While we’re preoccupied with our elections

Major crises are happening in other parts of the world that affect us all, and certainly will confront the new president when he or she takes office.

Like the horrific violence in Kenya. Yesterday, this stunning news:

Melitus Mugabe Were, a freshman member of Parliament, could have been one of the keys to unlocking Kenya’s crisis, but he never got the chance.

He was a moderate opposition politician, a self-made businessman who grew up in a slum, and he bridged the ethnic divide. His wife is from another ethnic group, and as Kenya slid into chaos this past month after a disputed election, he shuttled between different communities and tried to organize a peace march.

On Tuesday morning, as he pulled up to the gate of his home, Mr. Were was dragged out of his car and shot to death.

This is dreadful, and not only for Kenyans, though hell is breaking loose there.

“Whoever did this,” said Elizabeth Mwangi, a friend, “has killed the dreams of many.”

The details are still sketchy, but the shooting appears to have been a planned murder, not a robbery. Word spread fast and led to violence, with opposition supporters rioting across Nairobi, the capital.

The unrest seems to be escalating, and Kenyans are now literally ripping parts of their country apart, uprooting miles of railroad tracks, chopping down telephone poles, burning government offices and looting schools.

Remember the movie “Hotel Rwanda”? Here’s a snapshot that could have been taken right out of that drama.

Naivasha and the nearby city of Nakuru have seen a spate of killings in recent days as Kikuyus launched revenge attacks against people they say were responsible for attacks that killed dozens of their tribesmen further north and pushed hundreds of thousands from their homes. Those killings have changed the tenor of the violence, which the opposition initially characterized as a spontaneous surge of rage among people furious about the vote. It now appears to have devolved into simple revenge killing.

Indeed, the fear was that the violence would begin to spiral out of control into a cycle of ethnic attacks as members of Kenya’s different ethnic groups act on grievances they have harbored for decades over land and the perceived inequitable distribution of resources.

Remember the chilling line the Nick Nolte character – a military officer – said to the desperate Paul Rusesabagina that Americans are going to look at that on the tv screens, shake their heads and say ‘that’s a shame’, and go back to eating their dinners. That stung the conscience of anyone who cares passionately about human rights everywhere. But the wince it provoked was in its resemblance to truth.

Looking at this review of that film, one has to wonder what we’ve learned since then, and how it will be applied.

The Rwandan genocide was perhaps the most unforgivable foreign-relations lapse of the Clinton administration, but the United States was hardly alone: The United Nations reduced its peacekeeping force to 270 men — for the entire country — and Europe turned its collective back as Hutu extremists inflamed bloodlust against the Tutsi minority. Nearly 1 million people were killed in 100 days, the most rapid genocide in history. Many of the victims were hacked to death with machetes. Nobody wanted to know.