The African Union should not support impunity
Published in Kenya by The Star and Pambazuka News on October 10, 2013
This meeting will be an extra-ordinary session of the African Union organized to deliberate on International Jurisdiction, Justice and the International Criminal Court. At issue is whether the ICC has discriminated against Africans and whether the killings of over 1,100 persons in 2008 and the displacement of over half a million should be a matter of international criminal law.
Condoleezza Rice, then the US Secretary of State, flew to Kenya to ensure that western interests were given priority. The US Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, Dr. Jendayi Frazer, represented Kenya as a base for the global war against terror and did not countenance any discussion about whether the election results represented the will of the people.
Yoweri Museveni of Uganda had been as aggressive as the Kenyan leadership in placing the matter of the ICC before the Assembly. “The African leaders have to come to a consensus that the process the ICC is conducting in Africa has a flaw.
Presently, the situation in Kenya is too delicate for the questions of killings, bombings and extra judicial violence to be brushed aside. Last week, Sheikh Ibrahim Omar and three other people were shot dead in Mombasa as they drove home on Thursday night after preaching. The next day, after Friday prayers there were riots in Mombasa.
The defense of Kenyatta and Ruto by Frazer and Dowden has complicated the Kenyan leaders’ strategy of presenting themselves as anti-imperialists. When the African Union meets this week to discuss the case for mass withdrawal, African leaders should remember that it was the activism of the Caribbean and African states that brought the ICC into fruition.
This week many of the current
political leaders of Africa will meet in Addis Ababa to discuss whether African
states should withdraw en masse from the International Criminal Court because
of the indictment of Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta and Deputy President
William Ruto.
This meeting will be an extra-ordinary session of the African Union organized to deliberate on International Jurisdiction, Justice and the International Criminal Court. At issue is whether the ICC has discriminated against Africans and whether the killings of over 1,100 persons in 2008 and the displacement of over half a million should be a matter of international criminal law.
To ensure that the original reasons
for the ICC case are not forgotten, the Assembly of the African Union should
remember its foundational doctrine of non-indifference embedded in Article 4(h)
of the Constitutive Act of the AU, mandating the continental body to “intervene
… in respect of grave circumstances, namely: war crimes, genocide, and crimes
against humanity.”
As such, the special session of the
AU has far more serious priorities. If Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto are
innocent, then they can have their day in court and their exoneration before an
international criminal court can only convey greater political legitimacy to them.
One aim of the African Union when it
was formed was to ensure that there was no impunity for those who committed
crimes against humanity in Africa.
If indeed, the ICC has discriminated
against Africans, then the most urgent matter before this upcoming Assembly is
for Africans to build regional and national mechanisms to bring those who
commit crimes against humanity to justice.
Unless the Assembly can demonstrably
guarantee the African peoples that the AU has genuine political will and
capacity to thoroughly enforce article 4(h) of the Constitutive Act and to stem
the criminal activities of desperate and selfish political leaders in Africa,
any discussion about mass withdrawal from the ICC could be tantamount to
self-delegitimization.
While decent human beings everywhere
mourn with Kenyans over the Westgate attack, leaders such as Yoweri Museveni of
Uganda, Paul Kagame of Rwanda and Isaias Afewerki of Eritrea (the three
pressing the case for this special session) do not have the political
legitimacy to demand that the African Union withdraw en masse from the ICC.
The referral of the 2007-2008 Kenyan
post-election violence case to the ICC came not from imperialists but from the
Panel of Eminent African Personalities established by the African Union — with
Kofi Annan as chair and Benjamin Mkapa and Graca Machel as members.
The ICC charges alleged that
Kenyatta and Ruto helped to fuel the violence that followed the 2007 elections.
Both men have declared that they are innocent.
In the heat of that post-election
struggle, imperial states such as the United States and Britain wanted the
matter to be put aside so that international business could continue to thrive
in Kenya.
Condoleezza Rice, then the US Secretary of State, flew to Kenya to ensure that western interests were given priority. The US Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, Dr. Jendayi Frazer, represented Kenya as a base for the global war against terror and did not countenance any discussion about whether the election results represented the will of the people.
The Panel of Eminent African
Personalities was mandated by the AU on January 29, 2008 to mediate between
President Kibaki’s Party of National Unity and Raila Odinga’s Orange Democratic
Movement.
The panel was charged with finding a
peaceful solution to the crisis. One important outcome of the Panel’s work was
the referral of the cases of post-election violence to the ICC.
There had been a demand for the
local courts in Kenya to investigate the crimes but after six years only the
homicide of 19 persons has been brought before the Kenyan judiciary.
In May 2013, Africa celebrated fifty
years of unity. The plan of the AU Assembly was to prioritize the next fifty
years (Africa 2063) but the agenda was hijacked by the political leadership of
Kenya and their allies to discuss the cases of Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto
before the ICC.
Yoweri Museveni of Uganda had been as aggressive as the Kenyan leadership in placing the matter of the ICC before the Assembly. “The African leaders have to come to a consensus that the process the ICC is conducting in Africa has a flaw.
The intention was to avoid any kind
of impunity, but now the process has degenerated into some kind of race
hunting. We object to that,” the AU chairman, Ethiopia’s Prime Minister
Hailemariam Desalegn, declared at the end of the May 25 summit.
The debate on the ICC intensified
within African corridors of power with those opposed to the ICC trials couching
their opposition in anti-imperial discourse. The AU’s Final Decision and the
Summit proceedings reflected the line of the conservative media in Kenya.
“The ICC is a tool of Western powers
that targets and discriminates against the continent; undermines African
efforts to solve its problems, especially finding peace and reconciliation in
post-conflict situations; and is shot through with double-standards, focusing
its firepower only on African countries such as Sudan, Kenya and Libya but not
on Iraq or the Gaza,” wrote one Kenyan conservative analyst.
Both Yoweri Museveni and Hailemariam
Desalegn carried the same arguments to the General Assembly of the United
Nations in September when they lobbied for the UN Security Council to call on
the ICC to drop the case.
Many Africans now appear to have
forgotten the origins and enormity of the case and ignore the fact that the
referral to the ICC was made by a panel of Africans mandated by the AU and
acting in tandem with the non-indifference doctrine of AU’s founding document.
The AU is projecting confusion and
self-delegitimization if it allows itself to be used for mass withdrawal from
the ICC by some African leaders, without first investing in workable structures
that can impartially and decisively bring to justice powerful perpetrators of
crimes against humanity on the continent.
The Westgate attack took place on
September 22 in the middle of intense diplomatic activities by Yoweri Museveni
for Kenya to boycott the ICC. International sympathy for the Kenyan leaders
heightened until it was revealed that the Kenyan intelligence and military were
forewarned of the attack.
Concerned Kenyan citizens are now
posing important questions: why did it take so long for the Kenyan military and
security forces to respond to the attack? Why was it that select persons were
warned to stay away from the mall on that particular day?
Koigi Wamwere wrote in an op-ed in
the Star that 'Someone Should Take Political Responsibility For Westgate.'
“Amazingly, instead of accepting blame and responsibility for this tragedy,
President Uhuru, Deputy President Ruto and their government are positioning
themselves to reap political capital and professional gain from their own
failure,” he declared.
If the current leaders of Kenya are
not seeking to reap political capital from the Westgate tragedy, they should
call for the cancellation of the AU Special Session to discuss the case before
the ICC.
