Following the collapse of the case against President Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya, ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda made public her case against Mr. Kenyatta for his alleged role in the 2007-08 post-election violence in Kenya. More than 1300 people died and 300,000 were displaced.
You can find the public [redacted] version of the prosecution pre-trial brief here.
UPDATE: And here is the defence’s response.
Here is an excerpt of a piece I have written over at African Arguments:
“While it might be too early to ascertain the full political impact of the ICC’s ruling, there is no doubt that it will provide a real test to Kenyan institutions – especially the judiciary. The courts will have to decide, amid intense political pressure, whether or not the accused are fit to hold public office and by extension whether those that want to can run for president. Ultimately, however, a lot will turn on the decisions made by President Kibaki. Will he stand by his trusted lieutenants in Muthaura and Kenyatta or will he bow to public pressure and ditch them in an attempt to secure his legacy?”
That the ICC’s website crashed an hour before the ruling was given underscores the importance of today’s ICC ruling.
In the end it emerged that charges against Deputy Prime Minister Uhuru Kenyatta, Head of Civil Service Francis Muthaura, MP William Ruto and radio Presenter Joshua Sang were confirmed. Former police commissioner Husein Ali and MP Henry Kosgey will walk, at least for now.
The political implications of the decision will be huge.
Firstly, President Kibaki must decide whether or not to retain two of his most trusted lieutenants in the government (Messrs Kenyatta and Muthaura) even as they face charges with regard to the death of 1300 Kenyans and the displacement of hundreds of thousands. Should the president decide to stand with them I suspect that soon the courts will have to decide whether these two are fit to hold public office.
Remember that Kenya has a resurgent judiciary eager to stamp its authority as an independent institution. There will be intense political pressure from Civil Society groups to see the two step aside.
Equally interesting will be whether the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission will allow Ruto and Kenyatta to run for president in light of these developments. Again, the case might go all the way to the Supreme Court. The Kenyan constitution has a clause banning those accused of certain crimes from holding public office. The vagueness of the wording in the constitution will give the courts discretion in reaching a verdict. I suspect some activism here was well.
Secondly, Ruto and Kenyatta will find it hard to sell their candidacy to Kenyans ahead of the general elections later this year. As the process continues, it will be hard for both (whether guilty or not) to hide from the gruesome crimes that were committed in 2007-08. I therefore doubt the viability of either one running for president at the top of a ticket. If they want to be on a winning team in this year’s election they must be part of a coalition.
But coalition building will be hard. For one, cracks are already appearing in either camp. Ruto recently got kicked out of a party he tried to commandeer after defecting from ODM. Mr. Kenyatta is also facing a simmering insurgency within his Central Kenya camp. The other thing is that the Kenyan economic and political upper class has revealed a willingness to throw the two under the bus if they become too much of a baggage. It is telling that a group of Central Kenyan tycoons have started warming up to Prime Minister Raila Odinga, the man to beat in this year’s general election.
I expect a flurry of press conferences to follow shortly. But I must go to bed for now. It is 3:15 AM…
A panel of judges at the ICC will issue their ruling tomorrow afternoon on whether or not six accused Kenyans will stand trial. The six include two declared presidential candidates. Either way the ruling will have a non-trivial impact on the pursuit of justice for the victims of the 2007-08 post-election violence (PEV). It will also significantly shape the politics of coalition building in this year’s general elections.
Because of the ICC process, the Kenyan justice system has put on ice its own process of holding the perpetrators of the PEV to account. A non-confirmation of the charges against at least some of the six co-accused will add the 2007-08 PEV to the long list of crimes against Kenyans, many of which have been committed by the high and mighty, that have gone unpunished.
Justice is political. Therefore, there is no doubt that if the process of prosecuting the crimes committed in the PEV returns to Kenya none of the big fish will be held accountable. That is the sad truth.
This is why despite the noisy political environment, a majority of the PEV victims (and other Kenyans) still back the ICC process. At the very minimum they want justice to appear to be served.
At the moment the problem of justice remains a worry largely monopolized by the 300,000 or so Kenyans in IDP camps and the relatives of the over 1,300 who were killed. [The media and the political class are squarely to blame for this shameful situation.] For the rest of the country, focus has shifted to the politics of the general elections due later this year. To this we now turn.
