Gas, Guns and Arrests Snuff Out Kenya Protest Rally : Africa: Six more pro-democracy leaders are seized. The Moi regime accuses the U.S. of orchestrating the opposition.

Authorities broke up a Kenyan pro-democracy rally Saturday by arresting six of its organizers as they arrived at the Nairobi site. Thousands of onlookers were dispersed with tear gas, clubs and gunfire.

The action by Kenyan police and government paramilitary units brought to 14 the number of opposition political leaders arrested in a two-day crackdown. At least one onlooker was shot in the thigh Saturday during skirmishes near the meeting grounds.

Later, the government charged that the opposition movement had been orchestrated by the United States, accusing Washington of “flagrant abuse of accepted international rules of diplomatic conduct.”

American diplomats here have openly supported pro-democracy dissidents, at one point last year sheltering a leading dissident in the U.S. Embassy to help him escape a police dragnet. And U.S. Ambassador Smith Hempstone Jr. has been one of the government’s most outspoken foreign critics.

On Saturday, U.S. and German diplomatic vehicles offered some rally leaders an escort to the meeting site, but this did not prevent their arrests.

The government’s latest political crackdown--and the resumption of a war of words with the United States--is certain to sharply diminish the standing of President Daniel Arap Moi’s regime with foreign donors at the very moment when the government is preparing a new appeal for foreign aid.

Kenyan officials will meet in Paris on Nov. 25 with representatives of major donors, including the United States, who have been pressing Moi to accede to domestic demands for a liberalized political system. Kenya has been a one-party state since 1982, when Moi pushed through a constitutional amendment making his Kenya African National Union, or KANU, the only legal political party.

Kenya was already facing a difficult donors’ meeting because of Western exasperation with the regime’s behavior toward political opponents, as well as its record of burgeoning official corruption, disregard for human rights and poor economic performance. The session is critical because Kenya, up to now one of the leading recipients of foreign aid in sub-Saharan Africa, depends on such help for about 30% of its budget.

Domestically, President Moi is trying to face down charges that some of his leading ministers are openly involved in graft and that one, Industry Minister Nicholas Biwott, is implicated in the 1990 murder of Foreign Minister Robert J. Ouko, a critic of official corruption.

At the rally site, police turned away carloads of foreign diplomats planning to attend as observers. Several foreign journalists were briefly detained.

The government suggested in a statement that many of the demonstrators had been arrested but gave no figure. In a repeat of standard accusations that pro-democracy demonstrators are drug addicts and tools of “foreign masters,” the statement said that some of the arrested demonstrators “were so heavily drugged they could hardly stand on their feet.”

The statement, issued over the name of Cabinet Secretary Philip Leakey, the only white member of the Kenyan government, further charged the United States with “masterminding and abetting the supposed opposition movement.”

The latest crackdown further distinguishes the Moi regime from other African governments that have gradually worked toward liberalization of their one-party states. Over the last 18 months, multi-party elections or open political conventions have been held in more than a dozen other formerly autocratic African countries.

This trend, overtly supported by the United States and other Western donors of aid to Africa, has emboldened Kenyan dissidents in their opposition to the 13-year-old Moi regime. But so far Moi has steadfastly rejected any dilution of hit party’s political monopoly.

Saturday’s events marked the second time in just over a year that the government has quashed an opposition rally with force and wholesale arrests. A pro-democracy demonstration set for July 7, 1990, was broken up by the imprisonment of its two organizers three days before the event. They remained in jail without charges for more than six months before being released. Both, former members of Parliament Kenneth Matiba and Charles Rubia, were by then in broken health and subsequently left the country. The police action sparked four days of rioting in Nairobi and around the country that left more than 20 people dead.

The latest rally was called by the recently formed opposition Forum for the Restoration of Democracy, which had already been denied a license to hold a public meeting Oct. 5. The group rescheduled the rally for Saturday, but government officials again denied it permission to meet.

The group’s program calls for repeal of the 1982 constitutional provision making Moi’s party the sole legal political party; for a national political convention before any elections, and for the boycott of any elections held under the one-party system, according to Paul Muite, a prominent dissident lawyer.

In the days leading up to the rally, Moi and other government leaders maintained a steady drumbeat of threats and warnings designed to intimidate potential demonstrators. The government campaign climaxed with the arrest Friday of eight opposition leaders, including Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, an 80-year-old politician who served as the first vice president of independent Kenya in 1963, and Gitobu Imanyara, editor of the dissident Nairobi Law Monthly.

The elderly Odinga was granted bail and released, but the others remained in custody Saturday.

Their arrests generated a strong protest from the U.S. Embassy, which called for their immediate release.