Presently, the situation in Kenya is too delicate for the questions of killings, bombings and extra judicial violence to be brushed aside. Last week, Sheikh Ibrahim Omar and three other people were shot dead in Mombasa as they drove home on Thursday night after preaching. The next day, after Friday prayers there were riots in Mombasa.
Another Muslim cleric rightly called
for an end to the extrajudicial killings on the streets of Kenya. "They
should tell us the truth about Westgate, not kill innocent Muslims in
Mombasa," said Abubaker Shariff Ahmed, known as Makaburi.
In the midst of this instability
Richard Dowden of the Royal Africa Society and Jendayi Frazer waded into the
debate about Kenya and the ICC. In his article 'Kenya after Westgate: more
trouble ahead', Dowden argued that the West should rally behind the political
leaders of Kenya. Without mentioning the machinations of the UK in Somalia and
to corner the contracts for oil exploration, Dowden concluded that the Westgate
attack was the beginning of the end of the ICC.
“Western governments will need a
stable strong government in Kenya. There is no way the West is going to allow
President Kenyatta, who has shown good leadership qualities during the crisis
(and his vice-president William Ruto), to spend months at a trial in The Hague
and then go to jail,” said Dowden.
Jendayi Frazer, who had worked
closely with Condoleeza Rice to ensure that Mwai Kibaki remained President in
2008, wrote that the West now needs Kenya as a partner in the fight against
terror in an article in the Daily Nation, headlined 'Attack will draw West,
Kenya closer.' “Put more plainly, the ICC cases
against President Kenyatta and Deputy President Ruto have become a distraction
reflected clearly by the need to suspend Mr Ruto’s trial for a week to allow
his return home to attend to the Westgate crisis,” she wrote.
Jendayi Frazer was a diplomat for
the Republican government. The conservative wing of the US political
establishment is now coming to the defense of Kenyatta and Ruto. The United
States is not a signatory to the Rome Statute yet the conservatives are calling
for Africans to forget the crimes committed in January 2008 in order for
Kenyatta and Ruto to focus on the global war against terror.
The defense of Kenyatta and Ruto by Frazer and Dowden has complicated the Kenyan leaders’ strategy of presenting themselves as anti-imperialists. When the African Union meets this week to discuss the case for mass withdrawal, African leaders should remember that it was the activism of the Caribbean and African states that brought the ICC into fruition.
I share the opinion of Pan
Africanists who believe that if Kenyatta and Ruto are innocent, they should not
be afraid to get their day in court.
The African Union should be working
hard to ensure that there is no impunity in Africa. Other organs such as the
African Parliament and the Economic, Social and Cultural Council of the African
Union need to engage in this discussion about impunity in Africa.
This
week many of the current political leaders of Africa will meet in Addis
Ababa to discuss whether African states should withdraw en masse from
the International Criminal Court because of the indictment of Kenyan
President Uhuru Kenyatta and Deputy President William Ruto.
This meeting will be an extra-ordinary session of the African Union organized to deliberate on International Jurisdiction, Justice and the International Criminal Court.
At issue is whether the ICC has discriminated against Africans and whether the killings of over 1,100 persons in 2008 and the displacement of over half a million should be a matter of international criminal law.
To ensure that the original reasons for the ICC case are not forgotten, the Assembly of the African Union should remember its foundational doctrine of non-indifference embedded in Article 4(h) of the Constitutive Act of the AU, mandating the continental body to “intervene … in respect of grave circumstances, namely: war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity.”
As such, the special session of the AU has far more serious priorities. If Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto are innocent, then they can have their day in court and their exoneration before an international criminal court can only convey greater political legitimacy to them.
One aim of the African Union when it was formed was to ensure that there was no impunity for those who committed crimes against humanity in Africa.
If indeed, the ICC has discriminated against Africans, then the most urgent matter before this upcoming Assembly is for Africans to build regional and national mechanisms to bring those who commit crimes against humanity to justice.
Unless the Assembly can demonstrably guarantee the African peoples that the AU has genuine political will and capacity to thoroughly enforce article 4(h) of the Constitutive Act and to stem the criminal activities of desperate and selfish political leaders in Africa, any discussion about mass withdrawal from the ICC could be tantamount to self-delegitimization.
While decent human beings everywhere mourn with Kenyans over the Westgate attack, leaders such as Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, Paul Kagame of Rwanda and Isaias Afewerki of Eritrea (the three pressing the case for this special session) do not have the political legitimacy to demand that the African Union withdraw en masse from the ICC.
The referral of the 2007-2008 Kenyan post-election violence case to the ICC came not from imperialists but from the Panel of Eminent African Personalities established by the African Union — with Kofi Annan as chair and Benjamin Mkapa and Graca Machel as members.
The ICC charges alleged that Kenyatta and Ruto helped to fuel the violence that followed the 2007 elections. Both men have declared that they are innocent.
In the heat of that post-election struggle, imperial states such as the United States and Britain wanted the matter to be put aside so that international business could continue to thrive in Kenya.
Condoleezza Rice, then the US Secretary of State, flew to Kenya to ensure that western interests were given priority. The US Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, Dr. Jendayi Frazer, represented Kenya as a base for the global war against terror and did not countenance any discussion about whether the election results represented the will of the people.
The Panel of Eminent African Personalities was mandated by the AU on January 29, 2008 to mediate between President Kibaki’s Party of National Unity and Raila Odinga’s Orange Democratic Movement.
The panel was charged with finding a peaceful solution to the crisis. One important outcome of the Panel’s work was the referral of the cases of post-election violence to the ICC.
There had been a demand for the local courts in Kenya to investigate the crimes but after six years only the homicide of 19 persons has been brought before the Kenyan judiciary.
In May 2013, Africa celebrated fifty years of unity. The plan of the AU Assembly was to prioritize the next fifty years (Africa 2063) but the agenda was hijacked by the political leadership of Kenya and their allies to discuss the cases of Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto before the ICC.
Yoweri Museveni of Uganda had been as aggressive as the Kenyan leadership in placing the matter of the ICC before the Assembly. “The African leaders have to come to a consensus that the process the ICC is conducting in Africa has a flaw.
The intention was to avoid any kind of impunity, but now the process has degenerated into some kind of race hunting. We object to that,” the AU chairman, Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn, declared at the end of the May 25 summit.
The debate on the ICC intensified within African corridors of power with those opposed to the ICC trials couching their opposition in anti-imperial discourse. The AU’s Final Decision and the Summit proceedings reflected the line of the conservative media in Kenya.
“The ICC is a tool of Western powers that targets and discriminates against the continent; undermines African efforts to solve its problems, especially finding peace and reconciliation in post-conflict situations; and is shot through with double-standards, focusing its firepower only on African countries such as Sudan, Kenya and Libya but not on Iraq or the Gaza,” wrote one Kenyan conservative analyst.
Both Yoweri Museveni and Hailemariam Desalegn carried the same arguments to the General Assembly of the United Nations in September when they lobbied for the UN Security Council to call on the ICC to drop the case.
Many Africans now appear to have forgotten the origins and enormity of the case and ignore the fact that the referral to the ICC was made by a panel of Africans mandated by the AU and acting in tandem with the non-indifference doctrine of AU’s founding document.
The AU is projecting confusion and self-delegitimization if it allows itself to be used for mass withdrawal from the ICC by some African leaders, without first investing in workable structures that can impartially and decisively bring to justice powerful perpetrators of crimes against humanity on the continent.
The Westgate attack took place on September 22 in the middle of intense diplomatic activities by Yoweri Museveni for Kenya to boycott the ICC. International sympathy for the Kenyan leaders heightened until it was revealed that the Kenyan intelligence and military were forewarned of the attack.