Two of the accused, William Ruto and Uhuru Kenyatta have declared their interest in the presidency. Mr. Kenyatta is currently the second most preferred presidential candidate after Prime Minister Raila Odinga. Mr. Ruto, while not as popular nationally, still commands a sizeable chunk of the votes in the country’s most populous province – the Rift Valley. The Rift Valley has also been the hotbed of political violence in country’s history, most of it over land.
A confirmation of the charges will seriously dent the presidential ambitions of Messrs Ruto and Kenyatta. It will make it harder for either of them to sell their candidacy outside of their immediate ethnic constituency. It will also give their opponents (and there are plenty) an opportunity to hold themselves as the clean candidates that ought to succeed Kibaki. Needless to say, a non-confirmation would bolster the duo’s campaigns. What will this mean for the general election?
It is common knowledge that the man to beat in the 2012 election will be Mr. Odinga. The two scenarios above will impact the outcome of the election mainly through their influence on the coalition building abilities of the anti-Odinga crowd.
More on this tomorrow in reaction to the ICC ruling.
The ICC Pre-Trial Chamber Judge Ekaterina Trendafilova on Wednesday decided that the trial of suspects of the 2007-08 election violence in Kenya will not be held in the country.
Great move.
I am of the view that holding the hearings in Kenya would have created an unnecessary distraction from the important task of implementing Kenya’s new constitution. Already, the bigwigs accused of masterminding the violence that killed 1300 and displaced over 300,000 Kenyans have ethnicized their predicament. Holding the hearings in Kenya would have handed them an opportunity for a circus of ethnicity-charged rallies and demonstrations in Nairobi.
The ICC continues to be a source of debate in Kenya and across Africa. Many have faulted the court’s apparent bias against African leaders. Some have even called it a form of neocolonialism. While admitting that the court could use a little bit more tact [principally by acknowledging that it cannot be apolitical BECAUSE it is an international court SANS a world government] I still think that it is the best hope of ending impunity on the African continent – at least until African leaders internalize the fact that it is not cool to kill your own people.
Among the cases that should have been handled with a sensitivity to political realities include Sudan and Libya [and may be the LRA in Uganda]. Kenya’s Ocampo Six, the DRC’s Jean-Pierre Bemba and Cote d’Ivoire’s Laurent Gbagbo, on the other hand, should not raise questions of national sovereignty. Murderous dictators and their henchmen do not have internal affairs. In any case sovereignty for many an African country means nothing more than sovereignty for the president and his cronies.
The government of Kenya has lost in its bid to convince the ICC that it has the political will and capacity to try key perpetrators of the 2007-08 post-election violence (PEV). Kenya had asked for six months to get its justice system in order and convince the ICC that it could bring to book those who planned and carried out the murder of over 1300 people and the displacement of hundreds of thousands in 2007-08. More on this here.
The Kenyan political elite find themselves in a pickle. Less than two years ago parliament thought that they could punt on addressing the PEV by deferring the cases to the ICC. It turns out Ocampo and the court were actually serious. Realizing this, they (the Kenyan gov.) attempted to hurriedly create a local process with the hope of persuading the court to stop the proceedings at the Hague.
But even a blind sheep could see through the government’s insincere attempts to clean up the judiciary or “investigate” the key suspects.
The Kenyan civil society remains adamant that the government has neither the capacity nor political will to prosecute the crimes committed in relation to the 2007 general elections.
Now the clock is ticking. With parliament and the Kenyan legal epistemic community largely in charge of naming the new judges that will staff the supreme court (and the wider judiciary) the accused and their political godfathers are in a panic. They must try and clean up shop under the current system or they will lose big, soon. Realizing the gravity of the situation, the same ethnic chiefs demigods politicians who were running around screaming “sovereignty” and “neo-colonialism” have since gone silent.
The Kenyan case has also generated a lot of heat with regard to the geopolitics of the ICC.
Many in Kenya and across Africa have (sometimes rightfully) criticized the ICC. But in my view it remains to be a necessary institution in the fight against impunity and murderous dictatorship on the Continent. (Pardon the phrase) We cannot throw out the baby with the bath water.
Let’s not kid ourselves. Without the ICC the families of those women and children that were burnt alive in a Church in Kiamba, Eldoret or those killed in retaliatory attacks in Naivasha will never get justice. That is the reality.
Remember, more Kenyans were killed in the months before the elections of 1992 and 1997 than in 2007-08 and yet the Kenyan political class merely pushed the unbearable truth under the rug. Also of note is the fact that the present anti-ICC crusade comprises those suspected to have financed opposite sides of the PEV.
