NAIROBI (Reuters) -- Kenya's feuding parties resumed talks on Tuesday after a torrent of calls from home and abroad to solve a post-election crisis that has killed 1,000 people and tarnished the east African nation's reputation.

Foreign powers and the majority of Kenya's 36 million people are impatient for President Mwai Kibaki and opposition leader Raila Odinga to find a political solution to their country's darkest moment since independence in 1963.
Their dispute over who won the December 27 election unleashed protests and ethnic attacks that have traumatized the population, displaced 300,000 people, and hurt Kenya's image as a stable democracy and peacemaker in the region.
“The time for a political settlement was yesterday,” U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said at the end of her trip to Kenya to push for a power-sharing deal.
Apart from hardliners on both sides, a similar message is reverberating around Kenya from businessmen, clerics, grassroots groups and ordinary citizens, who are increasingly angry with the political class for allowing the crisis to drag on.
Negotiators went into Tuesday's talks at an upmarket Nairobi hotel without a word to waiting reporters, who asked the government side if it would accept a “grand coalition” as Rice, mediator Kofi Annan and other foreign powers have suggested.
Officials from Kibaki's Party of National Unity (PNU) and Odinga's Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) have agreed on principles to end violence and help displaced families.
They also agree in principle that the opposition must be brought into government somehow -- but are stuck on the details.
The deadline set by former U.N. boss Annan for a political deal by mid-February has passed, even after last week's trip to a secluded safari lodge to focus minds. But the Ghanaian has vowed to stay until mediation reaches an “irreversible point.”
Vice-president Kalonzo Musyoka -- who first allied with Odinga then broke off to run as a third candidate in the December election before throwing his lot in with Kibaki after the results -- was upbeat about the negotiations.
“The government and the ODM are talking the same language,” he said, noting they had already managed to stem post-election violence and address the humanitarian crisis.
While the government is prepared to give ODM some representation in cabinet, the opposition wants a virtual 50:50 arrangement with a strong position like a new prime minister's post for Odinga. It also wants a new election within two years.
Kenyan political pundit Macharia Gaitho said Kibaki was caught between pressure from abroad to give way, and pressure from his own hardliners not to let ODM take too much power.
“The U.S., Britain and other major Western powers all seem to have come to the conclusion that the Kibaki government is becoming the impediment,” he wrote.
“A siege mentality is creeping in as hardliners in government prevail with the view that the mediation process has become a device which the opposition, backed by the West, is using to force its way into what would amount to a virtual takeover of government.”
On the ground, the crisis has produced unprecedented population flows among communities terrified of more violence.
Thousands of members of Kibaki's Kikuyu group, Kenya's largest, have been trooping back to their heartland in the central highlands.
Many of Odinga's Luo community, and people from other tribes deemed pro-opposition, have also been heading in the opposite direction back to their ancestral homelands.