Concerned Kenyan citizens are now posing important questions: why did it take so long for the Kenyan military and security forces to respond to the attack? Why was it that select persons were warned to stay away from the mall on that particular day?
Koigi Wamwere wrote in an op-ed in the Star that 'Someone Should Take Political Responsibility For Westgate.' “Amazingly, instead of accepting blame and responsibility for this tragedy, President Uhuru, Deputy President Ruto and their government are positioning themselves to reap political capital and professional gain from their own failure,” he declared.
If the current leaders of Kenya are not seeking to reap political capital from the Westgate tragedy, they should call for the cancellation of the AU Special Session to discuss the case before the ICC.
Presently, the situation in Kenya is too delicate for the questions of killings, bombings and extra judicial violence to be brushed aside. Last week, Sheikh Ibrahim Omar and three other people were shot dead in Mombasa as they drove home on Thursday night after preaching. The next day, after Friday prayers there were riots in Mombasa.
Another Muslim cleric rightly called for an end to the extrajudicial killings on the streets of Kenya. "They should tell us the truth about Westgate, not kill innocent Muslims in Mombasa," said Abubaker Shariff Ahmed, known as Makaburi.
In the midst of this instability Richard Dowden of the Royal Africa Society and Jendayi Frazer waded into the debate about Kenya and the ICC. In his article 'Kenya after Westgate: more trouble ahead', Dowden argued that the West should rally behind the political leaders of Kenya. Without mentioning the machinations of the UK in Somalia and to corner the contracts for oil exploration, Dowden concluded that the Westgate attack was the beginning of the end of the ICC.
“Western governments will need a stable strong government in Kenya. There is no way the West is going to allow President Kenyatta, who has shown good leadership qualities during the crisis (and his vice-president William Ruto), to spend months at a trial in The Hague and then go to jail,” said Dowden.
Jendayi Frazer, who had worked closely with Condoleeza Rice to ensure that Mwai Kibaki remained President in 2008, wrote that the West now needs Kenya as a partner in the fight against terror in an article in the Daily Nation, headlined 'Attack will draw West, Kenya closer.'
“Put more plainly, the ICC cases against President Kenyatta and Deputy President Ruto have become a distraction reflected clearly by the need to suspend Mr Ruto’s trial for a week to allow his return home to attend to the Westgate crisis,” she wrote.
Jendayi Frazer was a diplomat for the Republican government. The conservative wing of the US political establishment is now coming to the defense of Kenyatta and Ruto. The United States is not a signatory to the Rome Statute yet the conservatives are calling for Africans to forget the crimes committed in January 2008 in order for Kenyatta and Ruto to focus on the global war against terror.
The defense of Kenyatta and Ruto by Frazer and Dowden has complicated the Kenyan leaders’ strategy of presenting themselves as anti-imperialists. When the African Union meets this week to discuss the case for mass withdrawal, African leaders should remember that it was the activism of the Caribbean and African states that brought the ICC into fruition.
I share the opinion of Pan Africanists who believe that if Kenyatta and Ruto are innocent, they should not be afraid to get their day in court.
The African Union should be working hard to ensure that there is no impunity in Africa. Other organs such as the African Parliament and the Economic, Social and Cultural Council of the African Union need to engage in this discussion about impunity in Africa.
- See more at: http://www.the-star.co.ke/news/article-139001/african-union-should-not-support-impunity#sthash.b8glWl52.9N83EjRx.dpuf
This meeting will be an extra-ordinary session of the African Union organized to deliberate on International Jurisdiction, Justice and the International Criminal Court.
At issue is whether the ICC has discriminated against Africans and whether the killings of over 1,100 persons in 2008 and the displacement of over half a million should be a matter of international criminal law.
To ensure that the original reasons for the ICC case are not forgotten, the Assembly of the African Union should remember its foundational doctrine of non-indifference embedded in Article 4(h) of the Constitutive Act of the AU, mandating the continental body to “intervene … in respect of grave circumstances, namely: war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity.”
As such, the special session of the AU has far more serious priorities. If Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto are innocent, then they can have their day in court and their exoneration before an international criminal court can only convey greater political legitimacy to them.
One aim of the African Union when it was formed was to ensure that there was no impunity for those who committed crimes against humanity in Africa.
If indeed, the ICC has discriminated against Africans, then the most urgent matter before this upcoming Assembly is for Africans to build regional and national mechanisms to bring those who commit crimes against humanity to justice.
Unless the Assembly can demonstrably guarantee the African peoples that the AU has genuine political will and capacity to thoroughly enforce article 4(h) of the Constitutive Act and to stem the criminal activities of desperate and selfish political leaders in Africa, any discussion about mass withdrawal from the ICC could be tantamount to self-delegitimization.
While decent human beings everywhere mourn with Kenyans over the Westgate attack, leaders such as Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, Paul Kagame of Rwanda and Isaias Afewerki of Eritrea (the three pressing the case for this special session) do not have the political legitimacy to demand that the African Union withdraw en masse from the ICC.
The referral of the 2007-2008 Kenyan post-election violence case to the ICC came not from imperialists but from the Panel of Eminent African Personalities established by the African Union — with Kofi Annan as chair and Benjamin Mkapa and Graca Machel as members.
The ICC charges alleged that Kenyatta and Ruto helped to fuel the violence that followed the 2007 elections. Both men have declared that they are innocent.
In the heat of that post-election struggle, imperial states such as the United States and Britain wanted the matter to be put aside so that international business could continue to thrive in Kenya.
Condoleezza Rice, then the US Secretary of State, flew to Kenya to ensure that western interests were given priority. The US Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, Dr. Jendayi Frazer, represented Kenya as a base for the global war against terror and did not countenance any discussion about whether the election results represented the will of the people.
The Panel of Eminent African Personalities was mandated by the AU on January 29, 2008 to mediate between President Kibaki’s Party of National Unity and Raila Odinga’s Orange Democratic Movement.
The panel was charged with finding a peaceful solution to the crisis. One important outcome of the Panel’s work was the referral of the cases of post-election violence to the ICC.
There had been a demand for the local courts in Kenya to investigate the crimes but after six years only the homicide of 19 persons has been brought before the Kenyan judiciary.
In May 2013, Africa celebrated fifty years of unity. The plan of the AU Assembly was to prioritize the next fifty years (Africa 2063) but the agenda was hijacked by the political leadership of Kenya and their allies to discuss the cases of Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto before the ICC.
Yoweri Museveni of Uganda had been as aggressive as the Kenyan leadership in placing the matter of the ICC before the Assembly. “The African leaders have to come to a consensus that the process the ICC is conducting in Africa has a flaw.
The intention was to avoid any kind of impunity, but now the process has degenerated into some kind of race hunting. We object to that,” the AU chairman, Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn, declared at the end of the May 25 summit.
The debate on the ICC intensified within African corridors of power with those opposed to the ICC trials couching their opposition in anti-imperial discourse. The AU’s Final Decision and the Summit proceedings reflected the line of the conservative media in Kenya.
“The ICC is a tool of Western powers that targets and discriminates against the continent; undermines African efforts to solve its problems, especially finding peace and reconciliation in post-conflict situations; and is shot through with double-standards, focusing its firepower only on African countries such as Sudan, Kenya and Libya but not on Iraq or the Gaza,” wrote one Kenyan conservative analyst.
