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Saturday, September 24, 2011

The horror of rapes in post-election slum life laid bare

PHOTO | DPM Uhuru arrives for the second day of confirmation hearings escorted by his wife, Margaret and the Kenya Ambassador in the Netherlands Prof Ruthie Rono.
PHOTO | DPM Uhuru arrives for the second day of confirmation hearings escorted by his wife, Margaret and the Kenya Ambassador in the Netherlands Prof Ruthie Rono.  
By MURIITHI MUTIGA mmutiga@ke.nationmedia.com
Posted  Friday, September 23  2011 at  22:30

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Amid all the lawyerly arguments in the wood-panelled Courtroom Number One in The Hague, it is easy to forget that this whole process is about the victims.
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The key figures in the trials are the 1,033 people that lost their lives, the hundreds of thousands that were forcibly displaced and the hundreds more that were sexually violated in the weeks of violence that followed the 2007 elections.
On Wednesday, those victims at last took centre stage in the proceedings.
The prosecution opened their submissions by detailing heart-rending stories from survivors of the mayhem which hurt all but two provinces in the country.
Prosecution lawyer Ms Adesola Adeboyejo was particularly vivid in describing the assaults which innocent wananchi suffered as hired youths went on the rampage from Naivasha to Nakuru to the capital city.
Most vivid and bracing were the descriptions of the sexual assaults which were visited upon victims, an issue which for a variety of reasons has rarely featured in the debate on Kenya’s post election violence.
“Suspects armed a criminal gang to carry out their mission of revenge against the civilian population. Evidence shows substantial grounds to believe that rape and sexual violence as a crime against humanity occurred,” she said.
Rulings by presiding judge Ekaterina Trendafilova on appeals entered by the defence lawyers before the hearings started indicate that the two days the prosecutors were allotted to make their case are the most crucial.
The judge ruled that the pre-trial hearings are not a mini-trial but are an avenue for the prosecutor to demonstrate whether there are substantial grounds to believe that the suspects were involved in the crimes.
The burden of proof therefore lies with the prosecutor and much will rest on the conclusion judges draw from the Thursday and Friday submissions.
The prosecution drew heavily from reports including the Justice Philip Waki’s Commission of Inquiry into the Post Election Violence report.
The commission found that women and men were subjected to degrading attacks which resulted in enduring stigma and emotional trauma.
Some of these included the abandonment of women by their husbands after they discovered they had been raped.
“(Social worker) Millicent Obaso’s organisation worked in Kibera and Mathare she had collected information from 40 victims and found that most victims were poor women who had been raped in their own homes by youth, gangs of up to 20 men, GSU officials and some police officers.
She explained that over 75 per cent of the individuals her group interviewed said they had been raped at home in front of their spouses and children, causing a great deal of stress that resulted in their being abandoned by their husbands.
As she explained, ‘the man came, the father of the house and when he found that his wife, daughter and daughter-in law had been raped, he said ‘I am finished with this; I am going to find myself another woman, because this is the biggest taboo in my home and I cannot even be cleansed.”

Some of those crimes were recounted at the International Criminal Court and it remains to be seen whether the judges will be convinced that the prosecutors have done a good enough job of linking the crimes to the suspects.

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