At the conclusion of its Summit in Sirte, Libya, on July 1, 2009, the Assembly of Heads of State and Governments of the African Union (AU) decided that “AU Member States shall not cooperate … in the arrest and surrender of President Omar El Bashir of The Sudan.” In a press release issued two weeks later, on July 14, the organisation explained that this decision “bears testimony to the glaring reality that the situation in Darfur is too serious and complex an issue to be resolved without recourse to an harmonised approach to justice and peace, neither of which should be pursued at the expense of the other.” Continue reading →

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Kenyans are very suspicious of the rare unity between the Cabinet and the Parliament as they jointly dismiss calls for the prosecution of the perpetrators of post-election violence atrocities. This unscrupulous behaviour is not coincidental, but a well crafted strategy: the Cabinet and Parliament are distorting facts on the requirements for a local tribunal, in order to escape accountability. Politicians are satisfied that they are now sharing the spoils and that it is business as usual. They prefer to push the issues that contributed to the crisis under the carpet in order to focus on efforts to capture power in 2012. While we commend the Kenyan government for renewing efforts to enact the Special Tribunal to try those responsible for the 2007 election violence, we believe that nothing short of momentous symbolic shock therapy to the political elite would incentivize formation of an effective, independent and impartial Tribunal locally. Here, we believe the International Criminal Court (ICC) continues to have a major role. Continue reading →

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The Kenyan Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission (TJRC) is mandated to enquire into human rights violations, including community displacements, settlements, evictions, historical land injustices, and the illegal or irregular acquisition of land, especially as these relate to conflict or violence. access to land is often cited as one of the key structural causes of violence in Kenya. However, political figures have manipulated and misrepresented the ‘land issue’ in the country, to the extent that it often seems to be an excuse, rather than a valid grievance. How should the TJRC address the land issue, which is so easily instrumentalized and so deeply linked to problematic conceptions of ethnicity? In order to answer this question, we first have to ask: why is the land issue relevant today? Continue reading →

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Writing more than twenty years ago about Idi Amin’s Uganda, Ali Mazrui observed that

Everyone was talking about the tyrant. I suggested that more people had died in the second half of the Amin years as a result of anarchy than as a result of tyranny. Many of the killings were not orchestrated orders from the top. Soldiers perpetrated them in night clubs, at road-blocks, in the villages. Yet the cases due to anarchy were not conspicuous political significance. They were cases of a basic moral collapse among those who wielded weapons. Continue reading →

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It is not often that participants in ethnic cleansing confess to it openly, but William ole Ntimama has managed it twice: in a 1996 interview, and more recently. The brazenness of the impunity is revolting: it is natural to want accountability and reform, and equally natural to think we can have both. This, unfortunately, is a bit of a farce: stable reform and calling the violent to account are incompatible. Continue reading →

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Nineteen months have passed since Kenya’s contested 2007 election, when the rapid re-inauguration of President Mwai Kibaki heralded an outburst of post-election violence – characterised by targeted attacks on ethnic ‘others’, an overzealous state security response, and retaliatory attacks on ‘aggressor’ communities – which left over 1,000 people dead and more than 350,000 displaced. The violence ended in February 2008, when a coalition government was formed, but ‘deep peace’ remains elusive and reforms unlikely. What is left is only rhetoric differentiating this administration from post-Mau Mau amnesia and investigative committees without reforms, as after the ‘ethnic clashes’ of 1991-1993. Continue reading →

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On 9 July 2009, Kofi Annan the former chief mediator in the aftermath of Kenya’s post-electoral violence, transferred an undisclosed list of senior politicians to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Luis Moreno-Ocampo. These politicians are alleged to have committed crimes against humanity during the post-electoral violence between December 2007 and February 2008. What prompted Annan’s actions? Continue reading →

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tories of men being forcibly circumcised and even castrated peppered news accounts of the madness that overtook Kenya in the aftermath of the December 2007 elections. According to the Waki commission that investigated the Post Election Violence (PEV), by January 2008 the ethnic militia of the Kikuyu ethnic group, Mungiki, used blunt objects such as broken glass to forcibly circumcise at least eight men, some as young as eleven and five years old. While exact numbers are hard to come by, one can deduce that tens of men endured genital mutilation during the first three months of 2008. Continue reading →

Read the rest of Watu Wazima: A gender analysis of forced male circumcisions during Kenya’s post-election violence. »

We knew or should have known that it was coming. But somehow we thought or believed, as the most corrupt country in the region, that we could bribe our way out of catastrophe. That was the 2007 post-election violence in Kenya. Then, as now, we knew what our possible futures could be and what choices we had to make. We made bad choices or refused to make real choices at all. To avoid the recurrence of the 2007 events and to reach true and full reconciliation, Kenyans will have to make real choices about what future they want individually and as a community; as a nation. We have powerful insights and tools, but will we use them? Continue reading →

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This forum offers a space where concerned Kenyans can come together with a range of experts, scholars, practitioners, and commentators to discuss fundamental questions about how Kenya got here, and the strategies necessary to move the country forward. This essay provides an overview of recent debates on violence and accountability in Kenya and summarizes the first set of contributions to this forum. Continue reading →

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