Both Yoweri Museveni and Hailemariam Desalegn carried the same arguments to the General Assembly of the United Nations in September when they lobbied for the UN Security Council to call on the ICC to drop the case.
Many Africans now appear to have forgotten the origins and enormity of the case and ignore the fact that the referral to the ICC was made by a panel of Africans mandated by the AU and acting in tandem with the non-indifference doctrine of AU’s founding document.
The AU is projecting confusion and self-delegitimization if it allows itself to be used for mass withdrawal from the ICC by some African leaders, without first investing in workable structures that can impartially and decisively bring to justice powerful perpetrators of crimes against humanity on the continent.
The Westgate attack took place on September 22 in the middle of intense diplomatic activities by Yoweri Museveni for Kenya to boycott the ICC. International sympathy for the Kenyan leaders heightened until it was revealed that the Kenyan intelligence and military were forewarned of the attack.
Concerned Kenyan citizens are now posing important questions: why did it take so long for the Kenyan military and security forces to respond to the attack? Why was it that select persons were warned to stay away from the mall on that particular day?
Koigi Wamwere wrote in an op-ed in the Star that 'Someone Should Take Political Responsibility For Westgate.' “Amazingly, instead of accepting blame and responsibility for this tragedy, President Uhuru, Deputy President Ruto and their government are positioning themselves to reap political capital and professional gain from their own failure,” he declared.
If the current leaders of Kenya are not seeking to reap political capital from the Westgate tragedy, they should call for the cancellation of the AU Special Session to discuss the case before the ICC.
Presently, the situation in Kenya is too delicate for the questions of killings, bombings and extra judicial violence to be brushed aside. Last week, Sheikh Ibrahim Omar and three other people were shot dead in Mombasa as they drove home on Thursday night after preaching. The next day, after Friday prayers there were riots in Mombasa.
Another Muslim cleric rightly called for an end to the extrajudicial killings on the streets of Kenya. "They should tell us the truth about Westgate, not kill innocent Muslims in Mombasa," said Abubaker Shariff Ahmed, known as Makaburi.
In the midst of this instability Richard Dowden of the Royal Africa Society and Jendayi Frazer waded into the debate about Kenya and the ICC. In his article 'Kenya after Westgate: more trouble ahead', Dowden argued that the West should rally behind the political leaders of Kenya. Without mentioning the machinations of the UK in Somalia and to corner the contracts for oil exploration, Dowden concluded that the Westgate attack was the beginning of the end of the ICC.
“Western governments will need a stable strong government in Kenya. There is no way the West is going to allow President Kenyatta, who has shown good leadership qualities during the crisis (and his vice-president William Ruto), to spend months at a trial in The Hague and then go to jail,” said Dowden.
Jendayi Frazer, who had worked closely with Condoleeza Rice to ensure that Mwai Kibaki remained President in 2008, wrote that the West now needs Kenya as a partner in the fight against terror in an article in the Daily Nation, headlined 'Attack will draw West, Kenya closer.'
“Put more plainly, the ICC cases against President Kenyatta and Deputy President Ruto have become a distraction reflected clearly by the need to suspend Mr Ruto’s trial for a week to allow his return home to attend to the Westgate crisis,” she wrote.
Jendayi Frazer was a diplomat for the Republican government. The conservative wing of the US political establishment is now coming to the defense of Kenyatta and Ruto. The United States is not a signatory to the Rome Statute yet the conservatives are calling for Africans to forget the crimes committed in January 2008 in order for Kenyatta and Ruto to focus on the global war against terror.
The defense of Kenyatta and Ruto by Frazer and Dowden has complicated the Kenyan leaders’ strategy of presenting themselves as anti-imperialists. When the African Union meets this week to discuss the case for mass withdrawal, African leaders should remember that it was the activism of the Caribbean and African states that brought the ICC into fruition.
I share the opinion of Pan Africanists who believe that if Kenyatta and Ruto are innocent, they should not be afraid to get their day in court.
The African Union should be working hard to ensure that there is no impunity in Africa. Other organs such as the African Parliament and the Economic, Social and Cultural Council of the African Union need to engage in this discussion about impunity in Africa.
- See more at: http://www.the-star.co.ke/news/article-139001/african-union-should-not-support-impunity#sthash.b8glWl52.9N83EjRx.dpuf
This
week many of the current political leaders of Africa will meet in Addis
Ababa to discuss whether African states should withdraw en masse from
the International Criminal Court because of the indictment of Kenyan
President Uhuru Kenyatta and Deputy President William Ruto.
This meeting will be an extra-ordinary session of the African Union organized to deliberate on International Jurisdiction, Justice and the International Criminal Court.
At issue is whether the ICC has discriminated against Africans and whether the killings of over 1,100 persons in 2008 and the displacement of over half a million should be a matter of international criminal law.
To ensure that the original reasons for the ICC case are not forgotten, the Assembly of the African Union should remember its foundational doctrine of non-indifference embedded in Article 4(h) of the Constitutive Act of the AU, mandating the continental body to “intervene … in respect of grave circumstances, namely: war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity.”
As such, the special session of the AU has far more serious priorities. If Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto are innocent, then they can have their day in court and their exoneration before an international criminal court can only convey greater political legitimacy to them.
One aim of the African Union when it was formed was to ensure that there was no impunity for those who committed crimes against humanity in Africa.
If indeed, the ICC has discriminated against Africans, then the most urgent matter before this upcoming Assembly is for Africans to build regional and national mechanisms to bring those who commit crimes against humanity to justice.
Unless the Assembly can demonstrably guarantee the African peoples that the AU has genuine political will and capacity to thoroughly enforce article 4(h) of the Constitutive Act and to stem the criminal activities of desperate and selfish political leaders in Africa, any discussion about mass withdrawal from the ICC could be tantamount to self-delegitimization.
While decent human beings everywhere mourn with Kenyans over the Westgate attack, leaders such as Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, Paul Kagame of Rwanda and Isaias Afewerki of Eritrea (the three pressing the case for this special session) do not have the political legitimacy to demand that the African Union withdraw en masse from the ICC.
The referral of the 2007-2008 Kenyan post-election violence case to the ICC came not from imperialists but from the Panel of Eminent African Personalities established by the African Union — with Kofi Annan as chair and Benjamin Mkapa and Graca Machel as members.
The ICC charges alleged that Kenyatta and Ruto helped to fuel the violence that followed the 2007 elections. Both men have declared that they are innocent.
In the heat of that post-election struggle, imperial states such as the United States and Britain wanted the matter to be put aside so that international business could continue to thrive in Kenya.
Condoleezza Rice, then the US Secretary of State, flew to Kenya to ensure that western interests were given priority. The US Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, Dr. Jendayi Frazer, represented Kenya as a base for the global war against terror and did not countenance any discussion about whether the election results represented the will of the people.
The Panel of Eminent African Personalities was mandated by the AU on January 29, 2008 to mediate between President Kibaki’s Party of National Unity and Raila Odinga’s Orange Democratic Movement.
The panel was charged with finding a peaceful solution to the crisis. One important outcome of the Panel’s work was the referral of the cases of post-election violence to the ICC.
There had been a demand for the local courts in Kenya to investigate the crimes but after six years only the homicide of 19 persons has been brought before the Kenyan judiciary.
In May 2013, Africa celebrated fifty years of unity. The plan of the AU Assembly was to prioritize the next fifty years (Africa 2063) but the agenda was hijacked by the political leadership of Kenya and their allies to discuss the cases of Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto before the ICC.
