KENYA:Kenya's major newspapers united yesterday in an unprecedented joint front-page editorial, pleading: "Save Our Beloved Country".
Under images of charred shanty towns, distraught villagers and youths burning tyres, all the main dailies appealed to President Mwai Kibaki and his opposition rival Raila Odinga to end the tribal bloodshed threatening to tear Kenya apart.
"Our beloved country, the Republic of Kenya, is a burnt-out, smouldering ruin," said the statement, which TV and radio stations read out on air.
"In the midst of this, leaders - who are the direct cause of this catastrophe - are issuing half-hearted calls for peace, from the comfort of their hotels and walled homes in Nairobi, whence they are conveyed in bullet-proof limousines," the editorial said.
"It must be a blind and deaf person who does not hear the cries of the 70,000 people, many of them our children, who are now refugees in their own country," it added.
Private television channel KTN aired its own similar plea.
"Kenya looks to you to bring it back from the edge of anarchy, from a bloodbath our nation has never witnessed before," a newscaster read.
The media's joint appeal came four days after the government imposed an indefinite ban on live TV and radio broadcasts - condemned by activists as an attempt to muzzle the press, which has become more robust under Mr Kibaki.
The newspaper editorial urged political leaders to tour the country's trouble spots, and called for negotiations.
It also suggested a powersharing deal or a new presidential election under an interim government without Mr Kibaki or Mr Odinga as ways of breaking the political impasse.
The Standardnewspaper summed it up in a cartoon depicting Mr Kibaki and Mr Odinga each insisting he won last Thursday's vote.
"Hundreds dead, thousands injured, myriads homeless, economic standstill - who cares?" it said. "Is this the kind of leadership we voted for on December 27th?" - ( Reuters)