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Kenyan president Uhuru Kenyata and his deputy William Ruto

Wanjohi Kabukuru
Luis Moreno Ocampo, the dashing former ICC prosecutor who initiated the cases against President Uhuru Kenyatta and his deputy William Ruto, has finally spilled the beans.  In an exclusive interview with Radio Netherlands Worldwide (RNW) in early February 2014, Ocampo revealed that the Kenyan ICC cases were trumped up charges by Western foreign envoys who had asked him to block Kenyatta and Ruto from contesting Kenya’s presidency.

“There were some diplomats asking me to do something more to prevent Kenyatta or Ruto from running in the elections”, Ocampo told the RNW.
“And I said it’s not my job. Judges in Kenya should do that. And if they authorise them to run, people will vote. And if people vote for them, we have nothing to say.”

As expected, Ocampo’s disclosures in the RNW interview have excited the Kenyan public.
As God will have it, his revelations came two weeks after Ruto’s lawyer, Karim Khan, had said at the ICC while cross-examining a witness that USAID and the former US ambassador to Kenya, Michael Ranneberger, had tried to implicate his client in the 2007-8 post-election violence.
Thus, Ocampo’s confession could not have come at a better time for Ruto and Kenyatta.

While for the last four years the ICC has claimed it had a water tight case, Ocampo’s weighty confession is a severe embarrassment to the Court.
In the last few months, Ocampo’s successor Fatou Bensouda has had a difficult time keeping the cases together, with dozens of witnesses withdrawing and recanting their testimonies.

In Nairobi, the Kenyan capital, the ICC cases have largely been seen as the worst political secret surrounding   the “Kibaki succession”.
The Kenyan civil  society caucus who were embedded in the charade by the EU and US diplomatic corps in Nairobi to have their favoured men succeed  the then outgoing president Mwai Kibaki, have now been exposed as the dirty faces behind the attempt to lock out Kenyatta and Ruto from the presidency, using the cover of the ICC.

The position taken by the EU and US was largely interpreted as “neo-colonialism” as the ICC cases were more politically — oriented than justice focused.

The voting pattern which saw Uhuru and Ruto winning against their main rival, ex-prime minister Raila Odinga, who had led the opinion polls for more than five years, was a protest vote by Kenyans against the Western interference in the country’s internal affairs.

By coming out of the closer, Ocampo has confirmed the consistent narrative that Kenyatta and Ruto have long held — that they were innocent and that the West was using the ICC to prop up a puppet regime in Kenya.

And what is worse, Ocampo’s  revelations are not only humiliating to the ICC and its EU paymasters, they have also done more harm than good for the political ambitions of Raila Odinga, who is reinventing  himself in readiness for the 2017 presidential race.
It is interesting to note that all the ICC cases against the various Kenyans named by the Court came about from a simple envelope.

When the Kenyan judge, Justice Philip Waki, was appointed to chair what became the Commission of Inquiry into the Post-Election Violence (CIPEV) in 2008, not much was expected of him.

No one anticipated that he would be the person who would set the ball rolling in determining Kenya’s fourth president, and the eventual embarrassment of the ICC and biased diplomats.

In justice Waki’s mind his commission was above board in ensuring justice was done.
Unlike previous commissions of inquiry in Kenya, Waki’s was going to be different.

He knew how the findings of such commissions had been but time buying gimmicks for the executive.
In the end, Waki presented his commission’s findings to the appointing authority, President Kibaki, but his most prized recommendation came in a sealed envelope, which he gave to the former UN secretary general Kofi Annan on October 17 2008.

This was unheard of and an open defiance of Kibaki.
The irony could not be lost on anybody: Justice Waki took the unprecedented act by ignoring his own findings.
In fact, the admission made on page 17 of the CIPEV  Final Report is  quite telling: “The evidence the Commission has  gathered so far is not in our assessment  sufficient to meet the threshold of proof required for criminal matters in this country:  that it be beyond reasonable doubt. It may even fall short of the proof required for international crimes against humanity. We believe, however, that the Commission’s evidence forms a firm basis for more investigations of the alleged perpetrators,” the CIPEV Final Report said.

Yet, despite this admission, Justice Waki still went on to give Kofi Annan the prized envelope, which contained the names of the alleged main masterminds of the 2007-08 post-election violence.

Annan had steered the then opposition leader, Raila Odinga, and President Kibaki to cobble together a power-sharing deal which saw Odinga becoming prime minister in an effort to reduce the tensions and heal the bitterness in the country.
On 9 July 2009, Annan gave the now famous envelope to Ocampo and the circus came to town.

Soon after receiving the envelope. Ocampo declared that he would make Kenya an example to the world.
True to his word, in December 2010 he revealed the names in the envelope.