Yoweri Museveni of Uganda had been as aggressive as the Kenyan leadership in placing the matter of the ICC before the Assembly. “The African leaders have to come to a consensus that the process the ICC is conducting in Africa has a flaw.
The intention was to avoid any kind of impunity, but now the process has degenerated into some kind of race hunting. We object to that,” the AU chairman, Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn, declared at the end of the May 25 summit.
The debate on the ICC intensified within African corridors of power with those opposed to the ICC trials couching their opposition in anti-imperial discourse. The AU’s Final Decision and the Summit proceedings reflected the line of the conservative media in Kenya.
“The ICC is a tool of Western powers that targets and discriminates against the continent; undermines African efforts to solve its problems, especially finding peace and reconciliation in post-conflict situations; and is shot through with double-standards, focusing its firepower only on African countries such as Sudan, Kenya and Libya but not on Iraq or the Gaza,” wrote one Kenyan conservative analyst.
Both Yoweri Museveni and Hailemariam Desalegn carried the same arguments to the General Assembly of the United Nations in September when they lobbied for the UN Security Council to call on the ICC to drop the case.
Many Africans now appear to have forgotten the origins and enormity of the case and ignore the fact that the referral to the ICC was made by a panel of Africans mandated by the AU and acting in tandem with the non-indifference doctrine of AU’s founding document.
The AU is projecting confusion and self-delegitimization if it allows itself to be used for mass withdrawal from the ICC by some African leaders, without first investing in workable structures that can impartially and decisively bring to justice powerful perpetrators of crimes against humanity on the continent.
The Westgate attack took place on September 22 in the middle of intense diplomatic activities by Yoweri Museveni for Kenya to boycott the ICC. International sympathy for the Kenyan leaders heightened until it was revealed that the Kenyan intelligence and military were forewarned of the attack.
Concerned Kenyan citizens are now posing important questions: why did it take so long for the Kenyan military and security forces to respond to the attack? Why was it that select persons were warned to stay away from the mall on that particular day?
Koigi Wamwere wrote in an op-ed in the Star that 'Someone Should Take Political Responsibility For Westgate.' “Amazingly, instead of accepting blame and responsibility for this tragedy, President Uhuru, Deputy President Ruto and their government are positioning themselves to reap political capital and professional gain from their own failure,” he declared.
If the current leaders of Kenya are not seeking to reap political capital from the Westgate tragedy, they should call for the cancellation of the AU Special Session to discuss the case before the ICC.
Presently, the situation in Kenya is too delicate for the questions of killings, bombings and extra judicial violence to be brushed aside. Last week, Sheikh Ibrahim Omar and three other people were shot dead in Mombasa as they drove home on Thursday night after preaching. The next day, after Friday prayers there were riots in Mombasa.
Another Muslim cleric rightly called for an end to the extrajudicial killings on the streets of Kenya. "They should tell us the truth about Westgate, not kill innocent Muslims in Mombasa," said Abubaker Shariff Ahmed, known as Makaburi.
In the midst of this instability Richard Dowden of the Royal Africa Society and Jendayi Frazer waded into the debate about Kenya and the ICC. In his article 'Kenya after Westgate: more trouble ahead', Dowden argued that the West should rally behind the political leaders of Kenya. Without mentioning the machinations of the UK in Somalia and to corner the contracts for oil exploration, Dowden concluded that the Westgate attack was the beginning of the end of the ICC.
“Western governments will need a stable strong government in Kenya. There is no way the West is going to allow President Kenyatta, who has shown good leadership qualities during the crisis (and his vice-president William Ruto), to spend months at a trial in The Hague and then go to jail,” said Dowden.
Jendayi Frazer, who had worked closely with Condoleeza Rice to ensure that Mwai Kibaki remained President in 2008, wrote that the West now needs Kenya as a partner in the fight against terror in an article in the Daily Nation, headlined 'Attack will draw West, Kenya closer.'
“Put more plainly, the ICC cases against President Kenyatta and Deputy President Ruto have become a distraction reflected clearly by the need to suspend Mr Ruto’s trial for a week to allow his return home to attend to the Westgate crisis,” she wrote.
Jendayi Frazer was a diplomat for the Republican government. The conservative wing of the US political establishment is now coming to the defense of Kenyatta and Ruto. The United States is not a signatory to the Rome Statute yet the conservatives are calling for Africans to forget the crimes committed in January 2008 in order for Kenyatta and Ruto to focus on the global war against terror.
The defense of Kenyatta and Ruto by Frazer and Dowden has complicated the Kenyan leaders’ strategy of presenting themselves as anti-imperialists. When the African Union meets this week to discuss the case for mass withdrawal, African leaders should remember that it was the activism of the Caribbean and African states that brought the ICC into fruition.
I share the opinion of Pan Africanists who believe that if Kenyatta and Ruto are innocent, they should not be afraid to get their day in court.
The African Union should be working hard to ensure that there is no impunity in Africa. Other organs such as the African Parliament and the Economic, Social and Cultural Council of the African Union need to engage in this discussion about impunity in Africa.
- See more at: http://www.the-star.co.ke/news/article-139001/african-union-should-not-support-impunity#sthash.b8glWl52.9N83EjRx.dpuf
This meeting will be an extra-ordinary session of the African Union organized to deliberate on International Jurisdiction, Justice and the International Criminal Court.
At issue is whether the ICC has discriminated against Africans and whether the killings of over 1,100 persons in 2008 and the displacement of over half a million should be a matter of international criminal law.
To ensure that the original reasons for the ICC case are not forgotten, the Assembly of the African Union should remember its foundational doctrine of non-indifference embedded in Article 4(h) of the Constitutive Act of the AU, mandating the continental body to “intervene … in respect of grave circumstances, namely: war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity.”
As such, the special session of the AU has far more serious priorities. If Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto are innocent, then they can have their day in court and their exoneration before an international criminal court can only convey greater political legitimacy to them.
One aim of the African Union when it was formed was to ensure that there was no impunity for those who committed crimes against humanity in Africa.
If indeed, the ICC has discriminated against Africans, then the most urgent matter before this upcoming Assembly is for Africans to build regional and national mechanisms to bring those who commit crimes against humanity to justice.
Unless the Assembly can demonstrably guarantee the African peoples that the AU has genuine political will and capacity to thoroughly enforce article 4(h) of the Constitutive Act and to stem the criminal activities of desperate and selfish political leaders in Africa, any discussion about mass withdrawal from the ICC could be tantamount to self-delegitimization.
While decent human beings everywhere mourn with Kenyans over the Westgate attack, leaders such as Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, Paul Kagame of Rwanda and Isaias Afewerki of Eritrea (the three pressing the case for this special session) do not have the political legitimacy to demand that the African Union withdraw en masse from the ICC.
The referral of the 2007-2008 Kenyan post-election violence case to the ICC came not from imperialists but from the Panel of Eminent African Personalities established by the African Union — with Kofi Annan as chair and Benjamin Mkapa and Graca Machel as members.
The ICC charges alleged that Kenyatta and Ruto helped to fuel the violence that followed the 2007 elections. Both men have declared that they are innocent.
In the heat of that post-election struggle, imperial states such as the United States and Britain wanted the matter to be put aside so that international business could continue to thrive in Kenya.
Condoleezza Rice, then the US Secretary of State, flew to Kenya to ensure that western interests were given priority. The US Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, Dr. Jendayi Frazer, represented Kenya as a base for the global war against terror and did not countenance any discussion about whether the election results represented the will of the people.