The situation is a grim reminder of the Swahili proverb that says when the elephants fight it is the grass that suffers.
To those who talk of the ICC’s infringement on African nations’ sovereignty I’d like to pose a question: Who’s sovereignty is being violated? Is it al-Bashir’s or the Darfuris?; is it the Central Africans’ or Jean Pierre Bemba’s?; is it the Kenyans’ across the Rift Valley or the sovereignty of the Ocampo six?
The denouement of the saga is still uncertain. Two Kenyan political supremos, Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto, are appearing at the ICC in the Hague to answer to charges of crimes against humanity. The two are among six Kenyans accused by Moreno Ocampo for being the brains behind the violence in 2007-08 in Kenya that killed over 1300 and displaced close to half a million people.
The ICC trial of the six is likely to bring to light the hypocrisy of Kenya’s ruling class. For far too long the political elite have used violence as a political tool. Former president Moi perfected the craft and got away with it in 1992 and 1997 (more people died then than in 2007-08). If all goes well, it appears that this time around things will be different.
My hope is that the six accused will bring all to light so that Kenyans can know their leaders for who they really are.
There is no doubt that ethnicity will continue to cloud Kenyan politics. But it is also true that Kenyans will, from now on, know what is at stake when their leaders incite them to violence. They will know that this crop of people do not give a rat’s behind about their (the people’s) plight. They will fully understand why the government of Kenya can spend millions of dollars in defense of a few men while hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens (and victims of crimes committed by the very few men) continue to subsist in limbo. They will understand why millions get spent every year to build offices, buy expensive cars and pay for the lavish lives of the ruling elite while ordinary Kenyans starve.
They will know that their tribal leaders do not have their interests at heart.
Whatever the outcome of the ICC trial, the mystic around Kenya’s ethnic leaders is gone. These little venal and inept men and women who like parading around as gods will no longer have the final word on everything.
The ICC has ruled that six prominent Kenyans have a case to answer for the murder of 1300 people and the displacement of hundreds of thousands in the 2007-08 post-election violence in Kenya.
The spotlight is now on President Kibaki. About two of the president’s closest allies – Finance Minister Uhuru and head of civil service Muthaura – a local daily opines:
Retaining them in Government will send a signal to the ICC and the world that Kenya is not ready to co-operate and is a hostile State, putting it at par with Sudan, which has refused to hand over President Al-Bashir who is charged with crimes against humanity over Darfur.
More on the political reaction to this soon.
In related news, I am absolutely loving the wikileaks stuff on the drama that is Kenyan politics. Most politicians believe that Kalonzo is a janus-faced intellectual lightweight who pretends to love Jesus Christ. Raila is depicted as accessible but power-hungry and really bad at management. President Kibaki is sick, condones corruption and has been captured by vested interests in his inner circle. Ruto and Uhuru fret at the idea of taking all the blame for 2007-08. Uhuru Kenyatta is “lazy.”
This is valuable information, the effects of which will not be apparent any time soon. In the minds of Kenyans, a clearer image of these little men and women who parade as gods is slowly forming. It is only a matter of time before the myth of tribal loyalty is shattered and these tribal chiefs are seen for who they really are: a bunch of unprincipled and venal goons.
The battle lines have been drawn for a showdown in the Kenyan parliament tomorrow. Most reasonable Kenyans, including the current Chief Justice, the Attorney General (Mr. Kibaki’s government legal adviser) and Minister for Justice and Constitutional Affairs oppose the move by a faction allied to Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto to censure the speaker and shove president Kibaki’s questionable nominations to constitutional offices down Kenyans’ throats.
The media owners association, the Law Society of Kenya, and most of the Kenyan civil society have also rejected the unconstitutional nominations.
I have defended President Kibaki numerous times. I believe that it is because of his leadership style that Kenyans have experienced a resurgence of self-confidence that had long been lost after the fiasco that was 1966.
That said, I find his present actions deplorable. President Kibaki has chosen to risk plunging Kenya back into the abyss because of two of his lieutenants who masterminded the chaos that killed 1300 Kenyans and displaced hundreds of thousands. President Kibaki has chosen to spend public money and resources in defending this same duo. President Kibaki may also have been aware that state resources were used by his second wife and daughter to facilitate drug-trafficking. I stand disillusioned. For far too long I saw in the son of Othaya a Mang’u Man above petty the politics and mediocrity that characterizes Kenya’s political class. I may have been wrong.
