urnalist Grace Rutha had to flee Kenya out of fear of both International Criminal Court Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda and Kenyan Deputy President William Ruto. The former Standard Mombasa senior bureau chief’s problems began in the middle of the 2007 general election campaign. An unnamed senior politician from the Rift Valley approached her with cash. He also promised her land in return for favourable coverage of his Mombasa campaign activities. According to Rutha, The personal assistant to the ODM politician called me and said the politician wanted to meet me in Eldoret. He would send me an air ticket. I declined. A few days later, the assistant was sent all the way from Eldoret to our offices in Mombasa.” Dirty hands The assistant said he had come to get her bank details in order to deposit KSh 2 million into her account. He also offered her a plot of land in Eldoret. “I asked him why I would want to move to Eldoret,” said Rutha. “His response was that I would definitely want a place to settle after the 2007 elections.“ In 2010, Rutha was interviewed by a local periodical about the bribery attempts. Expression Today published an article, entitled “Dirty hands: Despite great image, Kenyan media is blighted by corruption”. Election violence planned Immediately after the article was published, she told a Kenyan-based media rights organization that she started receiving threatening calls. Shortly afterwards, William Ruto himself telephoned her. Then one of Ruto’s relatives (name withheld) paid her a visit and accused her of nailing the politician to the ICC. It was her quote about land that caught the attention of ICC investigators. They managed to track down her telephone number and asked to meet her at an up-market shopping mall in Nairobi. “This issue of land implies that the election violence was planned earlier,” she told a Kenyan-based media rights organization in late 2012. Upon careful consideration, Rutho rejected the ICC’s advances, citing local media ethics and the fact that Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda had sounded the alarm in early 2012 about the high number of deaths and disappearances of people who had been contacted by her investigators as potential witnesses. But the ICC investigators were as relentless as were the supporters of the politician who had accused her of being used to nail Ruto. Wiretapping Shortly after turning down the ICC investigators, her phone started making a ‘clanging’ noise. She had her phone checked by a surveillance expert who determined that her cell was being wiretapped. Barely a week later, she visited a mall where a man in an ill- fitting suit conspicuously followed her. “I went to a café for coffee. He sat next to me and ordered a drink,” she recalled. He stayed there until a friend of hers arrived. When they left the café, he also stood up and walked out. “In my bid to escape from death in Kenya, I lived in toilets, bars, buses and matatus, traveling from one part of the country to the other, she said. Safe house An international human rights organization told this reporter that for almost a year, Rutha resided in a safe house operated by the Kenyan Witness Protection Agency (WPA). But she felt the managers were corrupt and were doing little to ensure her protection. Both local and international media have reported that the witness protection agency has internal operational issues. There have been numerous calls for a review and a strengthening of the programme. “While under WPA protection in December 2012, unknown men visited the home of Grace’s sister, demanding to know the journalist’s whereabouts. Fearful, Grace decided to flee the country ahead of the March 2013 elections,” said the official handling her case. No regrets Speaking by phone to this writer, Rutha said: “I have no regrets about my articles. In fact, Im proud that I played my role faithfully and dutifully in this precarious journey of investigative journalism.” She said she wishes both Bensouda and Ruto would leave her alone. She knows that both sides want her cooperation, but she does not want to lose her objectivity. She’s planning to tell her entire story in a book that she’s writing in a refugee shelter in the United States, where she now lives. *Patrick is a pseudonym for a Nairobi-based journalist. Lead image: An official of local human rights organisztion Article19 projects images revealing impunity against Kenyan journalists in 2013 during the launch of a report on the International Day to End Impunity in a Nairobi hotel
Posted on: Tue, 21 Jan 2014 12:30:36 +0000
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