Last week, the African Union passed a resolution demanding the International Criminal Court stop the trial of Kenya’s President Uhuru Kenyatta. Kenyatta and his deputy William Ruto are being tried for their alleged role in instigating the early 2008 post- election violence (PEV) in which nearly 1,400 people were killed and 600,000 displaced. In this anti-ICC push, Kenyatta and Ruto’s positions are the easiest to understand. They are the ones standing trial, and there is a narrative among many African intellectuals that the PEV was a political problem that can only be resolved politically in the long-term internally in Kenya, not at The Hague. That is where the easy bits end. Some things about this ICC thing don’t add up. First, it is the one case in which African presidents — like Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni — who are not on trial are railing against the ICC even more than Kenyatta and, especially Ruto. Ruto, whose trial has started, has interestingly shifted to a less confrontational strategy toward the ICC. For all the hot air, African presidents have a very poor record of backing each other. Yet in the past three years, the AU has easily made more resolutions against the ICC than on any other subject on this our long- suffering continent. Why? Seems the anti-ICC drive has become a proxy for a series of several other wars. There is a silent resource race among African countries. Who gets the most international investment in their resource sector, and gets to be the leading supplier is becoming a big issue. It may be bad for Kenyatta personally, but ironically, Kenya could gain globally as a country that respects international law if it continues to co-operate with the ICC. A refusal to co-operate, and an arrest warrant being issued for the president and his deputy, could harm that. But that would benefit Uganda (and indeed Tanzania). Kenya would take longer to find foreign investment to exploit its Turkana oil reserves, and if it had a sanctions regime, then Uganda oil would take off faster and Kenya would become its captive market. But there are even bigger issues we are not focusing on — in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Some regional observers take the view that the Kenya case is being used to collapse the whole ICC and prevent the trial of former DRC M23 rebel leader Bosco Ntaganda. This view alleges that the French and Belgians could use the Ntanganda case to embarrass Rwanda and Uganda, and finally rally the world against Presidents Paul Kagame and Yoweri Museveni by implicating them in the wars in eastern DRC. That, they claim, is partly why the AU meeting last week failed to get a resolution for mass withdrawal from the ICC — the French-speaking African countries refused to support it. Most of this is theory, not fact, so the next few months will be interesting to watch. There have also been conflicting signals from Kenya’s silent economic rivals like South Africa and Nigeria. In public, they support Nairobi on the ICC. When they get back home, they speak from both sides of their mouths on the issue. Don’t be surprised if it then turns out that the African leader’s anti-ICC stance, is really not about Kenyatta and Uhuru.
Posted on: Wed, 23 Oct 2013 21:14:07 +0000
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