The Kenyan presidency has been hijacked by Messrs Francis Muthaura and Uhuru Kenyatta. My only hope is that as they begin their descent for their sins from 2007-8 they do not take the rest of Kenya with them. I also hope that Mr. Kibaki will listen to the rest of Kenya, including the many bright legal minds allied to him, and rescind his wapende wasipende nominations.
His co-principal Mr. Odinga should also show some restraint and engage in grown-up politics. Engaging in a food fight with Mr. Kanyatta will not do Kenya any good.
Macharia Gaitho of the Daily Nation writes:
The crude personalised attacks both are displaying illustrate the depths to which Kenyan politics has sunk. Prime Minister Odinga and Deputy Prime Minister Kenyatta are demonstrating that they are truly the sons of their fathers.
They are privileged scions of the political and mercantile elite who got the best education money could buy and the richest heirlooms that could come out of public service, but when cornered, they abandon all pretence at cosmopolitan sheen and retreat to atavistic and crude ethnic demagoguery.
The saddest thing is that it might not just be a fight between two spoilt and overgrown brats, but a much wider one that carries their respective communities along.
The ordinary Luo or Kikuyu stands to gain absolutely nothing by hoisting Mr Odinga or Mr Kenyatta to reach the fruit. That fruit will not be shared, but kept within the family, as amply demonstrated by Kenyatta and Odinga Mark 1.
Yet you can bet that when it comes to reactions to the current Odinga-Kenyatta brickbats, it is the ordinary and downtrodden Kikuyu and Luo who will be incited to come out most rabidly in support of their man.
The just concluded AU summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia had two key problems to address: the political crisis in Ivory Coast and the legal battles involving six Kenyans who face charges at the ICC. So far the continental body appears to have failed on its attempts to address both problems.
In the Ivory Coast, Mr. Gbagbo’s camp has already declared that the five person panel formed by the AU is dead on arrival unless Burkinabe president, Compraore is dropped. The Daily Nation reports:
The president of Burkina Faso, named on a high-level African Union panel tasked with settling Cote d’Ivoire’s leadership crisis, is “not welcome” in this country, a top ally of strongman Laurent Gbagbo said here yesterday.
And in Kenya, the political football involving the setting up of a credibly clean local judicial system to try perpetrators of the 2007-8 post election violence diminished the prospects of a deferral from the UN Security Council. Kenya must guarantee that it will try the suspects for the ICC to consider a deferral. It does not help that the appointment of high members of its judiciary, including the chief justice, the attorney general and the director of public prosecutions has already been soiled by political grandstanding.
The Kenyan parliament passed a motion urging the country’s executive to pull out of the ICC treaty. It was left to Gichugu MP Martha Karua to be the sole defender of the ICC process with regard to Kenyan victims of the post-election violence that rocked the country in 2007-08.
The cases against the six named suspects will continue since the procedure to unsign from the treaty takes up to a year and even then signaling the intent to withdraw does not extricate a member country from its obligations while it is still a member. President Kibaki and Premier Odinga have yet to respond to the new developments.
My lukewarm support for the ICC process comes for the fore again: Recognizing the rights of sovereign states to solve their own problems (the Kenyans will not. No illusions about that. They will trade stability for injustice) and while registering my doubt of the ICC’s effectiveness at delivering justice (no apolitical body can do what it purports to do), I am still of the considered opinion that the Chads and CAR’s of this world need an international policeman to keep their tyrannical leaders in check.
Finance Minister Uhuru Kenyatta and former Agriculture Minister William Ruto are arguably the biggest casualties of the ICC process. Mr. Kenyatta has been angling for the title of de facto leader of central Kenya while Mr. Ruto is the de facto leader of the Rift Valley Province.
Already within central Kenya cracks abound in the political mold. Ms Martha Karua and Mr. Peter Kenneth are rival contenders, with Mr. Kenyatta, in the Kibaki-succession game. Also in contention are the acephalous “Kikuyu underclass” which has felt sidelined and maligned by the wealthy ruling class from the region since independence. The Mungiki movement is a potential channel for this group to articulate their demands. The election of the likes of “Sonko” and Waititu in Nairobi may be a signal of things to come in 2012. The fight between the country club elite and the matatu generation appears almost inevitable. Should Mr. Kenyatta go down with the ICC process there will certainly be someone on the wings to take his position.
