The African Union on Saturday resolved that President Uhuru Kenyatta should not attend trial against him at the International Criminal Court as from November 12, 2013. In a resolution communicated by AU’s Chair, Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn, the leaders have also decided that no sitting African leader should be tried at any international court including ICC.Desalegn told reports after an extraordinary meeting in Addis Ababa that the decision to have President Kenyatta not attend trial against him was reached unanimously by all states including Botswana that had opposed a plan to pull out all African states that are signatories to the Rome Statute.The extraordinary meeting also decided to send five heads of state to present a special request to the ICC president seeking to postpone Uhuru’s trial before another attempt at a referral of the case to Kenya is initiated.African leaders bid to pull out of International Criminal Court is denial of 1,300 deaths in poll chaos in Kenya.
During the Presidential Debate in Kenya !
When Linus Kaikai asked UHURU about his case before the International Criminal Court ( ICC), during the presidential debate early this year, Candidate Uhuru Kenyatta said this was a personal challenge. Kenyatta veritably waved away the question as an irrelevant irritant. Everybody has some personal challenges, he said. He would find a way around his. Two days later, we read in the local press that this question had been brilliantly handled. So well, in fact, that President Kenyatta was rated the winner in the debate.
Months later, the chickens are trooping home. The little personal matter has metamorphosed into maturity. The personal challenge has matured into a continental challenge. Today, therefore, African leaders are assembled in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to consider the possibility of pulling out of the ICC en masse, because of Kenya’s President’s personal challenge. It is now a challenge to Africa’s sovereignty, they say. Foreign disrespect for African leadership, we are told.Now this is what constitutes self-serving high sounding nothing. Africa’s lords of impunity have steadily rewritten the script of 2007/2008 in Kenya as to distort events beyond the remotest recognition. At the very bottom of it is denial of 1,300 deaths. Africa’s Council of Negations and Reversals in Addis Ababa is no doubt agreed on one thing. Forget about the 1,300. can understand. Alone in the world, African leadership has murdered millions of its citizens. From Uganda to the Central African Republic, all the way to Chad, Sudan, Liberia, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Angola, Mozambique, and all the way to Equatorial Guinea where the boss eats his adversaries’ genitals for lunch, African leaders know they are licensed to murder. When, therefore, you tell them to account, you clearly tamper with their sovereignty. African sovereignty is licence to kill. Period.
The architecture of our laws is itself clear. Criminal proceedings may not be commenced or continued against a sitting President. If you faced a huge personal legal challenge of a criminal nature as an ordinary citizen, your best way out would be to seek to become the President. After you succeed in becoming the President, we can change the script. Because you are the boss, nobody can touch you at home. As for the ICC that was set up to deal with Almighty Presidents, it is enough to dismiss it as the tool of colonial masters, who imagine that they are God, when it is you who is God.
Thus the notorious Joseph Kony of the Lord’s Resistance Army ( LRA) in Uganda may today be a man indicted before the ICC. He was referred to the court by President Yoweri Museveni’s government for two decades of atrocity in the north of Uganda. LRA narratives speak of the worst atrocities in the world. What we are hearing from Africa’s Council of Counter Revolutionaries in Addis is that if some angel of mischief were to place Kony in the saddle of power in Uganda, it would be an insult to the sovereignty of Uganda for the ICC to continue its interest in the LRA and Kony. If this happened, African leaders would meet in Addis to consider pulling out of the ICC.
It worries men and women of conscience that nobody talks anymore about Kenya’s 1,300 dead. Maybe they are truly irrelevant? In any event, can we bring them back to life? Why don’t we leave them to lie in their cold graves and move on? Unfortunately we do not do this in Emanyulia, where I was born and brought up. If they do it in your village, you can get on with it. But we will not. In my village we do not allow people’s deaths to go unrecorded, to be distorted by propaganda or to be misunderstood through simplified clichés, as Gerard Pruner would say in the volume The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide 1959 – 1994. The African assembly in Addis this weekend has one major objective. When the entire pretext on sovereignty is cast aside, their true goal is to put the last touch on the killers’ work in completing the dehumanisation of the 1,300. They are assembled to deny the dead the social meaning of their death.
We say in Emanyulia that to deny someone the social meaning of their death is to kill them a second time. First you kill them physically, then you kill them spiritually by ensuring that their story is dead and buried with them. The whole world knows that Africa would like to wish away these 1,300 deaths just as it has done with many more millions before. That is why even as embarrassing legislative loud-mouths-for-hire-and-rent shout “sovereignty – sovereignty,” no court in Africa is addressing the matter of Kenya’s 1,300.
I am a historian, but let me quote Pruner again, for he is a more seasoned historian: “The purpose of history cannot be to teach us lessons, or impose a moral lecture on the reader. But history can have a cleansing effect. Hannah Arendt has taught us that evil is extremely banal. But understanding its nature, stripping it of its emotional shock quality, tracing its ambiguities, looking at a world where the killers can be almost as forlorn as their victims and where the real perpetrators can swiftly turn themselves into the pretence victims of the violence they themselves have organised is an exercise in intellectual hygiene.”
I do not know who organised, if anybody organised, the murder and mayhem of Kenya’s 1,300. I cannot pronounce anybody guilty. But I know that Kenyatta when he first appeared before the ICC he was not a Kenyan President . I refuse to be a part of the complicity to rewrite the script of the 2007/2008 violence. That script has been written in blood. Get this right. Its ink is the blood of 1,300 people. But even if it were not, I would still refuse to be party to historical revisionism; especially when all it does is to cast Africa as a place of darkness – where bloodthirsty savages clobber each other on the head, with impunity. Shame, shame, Addis Ababa.
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