SULEIMAN MBATIAH/NATION Prime Minister Raila Odinga and Assistant Minister Wavinya Ndeti distribute food to elderly women at Unoa sports ground, Wote, in Makueni county on March 11, 201.
By PETER LEFTIE pmutibo@ke.nationmedia.com
Posted Friday, March 11 2011 at 22:00
Posted Friday, March 11 2011 at 22:00
In Summary
- PM escalates coalition wars with claims suspects want to cheat justice by manipulating the system
Prime Minister Raila Odinga warns that some of the six suspects summoned by the International Criminal Court may manipulate a local tribunal.
Speaking at the Reuters Africa Investment Summit on Thursday, Mr Odinga also opposed the government’s move to challenge the ICC from proceeding with the cases.
“I think the motivation is obvious. Their idea is to have a bench that will be user-friendly, that’s really the reason,” Mr Odinga was quoted.
“Just less than a year ago everybody was convinced that a local tribunal would be manipulated, that it would be interfered with by the political powers that be. All of a sudden, the very same people who were calling for The Hague are rooting for a local tribunal... why that about-turn? My view is the motives are sinister, they are not good.”
Vice-President Kalonzo Musyoka has been leading the Kenyan delegation trying to lobby representatives of the UN Security Council member states to have the cases deferred by one year to enable the government undertake reforms to facilitate the formation of a credible local tribunal.
The mission, however, suffered a major setback on Thursday after US stated that it would oppose the move.
The PM wondered why the government was moving to challenge the move by the ICC judges to summon the six individuals to the Hague on April 7 when the suspects are charged in their individual capacities.
“The government is not the accused person, there are individuals who are accused not as members of government, but in their own capacity,” Mr Odinga said.
Mr Odinga’s stand on the government’s decision to challenge the ICC process is rather puzzling given that he was said to have co-chaired the meeting at Harambee House with President Kibaki during which the decision to challenge the admissibility of the six cases was made.
The meeting was attended by Cabinet Ministers Prof George Saitoti and Mutula Kilonzo and Attorney General Amos Wako.
On Friday, ODM supported Mr Odinga’s position on the government move to challenge the cases facing the six, saying, it was a ploy to deny justice to the victims of the post-election violence.
In statement by the secretary-general Anyang’ Nyong’o, ODM also criticised the VP’s diplomatic shuttles saying they were also part of a campaign to subvert the ICC process.
“Instead of much-needed reconciliation, the efforts to subvert the process of justice and the politicization and open ethnicization of the anti-ICC campaign are opening deep fissures among sections of the Kenyan public,” Prof Nyong’o said.
“The epitome of the feeble and misguided campaign to avoid doing justice for the crimes related to post-election violence came on Wednesday, right after Vice President Kalonzo Musyoka’s plea for deferral was rebuffed in meetings with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and also United States Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice,” he stated.
“At almost the same moment, the ICC judges issued summons against the Ocampo 6. In response to all this, the PNU wing of the government immediately launched yet another ploy to subvert the trials, by challenging the ICC on the grounds of the “inadmissibility” of the case.”
Prof Nyong’o said only ICC could handle the cases facing the six suspects because Kenya lacked a credible local mechanism to try the suspects.
“The world knows that we have undertaken no investigations whatsoever to determine the culpability of those who organised the deaths of so many Kenyans,” he said.
“We must recommit ourselves to the ICC process since we don’t have any semblance of our own criminal justice mechanisms to deal with those major crimes,” Prof Nyong’o added.
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