NAIROBI, Feb 17: The Kenyan government on Sunday issued a veiled warning to the United States not to put “a gun to anybody’s head” on the eve of US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s visit to push for a power-sharing deal.

Rice is due in Nairobi on Monday for meetings with President Mwai Kibaki and opposition leader Raila Odinga, whose dispute over who won the Dec 27 presidential election plunged once stable Kenya into violence in which more than 1,000 people have died.

“We encourage our friends to support us, to encourage us, but not to make any mistake by putting a gun to anybody’s head and say ‘either or’ because that cannot work,” Foreign Minister Moses Wetangula told reporters.

US President George W. Bush called for a power-sharing deal at the start of his Africa tour on Saturday and said he was sending Rice to Kenya to support Kofi Annan’s mediation, which appears deadlocked over a proposed coalition government.

However, Rice “doesn’t expect ... to come away tomorrow with a final deal,” her spokeswoman Dana Perino told reporters in Dar es Salaam.

While Wetangula did not specifically mention the US, he said: “Those who support us should avoid judgmental language that tends to appear like we are being told ‘you must do this or you must do that’. We will find a solution.” Kibaki’s camp has balked at a power-sharing deal, saying in talks led by Annan that it was willing to include opposition members in government, but under the strong executive leadership of the president, according to a government official.

After initially welcoming Kibaki’s re-election, Washington backtracked in the face of mounting evidence of flaws in the presidential poll and is now pressing Kibaki to agree to a coalition with Odinga. During a visit to neighbouring Tanzania, however, Bush on Sunday took pains to specify that the United States did not want to “dictate” a solution to Kenya’s crisis but wanted to “help move the process along.” The statement came after talks with Tanzanian President Jakaya Kikwete, who holds the rotating chair of the African Union.

The United States considers Kenya a strategic ally in the fight against militant extremists and a key player in resolving conflicts in neighbouring Somalia and Sudan.

Negotiators for Kibaki and the opposition moved from a Nairobi hotel to a secluded safari lodge in southern Kenya last week to finalise details of a deal that Annan said was only days away.

But the former UN secretary general emerged from talks on Friday to announce that no final deal had been reached and that “the last outstanding issue” remained power-sharing in a new government.

Negotiations are due to resume on Monday, with Annan to meet separately with Kibaki and Odinga ahead of a new round of talks the following day.

US officials have stressed that Rice will support, and not upstage, Annan’s embattled mediation when she holds meetings with Kibaki and Odinga to deliver the message that a power-sharing deal is the way out of crisis.

Launched by the African Union, Annan’s mediation is seen as Kenya’s best hope for a political solution to move beyond the violence in which Kenyans have been killed by machete-wielding mobs, burnt in churches and driven off their land.—AFP