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
Posted Friday, September 23 2011 at 22:30
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.
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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