It’s Dec. 27, 2007, and the largest cities of Kenya – the booming, ordinarily stable, and most developed country in East Africa – are eerily silent and seemingly empty. You can drive through and buy a newspaper from a lone man at the gas station showing the face of each candidate that citizens will vote for as president later in the day.
The next day these streets have burning car tires, gunshots, and broken windows. Many of the silent people from the day before are either hiding out with their kids in the woods, afraid for their lives because of their ethnicity, or they have been silenced for good. In the following month, more than 1,200 of these people will be killed.
The chaos following the disputed election was fueled by lower-level politicians supporting the two candidates. One of these orchestrators was Uhuru Kenyatta, Kenya’s current president. He’s being charged by the International Criminal Court with crimes against humanity, specifically by funding local militia in reprisal attacks.
But the case is stalling, and the West has more to do with this than they might think.
Kenyatta has denied links to the violence. The government of Kenya has been noncompliant in supplying documentation for the case, and witnesses have been removed or compromised. Kenyatta’s defense team is working for the case to be dropped completely. Earlier this month, in an unprecedented move, Kenyatta went to the ICC in The Hague for trial, but this only resulted in further stalling.
This move that slowed momentum on Kenyatta’s case has had the opposite effect on his popularity at home, however. The controversy over Kenyatta’s trial has essentially jump-started a support base for him in the next election as citizens rally behind their president against what he has marketed as Western imperial paternalism and intrusion in African affairs.
There is significant support for this view. The ICC has 21 cases before it, all of which involve situations in African countries. African leaders see this as intentional targeting. The African Union has been consistently opposed to the ICC since its 2009 indictment of Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir. Some countries, including Chad, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Malawi, and Kenya have gone so far as to ignore al-Bashir’s arrest warrant and allow him safe passage through their countries. ICC naysayers point to its neglect of other conflicts, such as those in Gaza, Colombia, the Caucasus, or Iraq.
The reality is that weak national systems for prosecuting wayward leaders are highly concentrated in Africa. These countries recognize this, which is why a majority of the ICC’s cases were actually referred to the court by African governments themselves, instead of by the U.N. Security Council or the ICC Prosecutor. The reason other conflicts are prevented from being brought to the ICC is likely the influence of U.N. Security Council nations in those areas of the world or the existence of capable national legal systems.
The ability of African political leaders to escape accountability for their actions sets destructive precedents. Significantly, it is against high-level officials (those with the ability to engineer genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes) that the ICC generally brings charges, and it is this same level of politicians who are most vocally opposed to the court. The manipulation of post-colonial tensions is used by these politicians to secure both their current positions and their
immunity from interference in future human rights violations. The implications are already apparent. Widespread resentment against the ICC has prevented any decisive effort to bring South Sudanese political criminals to the ICC following its civil war.
The actions of the West, however, set precedents as well. The feeling of Western domination is very present across Africa. This political tension will continue to affect international relations in important ways. The fact that politicians manipulate and misrepresent some actions of the West should not distract from the legitimacy of some of these claims and the importance of serious self-examination by Western political leaders. Asuman Kiyingi of Uganda put it powerfully: “It’s really a colonial context. We were a dominated people. For a very long time we have been taking directives from these people. Even on the economy and politics, we are hardly ever taken seriously because we are dismissed as a people who are incompetent. So, when we speak out, we are not given due attention.” Disrespect cuts justice short before it even has a chance.