The situation in the Rift Valley is different. Mr. Ruto, like Mr. Odinga in Nyanza, hogs all the political power without any clear contenders on the wings. Should the Eldoret North MP go down with the ICC process, the Rift Valley caucus may end up divided and politically weakened, just like happened in Western Kenya after the death of Kijana Wamalwa. Possible unifiers in a post-Ruto era include Dr. Sally Kosgey and Mr. Samuel Poghisio.
What does all this mean for Kenyan politics?
Nobody knows.
Firstly, Kenya’s emboldened parliament will have to make the right calls as it continues in its march to become the sovereign in the land. If MPs choose to settle their differences over the ICC’s indictment of their men in the august house it will become a lose-lose situation. The new constitution will not be implemented as intended. Kenya may have to go through a snap election. And in the worst case scenario ethnic tension may explode into full out violence, again.
Secondly, president Kibaki must take charge. Even as he allows his lieutenants room to craft their means of political survival he must make sure that the impression that someone is in charge remains unshaken. The last thing the country needs is a feeling of a free for all situation.
And lastly, Mr. Odinga must not play petty politics with the ICC process. It is obvious that if everything works for Ocampo Mr. Odinga will be the biggest winner. But he must show restraint and calmness. The ICC process must not be made to appear to be a political witch hunt. In any case 2012 is still eons away in political terms. Plus he must consider the impression he will create if he is seen as completely throwing Ruto and Kosgey under the bus, two men who worked hard and delivered him the Rift Valley vote in the 2007 general election.
My take on the latest developments is mixed. On the one hand I like the move to end impunity. 1333 Kenyans died. Those who planned their murder should face justice. On the other hand I know that justice is political. And politics is messy. Perhaps the two principals (Kibaki and Odinga) could cut a deal with Ocampo to rescue their lieutenants in exchange for the latter staying out of politics (and perhaps serving a suspended sentence in Kenya) and contributing some of their wealth to the resettlement of displaced persons from the PEV chaos.
How I wish the whole nation wasn’t so fixated on this but on what Prof. Ndung’u of the CBK has to say about the state of the Kenyan economy or the latest projections on the state of the country’s financial, agricultural and manufacturing sectors.
I hope that Kenya’s captains of industry will not play politics but instead fund the right guys: guys who want macroeconomic and political stability so that more and more equities, access Kenyas and safaricoms can bloom in Kenya.
It is now emerging that the Kenya Bureau of Standards MD, Kioko Mang’eli, falsified information while petitioning for a salary increase. The embattled director was asking for a salary hike from 480,000 shillings a month to 1.07 million. His reason was that he had contributed to the financial stability of the bureau of standards by turning a 300 million shilling deficit into a 1.6 billion surplus. But this claim, in addition to a job evaluation report favorable to the MD, have been termed as false by the office of the head of civil service.
The Nation has more on this.
And in other news, the Standard is back online.
Kenyan MPs are some of the highest paid parliamentarians in the world ($ 136, 160 p.a.) – and this in a third world country with per capita income of $ 1800. The MPs have forever refused to pay taxes on their hefty pay, and for no good reason. Over the years their main defense has been that since they are forever helping their constituents with school fees, medical bills, funeral expenses and what not, they should be exempt from taxes because such help is an implicit tax. I say this is a load of horse manure.
If these people really cared about helping their constituents they should formalize such means of assistance and then pay taxes to fund such programs. The faux welfare system that they claim to be running as it is only serves as a tool for patronage and corruption. Their ‘help’ is essentially a money-for-votes racket and therefore should be declared illegal by the electoral commission (oops, wait a second, we do not have an electoral commission – how is any Kenyan politician in their right mind able to go to bed knowing that the country has a president who ‘has eaten a lot of salt’ (not to mention old military helicopters) but no polls body?????).
I agree with Kenya’s chief taxman (KRA Commissioner General Michael Waweru) and the secretary to the cabinet (Ambassador Francis Muthaura) in their calls for a pay freeze and taxation for our under-performing parliamentarians. They don’t deserve the very high salaries to begin with and so the least they could do for the millions of poor Kenyans whose money they continue to steal is pay taxes.
It is my hope that the Akiwumi Tribunal will let common sense prevail and write a sane report that will recommend the abolition of the Parliamentary Service Commission (these clowns should not be allowed to give themselves raises whenever they want) and its replacement with a general salaries body for all civil servants as has been suggested by ambassador Muthaura.
PS: If only we had this level of transparency. This is why America still rules the world. They have very honest leaders.
kenopalo.com 