Uhuru Kenyatta, William Ruto, General Mohammed Hussein Ali, Francis Muthaura, Henry Kosgey, and the journalist Joshua Sang were the six individuals named in the envelope as the lead perpetrators of the ignominy of 2007-8.

With Ocampo’s recent revelations in the RNW interview, it is now emerging that the ICC cases against the Kenyan leaders are nothing but a neatly choreographed plot by Western diplomats and their home governments to deny Kenyans of the leaders voters wanted.

The events that followed the opening of the envelope indicate a premeditated agenda, which had nothing to do with justice for the victims of the post-election violence but everything to do with geopolitical interests of the EU and the US.

Days after the opening of the envelope, the ICC and its benefactors set in motion an intense and well-funded media campaign involving much of the world media in a farce, which painted the six accused persons in a negative light and enhanced the ICC’s public profile in Kenya.

Initially, the ICC enjoyed a favourable rating in Kenya and the two visits that Ocampo made to Nairobi were accorded the status befitting the visit of a head of state.

As Ocampo enjoyed the media limelight, the six accused were demonised.
On the back of this came large monetary contributions by the US and the EU countries to the ICC for witness protection, creating the impression that the witnesses were going to reveal damaging information against the accused.

Civil society exposed
Strange as it may sound, human rights groups in Kenya joined the fray and became wholly fixated with the ICC cases more than in any of their previous campaigns.

Exploiting all available avenues, the human rights fraternity filed numerous cases in the Kenyan High Court in their vain attempts  to block Kenyatta  and Ruto from contesting the March 4, 2013 presidential election.

It was obvious that the EU-US partnership was using the civil societies and the ICC process to bolster the political fortunes of Raila Odinga.
This open bias even came with brazen warnings by the diplomats that “choices have consequences”, but try as they did, the warnings did not help their agenda. If anything, they turned the Kenyan voting public against Odinga.

Not surprisingly, since coming to power, Kenyatta and Ruto have picked up from where Kibaki had left in lobbying African and other countries to have their cases deferred.

The African Union has since passed resolutions, in May and October last year, in support of deferment of the cases, and asking member countries not to co-operate with the ICC on the Kenyan cases if the voice of the AU continues to be ignored by the UN Security Council on the matter.
Incidentally, when the Kenyan cases were deliberated on by the Security Council on November 9 2013, it became clear that the ICC “fixers” would have their way.

Although Russia, China, Azerbaijan , Togo, Rwanda,  Morocco, and Pakistan voted in favour of a deferral, Luxembourg, Australia, South Korea , Guatemala, Argentina, France,  the US, and Britain abstained  from the vote, meaning that the deferral issue was off the table.

For the deferral resolution to have been carried, it needed 9  of the 15 members of the Security Council to have voted in favour, but because only seven did, and eight abstained, the resolution died a natural death.

Prior to the November 9 Security Council meeting, The New York Times had published a pro-ICC editorial comment, claiming that: “The charge of racism against the ICC, while specious, has a certain appeal: Of the eight cases brought by the Court, all involve African states. There are indeed real questions about why charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity have not been pressed elsewhere — in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.
“Still serious abuses occurred in each of the African cases now before the court, and they need to be adjudicated. While the court may be flawed, it is the last resort to deliver justice for victims of conflict in countries that lack the capacity or will to do so themselves. Last May, the African Union passed a resolution accusing the court of targeting Africans. What it really should have focused on, and applauded, is that the court is also defending Africans including the 1100 Kenyans slaughtered in 2007-8.”

It was clear from the tone of the editorial that the AU and Kenya’s push for deferral was headed for doom, and the Security Council’s later decision proved it.

However, with the new revelations made by Ocampo, The New York Times, as well as many other media outlets and governments may be forced to reconsider their positions on the Kenyan cases.

One glaring blunder made by the forces behind the ICC is underestimating Kenyatta and Ruto, and the collective spirit and determination of the African Union.

The ICC and its supporters now have egg on their faces.
Ocampo’s shock revelations are likely to cause diplomatic disharmony and further damage the ICC’s already blotched image.
The repercussions of Ocampo’s candid revelations attest to the fact that the EU and US diplomats in Nairobi abused their positions.

Secondly, the revelations buttress the AU position that the ICC is a colour biased court, which is inadvertently undermining its own integrity by its strident prosecution of Africans irrespective of the evidence.

In the meantime, Kenyans are still coming to terms with the realisation that an envelope which began its journey in 2008 became the centrepiece of their lives for six years.

Many are yet to understand how this envelope has duped the world for the last four years.
But they take comfort in the fact that after all has been said and done, it is the same envelope that encouraged them to vote down a puppet regime that was being foisted on them by outside forces. — NewAfrican.