Sunday, September 2, 2012

Gachoka, Miguna ICC plots negate quest for justice


By Timothy Bosire
Some Kenyans need critical education on justice, truth and civilisation. Truth because Jesus Christ in John 8:32 Holy Bible) teaches that knowing the truth will set us free. And Kenya needs this freedom in abundance for anyone who sins becomes a slave of sin.
In 2007 politicians, the defunct Electoral Commission of Kenya, and a section of State security apparatus messed up the General Election.
As a consequence, the country was hit by post-election violence, which ground our motherland to a halt with thousands of lives lost, property worth tens of billions destroyed, the economy was pushed down to its knees, our sovereignty got cannibalised and left many leaders with blood on their hands.
Ethnic animosities
The international community rushed to our aide, persuaded us back to sanity and re-ordered our national institutions; complete with a transitional grand Coalition Government and patronisingly guided us into rewriting our Constitution. They are still watching over us to date.
As a consequence, some suspects have found themselves facing the International Criminal Court (ICC) while others remain suspects here at home.  The investigation and the ICC prosecution are all aimed at establishing the truth so that it can set us free as country.
Quick international intervention saved Kenya from going the way of 1930s Nazi Germany, 1990s genocidal Rwanda or Somalia where runaway selfishness, crass racism and ethnic animosities led to total breakdown of law and order that resulted in massive destruction of lives and property.
Theirs are named Holocaust and genocide, whereas ours was halted at the level of “acute crisis” but was sufficiently qualified too as “genocide”.
These actions are recognised universally as serious threats to human civilisation and global peace. The world order stands united in opposition to such barbarism, especially where there are clear symptoms of prior planning.
The Nuremberg trials in Germany at the end of the Second World War were the first ever International legal effort to punish perpetrators of grave sins on large scale in the world; hence the precedent.
Charges preferred against Germany’s 24 top suspects included  “crimes against Humanity”, “war crimes” and “crimes against the peace” which have a close relation with the charges the ICC has preferred against Kenyan suspects Uhuru Kenyatta, William Ruto, Francis Muthaura and Joshua Sang.
At Nuremberg, lead prosecutor, Justice Robert Jackson, of the US Supreme Court aptly said: “The wrongs we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant and so devastating that civilisation cannot tolerate their being ignored because it cannot survive their being repeated.”
Authorities on Nuremberg trials agree that the punishment of Hitler’s high-ranking officials indirectly assigned guilt to originators of the Second World War and subsequent destruction (axis powers) successfully. This is because not all players could be prosecuted.
Lessen collective guilt
Instructively, Kenya’s parliament opted for the ICC route due to fear that local investigators and prosecutions could be biased and full of revenge and vendetta just like the international community found out about local prosecutions and punishments in Rwanda before pushing the ICTR to take over.
Indeed, even most of the Kenyan suspects at some point openly preferred and campaigned to have the trials handled by the ICC with some arrogantly claiming it could take as many as 90 years to materialise, hence no threat to them.
In all these above scenarios it was necessary to charge the culprits in order to bring justice and also to deter repeats of these barbaric “final solutions”. There was also some effort to lessen the collective guilt of the communities involved. The international community focused on the principle of individual responsibility through universally acceptable trials even though individuals are deemed innocent until proven guilty.
Therefore, when these noble efforts by the international community are ongoing and people such as Tony Gachoka and Miguna Miguna start interrupting the process through strange campaigns to force into the ICC dock, fringe suspects whom previous investigations did not nab, we smell a rat.
The fact that they have been all along around and deliberately failed to come forward to give the evidence they now claim to have to help ICC investigators when they came around and kept pleading for such assistance is suspect. They were available, free, well placed and highly knowledgeable, yet they kept mum. Why now? What is the timing?
To paraphrase Justice Jackson “The wrongs which Kenyans condemn and seek to punish through the ICC process, have been so calculated, so malignant and so devastating that Wananchi can’t tolerate their being ignored because Kenya  cannot survive their being repeated.”
Gachoka and Miguna should give us a break.
The writer is a politician.
timothy_bosire@yahoo.com



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