Last month Deputy President (DP) William Ruto told the International Criminal Court (ICC) that the case he is facing at the Hague was a “syndicate of lies” and a concoction by those opposed to justice and truth.
And recently, President Uhuru through his lawyer applied to the High Court to have mobile providers Safaricom and Airtel compelled to hand in information targeting communications and money transfers done by four human rights activists and some diplomats that will prove that witnesses were bribed and coached.
The DP had earlier, during the confirmation of charges told the Pre-Trial Chamber that the accusations and events linking him to the post election violence could only be possible in a movie.
This line of argument has been pursued vigorously by the accused persons in case one and become a narrative whose objective is to subvert the truth and create a different line of belief.
It is a fact that post election violence took place in Kenya after the 2007 general elections. It is a fact, too,t hat more than 1000 innocent people lost their lives and close to 600 000 others displaced. It is also a fact that the Kenyan government failed to establish a local tribunal to address the matter with none other than the DP telling all and sundry that it could take 99 years before the wheels of international criminal justice comes full circle.
It therefore appears that the ICC accused persons are keen students of Josef Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda chief who while justifying Adolf Hitler’s emerging madness against the Jews in Germany said that a “lie repeated many times becomes a truth” in reference to the populist allegations then that Jews were the breeders of problems afflicting the German Reich.
First, I want to state that no witness was ever coached. The evidence presented at different levels of the PEV investigations were done by the witnesses voluntarily as a civic obligation to help the country get justice. At that early stage no one knew about ICC.
I have been accused together with Maina Kiai, Senator Hassan Omar and a few others as being the said coaches of the ICC witnesses. Nothing can be further from the truth.
In March 2008, when the embers of the ethnic violence were receding, several individuals from the North Rift approached a senior government official in the office of the President to assist them record statements over what they had witnessed during the chaos.
With his intervention, the witnesses recorded their reports at the Rift Valley Provincial CID headquarters in Nakuru, then under the stewardship of Mohamed Amin.
Most of them were to later record statements with the Kenya National Commission of Human Rights (KNCHR), Waki Commission and the ICC in that order. When you read all these statements, you realize that the witnesses knew or were sufficiently conscious of what they were reporting. The contents in these statements are similar.
So, to allege that there was witness coaching is to tell a white lie. At what point were they coached? Is it When they first appeared before the then PS for Internal Security or when they recorded their statements with the then Rift Valley PCIO? Is it when they appeared before KNCHR? Or when they appeared before the Waki Commission? NO. Not at KNCHR nor Waki because the contents of the statements by the witnesses to KNCHR and Waki are similar in sequence and meaning with the ones recorded by the Rift Valley PCIO. Did ICC coach them? No. ICC relied on KNCHR, Waki Commission and the Rift Valley PCIO office reports to get to the witnesses. Their statements to ICC are replicas of those recorded by the PCIO in March 2008.
It is true there have been some witnesses who have fallen out along the way. But unknown to Kenyans is the fact that some of the witnesses were removed from witness lists because it was discovered that they were either government spies or members of NSIS (one was a licensed firearm carrier) and therefore a threat to the security of the other witnesses. Others have dropped because of intimidation and threats while others especially for case two have been out rightly murdered. Yet some have been bribed or promised an assortment of goodies if they recanted their earlier testimonies.
Some of the recent witnesses who have sworn affidavits to recant their statements have done so after they were removed from witness lists due to gross misconduct and engaging in acts unbecoming of persons under protection.
No witness was ever coached. For the accused persons to cry foul and claim repeatedly that the charges before the ICC are a heap of lies is to exceed the limits of the mantra by Josef Goebbels, himself a one- time war crimes indictee at the Nuremberg.
Wafula is the President of the National Association of Human Rights Activists(NAHRA)
Email kenwafula51@yahoo.com
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