In the months before Kenya's first multiparty elections in 1992, violence erupted in the Rift Valley. Communities that had lived together for decades turned on each other. Farms were burned. People were killed. Hundreds of thousands were displaced. Evidence later emerged that the violence had been politically organised to cleanse certain areas of communities seen as likely to vote against Moi. The Rift Valley clashes of 1992, and their repetition in 1997, established a pattern of using ethnic violence as a political tool that would reach its terrible apex in 2007-08.