The Panel of Eminent African Personalities was mandated by the AU on January 29, 2008 to mediate between President Kibaki’s Party of National Unity and Raila Odinga’s Orange Democratic Movement.
The panel was charged with finding a peaceful solution to the crisis. One important outcome of the Panel’s work was the referral of the cases of post-election violence to the ICC.
There had been a demand for the local courts in Kenya to investigate the crimes but after six years only the homicide of 19 persons has been brought before the Kenyan judiciary.
In May 2013, Africa celebrated fifty years of unity. The plan of the AU Assembly was to prioritize the next fifty years (Africa 2063) but the agenda was hijacked by the political leadership of Kenya and their allies to discuss the cases of Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto before the ICC.
Yoweri Museveni of Uganda had been as aggressive as the Kenyan leadership in placing the matter of the ICC before the Assembly. “The African leaders have to come to a consensus that the process the ICC is conducting in Africa has a flaw.
The intention was to avoid any kind of impunity, but now the process has degenerated into some kind of race hunting. We object to that,” the AU chairman, Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn, declared at the end of the May 25 summit.
The debate on the ICC intensified within African corridors of power with those opposed to the ICC trials couching their opposition in anti-imperial discourse. The AU’s Final Decision and the Summit proceedings reflected the line of the conservative media in Kenya.
“The ICC is a tool of Western powers that targets and discriminates against the continent; undermines African efforts to solve its problems, especially finding peace and reconciliation in post-conflict situations; and is shot through with double-standards, focusing its firepower only on African countries such as Sudan, Kenya and Libya but not on Iraq or the Gaza,” wrote one Kenyan conservative analyst.
Both Yoweri Museveni and Hailemariam Desalegn carried the same arguments to the General Assembly of the United Nations in September when they lobbied for the UN Security Council to call on the ICC to drop the case.
Many Africans now appear to have forgotten the origins and enormity of the case and ignore the fact that the referral to the ICC was made by a panel of Africans mandated by the AU and acting in tandem with the non-indifference doctrine of AU’s founding document.
The AU is projecting confusion and self-delegitimization if it allows itself to be used for mass withdrawal from the ICC by some African leaders, without first investing in workable structures that can impartially and decisively bring to justice powerful perpetrators of crimes against humanity on the continent.
The Westgate attack took place on September 22 in the middle of intense diplomatic activities by Yoweri Museveni for Kenya to boycott the ICC. International sympathy for the Kenyan leaders heightened until it was revealed that the Kenyan intelligence and military were forewarned of the attack.
Concerned Kenyan citizens are now posing important questions: why did it take so long for the Kenyan military and security forces to respond to the attack? Why was it that select persons were warned to stay away from the mall on that particular day?
Koigi Wamwere wrote in an op-ed in the Star that 'Someone Should Take Political Responsibility For Westgate.' “Amazingly, instead of accepting blame and responsibility for this tragedy, President Uhuru, Deputy President Ruto and their government are positioning themselves to reap political capital and professional gain from their own failure,” he declared.
If the current leaders of Kenya are not seeking to reap political capital from the Westgate tragedy, they should call for the cancellation of the AU Special Session to discuss the case before the ICC.
Presently, the situation in Kenya is too delicate for the questions of killings, bombings and extra judicial violence to be brushed aside. Last week, Sheikh Ibrahim Omar and three other people were shot dead in Mombasa as they drove home on Thursday night after preaching. The next day, after Friday prayers there were riots in Mombasa.
Another Muslim cleric rightly called for an end to the extrajudicial killings on the streets of Kenya. "They should tell us the truth about Westgate, not kill innocent Muslims in Mombasa," said Abubaker Shariff Ahmed, known as Makaburi.
In the midst of this instability Richard Dowden of the Royal Africa Society and Jendayi Frazer waded into the debate about Kenya and the ICC. In his article 'Kenya after Westgate: more trouble ahead', Dowden argued that the West should rally behind the political leaders of Kenya. Without mentioning the machinations of the UK in Somalia and to corner the contracts for oil exploration, Dowden concluded that the Westgate attack was the beginning of the end of the ICC.
“Western governments will need a stable strong government in Kenya. There is no way the West is going to allow President Kenyatta, who has shown good leadership qualities during the crisis (and his vice-president William Ruto), to spend months at a trial in The Hague and then go to jail,” said Dowden.
Jendayi Frazer, who had worked closely with Condoleeza Rice to ensure that Mwai Kibaki remained President in 2008, wrote that the West now needs Kenya as a partner in the fight against terror in an article in the Daily Nation, headlined 'Attack will draw West, Kenya closer.'
“Put more plainly, the ICC cases against President Kenyatta and Deputy President Ruto have become a distraction reflected clearly by the need to suspend Mr Ruto’s trial for a week to allow his return home to attend to the Westgate crisis,” she wrote.
Jendayi Frazer was a diplomat for the Republican government. The conservative wing of the US political establishment is now coming to the defense of Kenyatta and Ruto. The United States is not a signatory to the Rome Statute yet the conservatives are calling for Africans to forget the crimes committed in January 2008 in order for Kenyatta and Ruto to focus on the global war against terror.
The defense of Kenyatta and Ruto by Frazer and Dowden has complicated the Kenyan leaders’ strategy of presenting themselves as anti-imperialists. When the African Union meets this week to discuss the case for mass withdrawal, African leaders should remember that it was the activism of the Caribbean and African states that brought the ICC into fruition.
I share the opinion of Pan Africanists who believe that if Kenyatta and Ruto are innocent, they should not be afraid to get their day in court.
The African Union should be working hard to ensure that there is no impunity in Africa. Other organs such as the African Parliament and the Economic, Social and Cultural Council of the African Union need to engage in this discussion about impunity in Africa.
- See more at: http://www.the-star.co.ke/news/article-139001/african-union-should-not-support-impunity#sthash.b8glWl52.9N83EjRx.dpuf
This
week many of the current political leaders of Africa will meet in Addis
Ababa to discuss whether African states should withdraw en masse from
the International Criminal Court because of the indictment of Kenyan
President Uhuru Kenyatta and Deputy President William Ruto.
This meeting will be an extra-ordinary session of the African Union organized to deliberate on International Jurisdiction, Justice and the International Criminal Court.
At issue is whether the ICC has discriminated against Africans and whether the killings of over 1,100 persons in 2008 and the displacement of over half a million should be a matter of international criminal law.
To ensure that the original reasons for the ICC case are not forgotten, the Assembly of the African Union should remember its foundational doctrine of non-indifference embedded in Article 4(h) of the Constitutive Act of the AU, mandating the continental body to “intervene … in respect of grave circumstances, namely: war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity.”
As such, the special session of the AU has far more serious priorities. If Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto are innocent, then they can have their day in court and their exoneration before an international criminal court can only convey greater political legitimacy to them.
One aim of the African Union when it was formed was to ensure that there was no impunity for those who committed crimes against humanity in Africa.
If indeed, the ICC has discriminated against Africans, then the most urgent matter before this upcoming Assembly is for Africans to build regional and national mechanisms to bring those who commit crimes against humanity to justice.
Unless the Assembly can demonstrably guarantee the African peoples that the AU has genuine political will and capacity to thoroughly enforce article 4(h) of the Constitutive Act and to stem the criminal activities of desperate and selfish political leaders in Africa, any discussion about mass withdrawal from the ICC could be tantamount to self-delegitimization.
