"This is our land and we will do everything to protect it," William Ole Ntimama, himself a Maasai, told 700 mourners including young men armed with clubs at a funeral for two herdsmen east of Nairobi.

"We are not going to be removed from Mai Mahiu and Naivasha. We will fight for our land to the last person."

Ntimama, a Minister of State, was referring to two towns in a district east of Nairobi where Maasai herdsmen and Kikuyu farmers have clashed since January over land and access to water, killing at least 17 people including the two herdsmen.

Hundreds of people have fled the area, traditionally roamed by Maasai but settled since the 1970s by small scale farmers from the Kikuyu tribe.

The fighting has pitted Kikuyus armed with machetes against Maasais with spears, bows and arrows and clubs. Land is a very sensitive topic in Kenya, with successive governments blamed for failing to address land distribution seen by many Kenyans as inequitable.

The Maasai, who are nomadic cattle herders, say the land and use of its rivers were stolen by colonial Britain and wrongfully retained after independence in 1963 by the government of President Jomo Kenyatta, who parcelled it out in the 1970s to fellow Kikuyus, including top politicians.

"The government should find a lasting solution to the water problem and land," Nitmama told the mourners in this Rift Valley town in the shadow of Kenya's dormant Longonot volcano.

"Anybody, be they in the government or anywhere, who thinks that the Maasais will move out of Mai Mahiu and Naivasha is dreaming.

"This is the land of our forefathers which was taken forcefully by the colonialists. We are not leaving."

Ntimama is a self-styled champion of Maasai land rights seen by critics as an ethnic chauvinist with a history of involvement in land clashes.

He has denied any role in what human rights groups called at the time campaigns of ethnic cleansing that displaced about 275,000 Kenyans between 1991 and 1993. The clashes pitted the Kalenjin tribe and the Maasai against the populous Kikuyu, Luhya and Luo tribes in western Kenya.

Then President Daniel arap Moi blamed the ethnic clashes on the switch to multi-party politics, but opposition figures say the government masterminded the violence to derail democracy.

Source: Reuters