and controversial book about the Illinois senator.
His claims relating to Kenya revolve around Raila Odinga, a member of the Luo ethnic group who was sworn in as prime minister last April after a power-sharing deal was negotiated to end election-related violence early in the year.
Corsi paints Odinga as “a Muslim sympathizer with well-known communist political roots,” and alleges links between Odinga and Obama, whose father, a Kenyan economist who died in 1982, was a Luo.
The violence erupted after Odinga’s supporters, many of them Luos, accused President Mwai Kibaki, a Kikuyu, of rigging his re-election on Dec. 27 last year.
Early returns after the vote had put Odinga significantly in the lead, and he led in most pre-election opinion polls, but the official electoral commission, after some unexplained delays in counting in some areas, announced Kibaki the winner by a margin of just over 200,000 votes.
The resulting disagreement sparked violence along political and ethnic lines that cost more than 1,000 lives and displaced up to half a million people. In one incident, dozens of Kikuyus died when the Rift Valley church in which they were sheltering was torched on New Year’s Day.
Mediation efforts eventually led to a negotiated settlement, but not before Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice warned that the U.S. was ready to take strong but unspecified actions against those it held “responsible for lack of progress.”
The U.S. ambassador later
disclosed that Washington had threatened to stop Kenyan leaders from traveling to the U.S.
Inter-ethnic tensions have simmered in Kenya for decades. Kikuyus comprise about 22 percent of the population and have dominated politics since independence in 1963. Luos make up about 13 percent.
Human rights researchers who investigated the violence cited evidence that Odinga supporters during the campaign had urged attacks against Kikuyu in the event their candidate did not win, since that would mean the poll had been rigged. Researchers also reported evidence that Kikuyu violence against Luos was orchestrated.
Communism, Islamism
Obama visited Kenya in mid-2006 and was filmed speaking at rallies with Odinga. He also criticized official corruption in Kenya, and a government spokesman, Alfred Matua, suggested Odinga was using Obama as a “stooge.”
Corsi says Obama has since then been “in direct contact” with Odinga, described in his book as “the most extreme Luo in Kenyan politics” and the son of a communist.
Odinga’s father, Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, was a leading Luo politician and Kenya’s first post-independence vice-president, who later fell out with founding president Jomo Kenyatta.
Kenyatta, a Kikuyu, studied briefly in Moscow but as president pursued an anti-communist foreign policy and in 1965 famously declared that “to us, communism is as bad as imperialism.”
Oginga Odinga’s sympathies lay with communism, which he
described as being “like food” to him.
According to prominent African scholar Ali Mazrui, Oginga Odinga’s political movement received economic and financial support from the Soviet Union, China and communist states in Eastern Europe, although Mazrui also notes that, before his death in 1994, Oginga Odinga denied ever having become a communist.
Raila Odinga studied engineering in East Germany in the 1960s and has a son named after Fidel Castro.
Political analysts describe Odinga as an ambitious, shrewd and principled politician. He spent a total of nine years in prison after supporting an abortive Air Force coup against Daniel arap Moi’s one-party state in 1982, and after his release worked for the repeal of a law banning alternative political parties.
He played an important role in securing Kibaki’s first term election victory in 2002, but fell out afterwards with the president, saying he had reneged on an agreement to appoint him prime minister.
During his five months in office this year, Odinga has been outspoken about poor leadership and crises in Africa, and in a speech in Nigeria Thursday accused the African Union of not doing enough to end the carnage in Darfur and of failing to stand up to dictators like Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe.
Odinga’s alleged relationship with radical Muslims is another key Corsi theme.
During last year’s election campaign, reports emerged of a secret memorandum of understanding (MoU) between Odinga, an Anglican, and the National Muslim Leaders’ Forum (Namlef).
A document dated Aug. 29, 2007 and circulated on the Internet called Islam “the one true religion” and included pledges that Odinga would, if elected president, expand shari’a, outlaw alcohol and pork, ban Christian preaching and radio broadcasts, and stop cooperating with U.S. anti-terror efforts.
Odinga and Namlef dismissed the document as a fake intended to smear the candidate, and Namlef in November released what it said was the real MoU reached with Odinga.
The purported genuine MoU said Namlef would mobilize Muslim support for Odinga on condition that he would work with the organization to improve relations with Muslims and give priority in budgetary allocations to the country’s north-eastern and coastal provinces, home to many Muslims.
In the document, he also agreed to set up an inquiry into the Kibaki government’s extradition of Kenyan terror suspects to Guantanamo Bay and Ethiopia.
Campaigning, Odinga told Muslims he would change direction when it comes to handling suspected terrorism.
“Our government will not be held at ransom to extradite Muslims to foreign lands,” he was
quoted as telling supporters in the coastal city of Mombasa. “This government is behaving as if it is still a colony.”
’Unfulfilled promises’
Since Odinga became prime minister after his bid for the presidency failed, his relations with Muslims, who account for about 11 percent of Kenya’s population of 34 million, have not been particularly warm.
A commentary in the Sept. 19 edition of the Kenyan Islamic publication, the
Friday Bulletin, complained that Odinga had failed to fulfill his pledges to the Muslim community.
It said the prime minister had “yet to come out publicly to speak against the injustice being perpetrated against members of the Muslim community – the same people who helped him to ascend to his present position.”
“The pledges which Raila espoused and were crafted in the MoU remain unfulfilled and it appears that he is not about to fulfill his part of the bargain with Muslims,” it said.
A Kenyan journalist said from Mombasa Thursday it was true relations between Odinga and the Muslim community had cooled, and attributed this to the fact that as prime minister, “Odinga has no powers to implement what he promised in the MoU.”
“But he tells the Muslims to ‘understand and wait’ till when his party got the presidency,” said the journalist, who spoke on condition on anonymity. The next presidential election is due in 2012, when Kibaki’s second and final five-year term is due to end.
The journalist added, “In a way, Odinga’s sympathy with Muslims is seen as a gimmick to win their support rather than implement what they wanted.”
Speaking on the Laurie Roth radio show late Thursday, Corsi said Kikiyu politicians had voiced concern to him that should Obama become president, Odinga may force an early election in Kenya.