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From Our Own Correspondent: Kenya and Chechnya

Kenya and Chechnya

BBC World Service - From Our Own Correspondent, Kenya and Chechnya

With dispatches from Gabriel Gatehouse in Kenya's Tana Delta and Steve Rosenberg in Grozny

Pascale Harter presents insights from Gabriel Gatehouse (tracing the roots of lethal clashes in Kenya's Tana Delta) and Steve Rosenberg (noticing increasingly Islamic rhetoric and imagery in Grozny).

Personal stories, insight and analysis from BBC correspondents around the world, introduced by Pascale Harter. In this edition: 


"Government is where people to go to get rich "

Kenya has bitter experience of pre-and post-electoral violence, with burning, looting and killing all too common around voting time and taking place in many areas of the country. And there are a host of other competing interests, apart from the political: struggles for land, jobs and livestock have all erupted in conflict too. 

There's recently been fighting, and deaths, in the Tana Delta area - which was reported mostly as a spontaneous outbreak of communal violence. But as Gabriel Gatehouse discovered, the real reasons behind it may have been rather more calculated than they seem. 


A part of Russia with Islam centre stage

It's been a while since Steve Rosenberg was last in Chechnya - which for years battled its Russian overlords in outright war, and then insurgency, but is now firmly under Moscow's control. It's still officially a Russian republic, with its own leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, a Chechen who claims to be imposing order and cracking down on continuing Islamist fighting groups. 

Yet the Kadyrov regime is also playing the Islamic card itself - with an increasing stress on religious orthodoxy and religious principles in its public rhetoric and imagery. Steve's first clue to the new ethos was to be seen right on arrival at Grozny airport ...

(Image: A dead bull with bullet wounds lies in front of burnt-out huts in Kilelengwani village in the Tana river Delta on September 12, 2012. Credit: AFP / Getty Images)

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