MauMauKimathi
51m ago
0 1
Any benefit of the doubt I ever gave to the ICC died when I saw how it handled the Kenyan situation. It was, to put it mildly, a travesty of justice of monumental proportions; something that would never have been allowed to happen to even the lowest citizens of modern Europe.
The Kenyan case arose from post-election violence that happened in 2008. 1,200 people died in that violence, about 70 per cent of whom were shot by the police in riots.
In 2010, Moreno Ocampo from Argentina (is that country a model of racial equality, any one?) jetted into Nairobi with pre-set notions of African barbarity, toured a few parks and announced the names of six suspects - neatly, three from each side of the 2008 conflict. At a press conference in Nairobi, he told the world that he was going to make them an âexampleâ to the world. No investigations, nothing. I promptly wrote on my blog that we were about to witness one of the most brazen miscarriages of justice we had seen in post-independence Kenya.
When the cases of the so-called Ocampo Six went to a pre-trial hearing in The Hague before a three-man bench, one of the judges, a German with considerable jurisprudence, dismissed the charges as a joke. That was a refrain that was to be repeated by another judge from Sweden later, who too opted out of the cases on a matter of principle.
Despite this, the ICC continued to flog what was essentially a hopeless case, subjecting innocent people to a seven-year injustice of being labeled âcrimes against humanity suspectsâ. At the end, all six cases were dismissed for lack of evidence, but the Bensouda that is so praised here refused to acknowledge this, instead blaming Kenya for lack of cooperation.
Luckily for her, the Rome Statute that set up the ICC does not allow for suits for compensation by defamed âsuspectsâ, a very weird happenstance I must say.
So, why were the Kenyan cases opened in the first place? This goes to the raison dâetre of the ICC; a European neo-colonial institution meant to whip errant Third World leaders into line. In the Kenya case, the ICC prosecutions were meant to remove Uhuru Kenyatta (who was then seen as difficult to deal with and pro-China) and several of his allies from the political equation, and pave way for the more pliable RaIla Odinga to take up the presidency in 2013.
No lesser persons than the EU ambassadors in Nairobi and the then US Under-secretary for Africa, Johnny Carson, warned us in early 2013 that voting for Uhuru and his running mate William Ruto (the deputy president) was going to have âconsequencesâ. In other words, foreign governments from the West were using the ICC to tell us Kenyans who to vote or not vote for!
Those statements probably sunk Railaâs presidential bid in the eyes of the proud Kenyan people, but the attempt had been made to use what is essentially a European Court to determine the political destiny of a sovereign country.
As the kind of coups, assassinations and invasions that were employed to control swathes of Africa, South America and Asia in decades gone by become more unpopular, I believe the world is likely to witness more of these brazen attempts where â international lawâ is used to subvert sovereignty.
For this alone, the ICC must be called out for what it is; an imperial, Jim Crow court. Itâs token officials of colour like Bensouda are more like the collaborators that are seen in any war of liberation; servile, spineless and repugnant.
To purport that they are high servants of justice is to insult that very word.
NO CHILLS GIVEN