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Published 7th June 2013

Vol 54 No 12

Kenya

Bringing it all back home

KENYA Kitale: William Ruto, surrounded by his security guards, speaks to a crowd of supporters during a campaign rally for the 2013 general elections. Sven Torfin / Panos
KENYA Kitale: William Ruto, surrounded by his security guards, speaks to a crowd of supporters during a campaign rally for the 2013 general elections. Sven Torfin / Panos

Image courtesy of Panos Pictures

The International Criminal Court’s offer to hold the trial of William Ruto in East Africa could be an astute compromise

The announcement by the International Criminal Court on 3 June that it could try William Ruto, Kenya’s Deputy President, in East Africa rather than at the Hague appears to be a response to an African Union resolution calling for ICC cases to be brought back to Africa. Ruto’s defence team had also requested his trial be brought closer to home ‘in the interests of justice’. For the Court, an ICC trial in Africa would be vastly preferable to transferring the case to the Kenyan judiciary, which it believes would come under irresistible political pressure. Already more than ten witnesses have recanted their testimony.

Paying – and fighting – for unity

Image courtesy of Panos Pictures

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Nigeria’s ex-President Obasanjo proposes taxing hotels and airlines to make the AU independent of foreign governments

The African Union took some tentative steps at its 50th anniversary summit on 25-26 May to end what South Africa’s Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma called the organisation’s ‘unsustainable’ financial dependence...

The new battle for the Bank

Image courtesy of Panos Pictures

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Bank officials advise African economies to seek new sources of funding

‘Is it Africa’s time?’ asked Ghanaian journalist Komla Dumor at a seminar at the African Development Bank’s annual meeting in Marrakech on 29 May. His panelists – AfDB...

BLUE LINES
THE INSIDE VIEW

Britain’s belated compensation this week to Kenyans tortured by colonial forces during the Mau Mau rebellion in the 1950s holds some lessons for the new Kenyan government. The efforts of top politicians to derail their international trials for the post-poll violence in 2007 could rebound.

Between 1958 and 1963, the British colonial authorities destroyed 3.5 tonnes of documents recording the b...

Britain’s belated compensation this week to Kenyans tortured by colonial forces during the Mau Mau rebellion in the 1950s holds some lessons for the new Kenyan government. The efforts of top politicians to derail their international trials for the post-poll violence in 2007 could rebound.

Between 1958 and 1963, the British colonial authorities destroyed 3.5 tonnes of documents recording the brutal treatment meted out to Kenyans. Some of the surviving victims launched a case for compensation against Britain. Asked by the London High Court to produce hundreds of thousands more documents on the torture, Whitehall officials insisted they had misplaced them. Then a determined Foreign and Commonwealth Office official, Edward Inglett, tracked down the documents, which occupied 30 metres of shelf space in a ministry archive. The pay out to 5,000 of the now elderly victims works out at about £3,000 each but its political significance goes far beyond that.

Already torture victims caught in anti-colonial struggles in Algeria and Malaysia are preparing compensation cases. In Kenya’s post-election violence in 2007, over 1,200 people were killed and 300,000 chased from their homes but only one person has been charged and less than 5% of the displaced people have been able to return home. That’s why efforts to return the cases against President Kenyatta and his Deputy Ruto to Kenya’s jurisdiction are greeted with so much scepticism.

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