While decent human beings everywhere mourn with Kenyans over the Westgate attack, leaders such as Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, Paul Kagame of Rwanda and Isaias Afewerki of Eritrea (the three pressing the case for this special session) do not have the political legitimacy to demand that the African Union withdraw en masse from the ICC.
The referral of the 2007-2008 Kenyan post-election violence case to the ICC came not from imperialists but from the Panel of Eminent African Personalities established by the African Union — with Kofi Annan as chair and Benjamin Mkapa and Graca Machel as members.
The ICC charges alleged that Kenyatta and Ruto helped to fuel the violence that followed the 2007 elections. Both men have declared that they are innocent.
In the heat of that post-election struggle, imperial states such as the United States and Britain wanted the matter to be put aside so that international business could continue to thrive in Kenya.
Condoleezza Rice, then the US Secretary of State, flew to Kenya to ensure that western interests were given priority. The US Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, Dr. Jendayi Frazer, represented Kenya as a base for the global war against terror and did not countenance any discussion about whether the election results represented the will of the people.
The Panel of Eminent African Personalities was mandated by the AU on January 29, 2008 to mediate between President Kibaki’s Party of National Unity and Raila Odinga’s Orange Democratic Movement.
The panel was charged with finding a peaceful solution to the crisis. One important outcome of the Panel’s work was the referral of the cases of post-election violence to the ICC.
There had been a demand for the local courts in Kenya to investigate the crimes but after six years only the homicide of 19 persons has been brought before the Kenyan judiciary.
In May 2013, Africa celebrated fifty years of unity. The plan of the AU Assembly was to prioritize the next fifty years (Africa 2063) but the agenda was hijacked by the political leadership of Kenya and their allies to discuss the cases of Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto before the ICC.
Yoweri Museveni of Uganda had been as aggressive as the Kenyan leadership in placing the matter of the ICC before the Assembly. “The African leaders have to come to a consensus that the process the ICC is conducting in Africa has a flaw.
The intention was to avoid any kind of impunity, but now the process has degenerated into some kind of race hunting. We object to that,” the AU chairman, Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn, declared at the end of the May 25 summit.
The debate on the ICC intensified within African corridors of power with those opposed to the ICC trials couching their opposition in anti-imperial discourse. The AU’s Final Decision and the Summit proceedings reflected the line of the conservative media in Kenya.
“The ICC is a tool of Western powers that targets and discriminates against the continent; undermines African efforts to solve its problems, especially finding peace and reconciliation in post-conflict situations; and is shot through with double-standards, focusing its firepower only on African countries such as Sudan, Kenya and Libya but not on Iraq or the Gaza,” wrote one Kenyan conservative analyst.
Both Yoweri Museveni and Hailemariam Desalegn carried the same arguments to the General Assembly of the United Nations in September when they lobbied for the UN Security Council to call on the ICC to drop the case.
Many Africans now appear to have forgotten the origins and enormity of the case and ignore the fact that the referral to the ICC was made by a panel of Africans mandated by the AU and acting in tandem with the non-indifference doctrine of AU’s founding document.
The AU is projecting confusion and self-delegitimization if it allows itself to be used for mass withdrawal from the ICC by some African leaders, without first investing in workable structures that can impartially and decisively bring to justice powerful perpetrators of crimes against humanity on the continent.
The Westgate attack took place on September 22 in the middle of intense diplomatic activities by Yoweri Museveni for Kenya to boycott the ICC. International sympathy for the Kenyan leaders heightened until it was revealed that the Kenyan intelligence and military were forewarned of the attack.
Concerned Kenyan citizens are now posing important questions: why did it take so long for the Kenyan military and security forces to respond to the attack? Why was it that select persons were warned to stay away from the mall on that particular day?
Koigi Wamwere wrote in an op-ed in the Star that 'Someone Should Take Political Responsibility For Westgate.' “Amazingly, instead of accepting blame and responsibility for this tragedy, President Uhuru, Deputy President Ruto and their government are positioning themselves to reap political capital and professional gain from their own failure,” he declared.
If the current leaders of Kenya are not seeking to reap political capital from the Westgate tragedy, they should call for the cancellation of the AU Special Session to discuss the case before the ICC.
Presently, the situation in Kenya is too delicate for the questions of killings, bombings and extra judicial violence to be brushed aside. Last week, Sheikh Ibrahim Omar and three other people were shot dead in Mombasa as they drove home on Thursday night after preaching. The next day, after Friday prayers there were riots in Mombasa.
Another Muslim cleric rightly called for an end to the extrajudicial killings on the streets of Kenya. "They should tell us the truth about Westgate, not kill innocent Muslims in Mombasa," said Abubaker Shariff Ahmed, known as Makaburi.
In the midst of this instability Richard Dowden of the Royal Africa Society and Jendayi Frazer waded into the debate about Kenya and the ICC. In his article 'Kenya after Westgate: more trouble ahead', Dowden argued that the West should rally behind the political leaders of Kenya. Without mentioning the machinations of the UK in Somalia and to corner the contracts for oil exploration, Dowden concluded that the Westgate attack was the beginning of the end of the ICC.
“Western governments will need a stable strong government in Kenya. There is no way the West is going to allow President Kenyatta, who has shown good leadership qualities during the crisis (and his vice-president William Ruto), to spend months at a trial in The Hague and then go to jail,” said Dowden.
Jendayi Frazer, who had worked closely with Condoleeza Rice to ensure that Mwai Kibaki remained President in 2008, wrote that the West now needs Kenya as a partner in the fight against terror in an article in the Daily Nation, headlined 'Attack will draw West, Kenya closer.'
“Put more plainly, the ICC cases against President Kenyatta and Deputy President Ruto have become a distraction reflected clearly by the need to suspend Mr Ruto’s trial for a week to allow his return home to attend to the Westgate crisis,” she wrote.
Jendayi Frazer was a diplomat for the Republican government. The conservative wing of the US political establishment is now coming to the defense of Kenyatta and Ruto. The United States is not a signatory to the Rome Statute yet the conservatives are calling for Africans to forget the crimes committed in January 2008 in order for Kenyatta and Ruto to focus on the global war against terror.
The defense of Kenyatta and Ruto by Frazer and Dowden has complicated the Kenyan leaders’ strategy of presenting themselves as anti-imperialists. When the African Union meets this week to discuss the case for mass withdrawal, African leaders should remember that it was the activism of the Caribbean and African states that brought the ICC into fruition.
I share the opinion of Pan Africanists who believe that if Kenyatta and Ruto are innocent, they should not be afraid to get their day in court.
The African Union should be working hard to ensure that there is no impunity in Africa. Other organs such as the African Parliament and the Economic, Social and Cultural Council of the African Union need to engage in this discussion about impunity in Africa.
- See more at: http://www.the-star.co.ke/news/article-139001/african-union-should-not-support-impunity#sthash.b8glWl52.9N83EjRx.dpuf
This meeting will be an extra-ordinary session of the African Union organized to deliberate on International Jurisdiction, Justice and the International Criminal Court.
At issue is whether the ICC has discriminated against Africans and whether the killings of over 1,100 persons in 2008 and the displacement of over half a million should be a matter of international criminal law.
To ensure that the original reasons for the ICC case are not forgotten, the Assembly of the African Union should remember its foundational doctrine of non-indifference embedded in Article 4(h) of the Constitutive Act of the AU, mandating the continental body to “intervene … in respect of grave circumstances, namely: war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity.”
As such, the special session of the AU has far more serious priorities. If Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto are innocent, then they can have their day in court and their exoneration before an international criminal court can only convey greater political legitimacy to them.
