Kenya Arrests Outspoken Law Magazine Editor : Human rights: It is the third time he has been detained for criticizing the government. Action could jeopardize foreign aid.

In a new crackdown on political dissent, authorities here have arrested for the third time the editor and publisher of an outspoken law magazine and have moved to confiscate copies of that publication and two others critical of Kenya’s one-party government.

The steps seem certain to reignite criticism of the Kenyan government’s human-rights record by Western countries, especially the United States, which are its key aid donors. Millions of dollars of crucial foreign aid could be jeopardized.

Such criticism has been muted in recent months, in part because of Kenya’s support of allied policy in the Persian Gulf War. The government had also taken modest steps to liberalize the monolithic rule of the Kenya African National Union (KANU), the only legal political party in this country.

But any expectations that authorities were relaxing their policy toward political criticism ended Friday with the arrest of Gitobu Imanyara, 38, editor and publisher of the Nairobi Law Monthly. The periodical is perhaps the leading forum inside the country for critics of the government of President Daniel Arap Moi. It was officially banned for a month last year during a similar crackdown, but the ban was overturned in court.

Imanyara, a lawyer, was arrested at the monthly’s downtown Nairobi office by a cadre of plainclothes police officers and reportedly taken to the city’s central police station. On Saturday his lawyers said they had not been permitted to witness the arrest or see him in detention.

One of the attorneys said he was assaulted by police when he insisted on interviewing his client. Another said police officials at the station denied that Imanyara was inside, even though he could be seen through a window. Imanyara’s office and home were ransacked and searched by police, according to statements by his lawyers and family.

Earlier last week, police confiscated from street vendors an unknown number of copies of the Law Monthly and two other magazines critical of the government, Finance and Society. Their editors, Njehu Gatabaki of Finance and Pius Nyamora of Society, were reported to be in hiding Saturday.

The crackdown followed an attack on the three magazines by the daily Kenya Times, which is part owned by KANU. In a front-page editorial last week, the newspaper charged that their continuing publication given their scarcity of advertising indicated they were being financed secretly from abroad. The editorial also charged that they published largely anti-government propaganda.

The Kenya Times repeated its charges Saturday, remarking that Finance in particular “has been in the forefront of spreading anti-government fire through its highly sensitive commentaries.”

The U.S. State Department on Saturday reacted to Imanyara’s arrest with a statement bearing the harshest diplomatic criticism of the Kenya government since an outbreak of angry rhetoric last summer. Issued from Washington, it said the arrest was “clearly in retaliation for material appearing in Mr. Imanyara’s publication” and called it “another denial of freedom of expression in Kenya.”

The current issue of the Law Monthly carries reports on the formation of a second political party--technically illegal here--by Oginga Odinga, a former vice president and member of Parliament who has himself been detained in the past by the Moi government. The monthly also has questioned the treason prosecution of a group of political dissidents, a step for which Imanyara had been threatened with contempt-of-court charges.

The American statement called on the government to release Imanyara “without delay and to move to correct other outstanding human-rights problems,” including the arrest without charge last July of Kenneth Matiba and Charles Rubia, two prominent advocates of multi-party politics.

The U.S. government has refrained from overt criticism of Moi since late last year, possibly because Kenyan authorities have been helpful to U.S. interests on several military and diplomatic fronts. In addition to supporting American policy in the Gulf, Kenya allowed its air bases to be used as a staging point for a military evacuation of American diplomats from the Somali capital of Mogadishu in late December when rebels overran the city.

Also, during a Libya-assisted rebel coup in Chad last December, the government allowed a group of anti-Moammar Kadafi Libyans trained there by the United States to be airlifted to Kenya on their way to safety.

Although sources in Nairobi say U.S. diplomats have continued to raise privately the Matiba and Rubia cases and others with Kenyan officials, there has been no public expression of dissatisfaction for months.

The latest government maneuver, however, could further jeopardize as much as $15 million in U.S. aid. This includes $4.95 million in military aid from last year, about half the budgeted amount. Of the total $9.9 million withheld in reaction to last summer’s round of dissident arrests, $5 million was released to Kenya in recent weeks “as a gesture of thanks” for its cooperation last year and on the Gulf issue, diplomatic sources said.

No military aid was budgeted for Kenya in the 1991 fiscal year, again out of protest over its treatment of dissidents, and any attempt to restore aid will almost certainly be forestalled now.

Additionally, American development aid to Kenya this year was frozen at $39 million instead of being increased--as was similar assistance for other African countries--because of Administration and congressional unhappiness with the political situation.

Imanyara, the Law Monthly editor, has been arrested twice before. The first time came after he served as defense counsel to several men charged with complicity in a 1982 coup attempt against the Moi government and the second time was last year, during the July crackdown.

More recently he and Paul Muite, a prominent local human-rights lawyer, were threatened with contempt-of-court charges after the Law Monthly published Muite’s analysis of the government’s case against a group of political dissidents he is defending against charges of treason.