Kenya Cracks Down, Jails 5 Opponents of One-Party Rule : East Africa: Two former Cabinet ministers and a law review editor are among those seized after advocating a multi-party system.

In a sign of government unease with a growing opposition movement, police here have jailed five leading supporters of multi-party democracy in a crackdown that began Wednesday night.

The most prominent figures detained in the government action are Kenneth Matiba and Charles Rubia, both former Cabinet ministers in the government of President Daniel Arap Moi, and Gitobu Imanyara, editor of the Nairobi Law Review. Matiba and Rubia have publicly called for an end to the monopoly party rule of the Kenya African National Union, or KANU, and Imanyara’s journal has published articles in support of ending one-party rule.

Matiba and Rubia were picked up by squads of police late Wednesday and driven off to unknown destinations, according to family members and newspaper reports. Accounts of Imanyara’s arrest were confused, with the Associated Press later quoting an associate of his as saying the editor had escaped police and gone into hiding.

Detained Thursday were John Khaminwa, a lawyer for Rubia who was reported arrested after he entered a Nairobi police station inquiring about his client, and Raila Odinga, a two-time political detainee who is the son of Oginga Odinga, a key political figure here in the 1970s and 1980s and a leader of the important Luo tribe. The Odingas were reported in the Kenya press recently as having held meetings with Matiba and Rubia. Five members of Matiba’s staff were also detained.

Police are reportedly also set to detain several other members of Kenya’s burgeoning opposition.

The surge of detentions Thursday brought a response from the U.S. Embassy here, which expressed “interest and concern.”

Authorities have expressed increasing concern and anger over plans by Matiba and Rubia for an unofficial rally in favor of political pluralism scheduled for Saturday at a field in the center of Nairobi, and they have announced that police would use force to keep the rally from getting under way.

President Moi recently charged in a speech that the two men were planning to have demonstrators at Saturday’s rally shot and to blame the killings on the government. Matiba and Rubia, in a joint statement issued about an hour before they were picked up Wednesday, denied that. They said their application to hold the rally at Nairobi’s Kamukunji Park had been turned down and that they had dropped the plan.

The detentions climaxed a war of nerves between the government and Matiba and Rubia that began several weeks ago, when the two former ministers issued a call for multi-party democracy in this country.

Over the last two weeks, Matiba’s and Rubia’s offices have been under police surveillance and their visitors have been tailed. Police broke up press conferences and interview sessions held by both men and seized their passports.

An attempt by police to arrest them June 20 for “holding an illegal meeting”--they were consulting with their lawyer, Paul Muite--was aborted when a large crowd gathered around the sidewalk confrontation between the three men and six plainclothes police officers.

On June 13, a gang of men dressed in civilian clothes but addressing each other by military rank invaded Matiba’s house. They asked for him by name and, when told he was not at home, severely beat his wife and daughter before escaping with a pocketbook and a cheap necklace.

Matiba charged that the episode, which the police called a burglary, was an assassination attempt.

Any confrontation between President Moi and the emerging forces for political change could severely damage what has so far been an African success story. Kenya’s political stability and economic success have long held the attention of Africa-watchers. Since Moi came to power in 1978, there has been only one major eruption of unrest--an attempted coup in 1982 by officers of the Kenyan air force. It was quickly put down.

During this same period, unrest has flared repeatedly in neighboring countries: civil war in Uganda, repression and ethnic war in Marxist Ethiopia, civil war and an Islamic fundamentalist coup in Sudan, a near-total breakdown of government authority in Somalia.

Since 1982, Moi has steadily tightened his and his party’s autocratic grip on Kenya. Constitutional amendments have outlawed opposition parties and made the tenure of once-independent judges subject to the president’s wish.

In a move against the press, a Kenyan court on June 29 charged four editors of a Nairobi newspaper with publishing material “likely to cause fear, alarm and despondency” among the public. The editors of the Standard newspaper were charged after the paper ran a series of stories implying that the government lied about a Nairobi slum clearance operation that turned violent last May.

Meanwhile, economic growth has failed to keep pace with population growth, which is among the world’s highest, and Kenya’s economic status has slipped. Spreading corruption has driven away foreign investment.

The country would have much to lose in any extended outbreak of public unrest or an escalation of the crackdown on dissent. Tourism is Kenya’s leading foreign-exchange earner; last year about 700,000 visitors spent an estimated $340 million here.

Further, Kenya’s budget is increasingly dependent on aid from Western donor countries. Foreign aid loans and grants account for 27% of the budget this fiscal year, compared to only 5% three years ago. U.S. aid totaled $76.4 million last year, including $15 million in military assistance.

Recently, however, the United States has put the Kenyan government on notice that democratic countries are likely to get preference in the future. The notice came from Smith Hempstone, U.S. ambassador to Kenya, in a speech to a local businessmen’s group in which he described the new standard as congressional policy.

Herman J. Cohen, the assistant secretary of state for African affairs, said in a speech in Washington last April that the U.S. government would show “a change in attitude toward the African one-party state (and that) it is time for most African political systems to evolve toward a Western-style democracy.”

Before this week’s arrests, the political crackdown here had already elicited a stern reaction from three influential American lawmakers, Reps. Howard Wolpe (D-Mich.), chairman of a House subcommittee on Africa and a frequent critic of Moi; Gus Yatron (D-Pa.), chairman of a subcommittee on human rights, and Dante Fascell (D-Fla.), chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee.

In a letter to Moi, the three focused on the “harassment” of lawyer Muite and the conviction of the Rev. Lawford Imunde, a Presbyterian minister who was sentenced to six years in jail on the basis of what were deemed seditious entries in his diary. Imunde has appealed his sentence on grounds that some of the entries were made by the police and that he was tortured into signing a confession and pressured into waiving his right to counsel.

These two episodes, the letter states, are “the most visible signs of growing hostility toward independent voices in Kenya by your government.”

The letter continues: “At a time when, throughout the world, we are witnessing the formation of pluralist democracies--characterized by multi-party elections, respect for human rights and tolerance of opposition views--we are deeply concerned about government efforts to suppress such initiative in Kenya.”

Meanwhile, open criticism of Moi’s leadership and of KANU, the only legal political party here, has also come from several leading Kenyan institutions.

In the most serious sign of dissatisfaction, 18 Roman Catholic clerics, including Cardinal Maurice Otunga, the archbishop of Nairobi, on June 22 issued a pastoral letter assailing the political situation and the deteriorating economic climate.

The letter, which appeared as a full-page advertisement by the Kenya Episcopal Conference in the country’s three major newspapers, attacked what it called widespread corruption in the country and the voting system known as “queuing.” In primary elections--key contests in a single-party state--voters do not mark a ballot but line up behind photographs of their favored candidate.

The churchmen reserved their most stinging criticism for the increasing authority of the party over Parliament and other government institutions.

“The least sign of dissent in the face of any particular decision of the party is often interpreted as subversive and as endangering the security of the state,” the bishops complained. They compared the situation to the “philosophy of ‘national security’ ” that gave birth to death squads, murder by torture and a breakdown of civil liberties in Latin America in the 1970s.

The political waters here have been stormy since the mysterious death Feb. 13 of Dr. Robert Ouko, Moi’s minister of foreign affairs.

Although political assassination has never been Moi’s style--it was with his predecessor, Jomo Kenyatta--there has been widespread public suspicion that someone in the administration was involved in the Ouko death. Still, there has been no reliable explanation of why an apparently loyal member of Moi’s Cabinet should be killed.

Ouko’s body was found near his home, charred and mutilated. When the police suggested that he had committed suicide, demonstrations broke out in major cities and marchers carried placards charging a cover-up.