One aim of the African Union when it was formed was to ensure that there was no impunity for those who committed crimes against humanity in Africa.
If indeed, the ICC has discriminated against Africans, then the most urgent matter before this upcoming Assembly is for Africans to build regional and national mechanisms to bring those who commit crimes against humanity to justice.
Unless the Assembly can demonstrably guarantee the African peoples that the AU has genuine political will and capacity to thoroughly enforce article 4(h) of the Constitutive Act and to stem the criminal activities of desperate and selfish political leaders in Africa, any discussion about mass withdrawal from the ICC could be tantamount to self-delegitimization.
While decent human beings everywhere mourn with Kenyans over the Westgate attack, leaders such as Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, Paul Kagame of Rwanda and Isaias Afewerki of Eritrea (the three pressing the case for this special session) do not have the political legitimacy to demand that the African Union withdraw en masse from the ICC.
The referral of the 2007-2008 Kenyan post-election violence case to the ICC came not from imperialists but from the Panel of Eminent African Personalities established by the African Union — with Kofi Annan as chair and Benjamin Mkapa and Graca Machel as members.
The ICC charges alleged that Kenyatta and Ruto helped to fuel the violence that followed the 2007 elections. Both men have declared that they are innocent.
In the heat of that post-election struggle, imperial states such as the United States and Britain wanted the matter to be put aside so that international business could continue to thrive in Kenya.
Condoleezza Rice, then the US Secretary of State, flew to Kenya to ensure that western interests were given priority. The US Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, Dr. Jendayi Frazer, represented Kenya as a base for the global war against terror and did not countenance any discussion about whether the election results represented the will of the people.
The Panel of Eminent African Personalities was mandated by the AU on January 29, 2008 to mediate between President Kibaki’s Party of National Unity and Raila Odinga’s Orange Democratic Movement.
The panel was charged with finding a peaceful solution to the crisis. One important outcome of the Panel’s work was the referral of the cases of post-election violence to the ICC.
There had been a demand for the local courts in Kenya to investigate the crimes but after six years only the homicide of 19 persons has been brought before the Kenyan judiciary.
In May 2013, Africa celebrated fifty years of unity. The plan of the AU Assembly was to prioritize the next fifty years (Africa 2063) but the agenda was hijacked by the political leadership of Kenya and their allies to discuss the cases of Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto before the ICC.
Yoweri Museveni of Uganda had been as aggressive as the Kenyan leadership in placing the matter of the ICC before the Assembly. “The African leaders have to come to a consensus that the process the ICC is conducting in Africa has a flaw.
The intention was to avoid any kind of impunity, but now the process has degenerated into some kind of race hunting. We object to that,” the AU chairman, Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn, declared at the end of the May 25 summit.
The debate on the ICC intensified within African corridors of power with those opposed to the ICC trials couching their opposition in anti-imperial discourse. The AU’s Final Decision and the Summit proceedings reflected the line of the conservative media in Kenya.
“The ICC is a tool of Western powers that targets and discriminates against the continent; undermines African efforts to solve its problems, especially finding peace and reconciliation in post-conflict situations; and is shot through with double-standards, focusing its firepower only on African countries such as Sudan, Kenya and Libya but not on Iraq or the Gaza,” wrote one Kenyan conservative analyst.
Both Yoweri Museveni and Hailemariam Desalegn carried the same arguments to the General Assembly of the United Nations in September when they lobbied for the UN Security Council to call on the ICC to drop the case.
Many Africans now appear to have forgotten the origins and enormity of the case and ignore the fact that the referral to the ICC was made by a panel of Africans mandated by the AU and acting in tandem with the non-indifference doctrine of AU’s founding document.
The AU is projecting confusion and self-delegitimization if it allows itself to be used for mass withdrawal from the ICC by some African leaders, without first investing in workable structures that can impartially and decisively bring to justice powerful perpetrators of crimes against humanity on the continent.
The Westgate attack took place on September 22 in the middle of intense diplomatic activities by Yoweri Museveni for Kenya to boycott the ICC. International sympathy for the Kenyan leaders heightened until it was revealed that the Kenyan intelligence and military were forewarned of the attack.
Concerned Kenyan citizens are now posing important questions: why did it take so long for the Kenyan military and security forces to respond to the attack? Why was it that select persons were warned to stay away from the mall on that particular day?
Koigi Wamwere wrote in an op-ed in the Star that 'Someone Should Take Political Responsibility For Westgate.' “Amazingly, instead of accepting blame and responsibility for this tragedy, President Uhuru, Deputy President Ruto and their government are positioning themselves to reap political capital and professional gain from their own failure,” he declared.
If the current leaders of Kenya are not seeking to reap political capital from the Westgate tragedy, they should call for the cancellation of the AU Special Session to discuss the case before the ICC.
Presently, the situation in Kenya is too delicate for the questions of killings, bombings and extra judicial violence to be brushed aside. Last week, Sheikh Ibrahim Omar and three other people were shot dead in Mombasa as they drove home on Thursday night after preaching. The next day, after Friday prayers there were riots in Mombasa.
Another Muslim cleric rightly called for an end to the extrajudicial killings on the streets of Kenya. "They should tell us the truth about Westgate, not kill innocent Muslims in Mombasa," said Abubaker Shariff Ahmed, known as Makaburi.
In the midst of this instability Richard Dowden of the Royal Africa Society and Jendayi Frazer waded into the debate about Kenya and the ICC. In his article 'Kenya after Westgate: more trouble ahead', Dowden argued that the West should rally behind the political leaders of Kenya. Without mentioning the machinations of the UK in Somalia and to corner the contracts for oil exploration, Dowden concluded that the Westgate attack was the beginning of the end of the ICC.
“Western governments will need a stable strong government in Kenya. There is no way the West is going to allow President Kenyatta, who has shown good leadership qualities during the crisis (and his vice-president William Ruto), to spend months at a trial in The Hague and then go to jail,” said Dowden.
Jendayi Frazer, who had worked closely with Condoleeza Rice to ensure that Mwai Kibaki remained President in 2008, wrote that the West now needs Kenya as a partner in the fight against terror in an article in the Daily Nation, headlined 'Attack will draw West, Kenya closer.'
“Put more plainly, the ICC cases against President Kenyatta and Deputy President Ruto have become a distraction reflected clearly by the need to suspend Mr Ruto’s trial for a week to allow his return home to attend to the Westgate crisis,” she wrote.
Jendayi Frazer was a diplomat for the Republican government. The conservative wing of the US political establishment is now coming to the defense of Kenyatta and Ruto. The United States is not a signatory to the Rome Statute yet the conservatives are calling for Africans to forget the crimes committed in January 2008 in order for Kenyatta and Ruto to focus on the global war against terror.
The defense of Kenyatta and Ruto by Frazer and Dowden has complicated the Kenyan leaders’ strategy of presenting themselves as anti-imperialists. When the African Union meets this week to discuss the case for mass withdrawal, African leaders should remember that it was the activism of the Caribbean and African states that brought the ICC into fruition.
I share the opinion of Pan Africanists who believe that if Kenyatta and Ruto are innocent, they should not be afraid to get their day in court.
The African Union should be working hard to ensure that there is no impunity in Africa. Other organs such as the African Parliament and the Economic, Social and Cultural Council of the African Union need to engage in this discussion about impunity in Africa.
- See more at: http://www.the-star.co.ke/news/article-139001/african-union-should-not-support-impunity#sthash.b8glWl52.9N83EjRx.dpuf