Reflections on the road to The Hague

By ABABU NAMWAMBA
Posted  Saturday, April 2 2011 at 18:57

In Summary

• We killed, pillaged with abandon, surely the least we can do for violence victims is give them a chance to see justice done

In his masterpiece of political intrigue, Niccolo Machiavelli says, “Men are so simple and so much creatures of circumstance that the deceiver will always find someone ready to be deceived”.

And the tragedy is that deceit has this amazing ability to sprout wings and fly at dizzying speed.

Sir Winston Churchill best acknowledged this when he quipped that a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to pull on its pants.

This coming week will witness the making of history when six of our citizens appear before the International Criminal Court at The Hague.

The build-up to this epochal event has been inundated with floods of political noises that have tended to mask reality in subterfuge, with volumes of vile lies polluting the air since Mr Luis Moreno-Ocampo named his prime prey last December.

For reasons pretty obvious to the discerning eye, this journey to The Hague has been littered with such a slew of imaginative conspiracy theories as would send Hollywood honchos green with envy. We have been entertained by tales of living martyrs and legends, whose sheer creativity rivals the best of the Arabian fables and African folklore.

Some malevolent force, the epic tale goes, has hatched The Hague plot to destroy our nation’s heroes, to eliminate competition in the race to the Mansion upon the Hill.

Those spinning this yarn of deceit are publicly celebrating impunity and mocking justice. Their cynical lies belittle our intelligence and are a slap in the face of the long-suffering victims. The clever ploys are a classic case of selective amnesia that is conveniently ignoring and deliberately distorting historical fact.

Beyond argument

It is fact beyond argument that The Hague did not just drop onto our laps from Pluto. No. We have consciously walked ourselves to that land of tulips. In our midst are fellows who deliberately bungled the 2007 elections so badly that the Kriegler Commission returned the verdict: “We can’t tell who won the presidential race”.

And those 1,330 innocent Kenyans whose lives were wasted in the ensuing madness did not just drop dead, neither did the women rape themselves. Yes, there are some among us who killed, raped and pillaged with abandon.

The country tottered on the brink, only pulling back right at tipping point courtesy of the internationally brokered National Accord. As part of the accord, the Serena Eight mapped our path back to normalcy.

They created the Waki Commission, which originated the list of suspects in the mysterious envelope from which emerged the Ocampo Six.

Given the choice of either local justice or ICC trials, some smarties composed that hit tune: “Don’t be vague, let’s go The Hague”. The rest, as they say, is water under the bridge.

This journey is inherently about justice, not politics. And the pursuit of justice consists of striking a delicate balance between respective rights of victim and suspect.

You attain the equilibrium by ensuring that the suspect is guaranteed a fair trial, while the victim is assured of justice not only being done but being seen to have been done.

The suspect must be presumed innocent until proven guilty, fairly and competently so, and afforded every reasonable opportunity to prove this innocence, while the victim’s path to justice must not be encumbered, compromised or prejudiced whatsoever.

Have we really succeeded in striking this delicate balance? Sadly not. What is happening amounts to defiling the memory of the hundreds who died in cold blood, and dehumanising even further the thousands of living victims like Mzee Ndege who watched helplessly as his entire family roasted before his very eyes in the inferno engulfing what was until then his family haven in Naivasha.

Therapeutic closure

May this week mark that first step towards therapeutic closure. May we rise above the myopic, the petty and the parochial to strike a lasting blow for justice. If the Ocampo Six are innocent, they must return home, free men. But that must not be the end of this epic journey.

The Waki report says 450 of the dead were victims of police bullets, while the rest succumbed to all sorts of instruments of violence, including arrows, machetes and fire. We must not rest until the villains are unmasked and made to take full responsibility for their unspeakable crimes.

While on this justice odyssey, let us be honest and stop the hollow lies and empty posturing. Let us disclose who else was listed in that secret envelope and how Ocampo settled on the six. Let’s know who fingered who.

Of course we already know that the ministries of Information, National Security and Justice, respectively, were prime sources of some devastating evidence. But I believe Kenyans want to see the full picture. As for those who thrive on deceit, beware.

In the words of Martin Luther King, “The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice”.

ababumtumwa@yahoo.com