ICC and the games people play

I tend to think that the biggest challenge for news consumers is whether what they see, read or hear is real. This is because over the years the line between Hollywood and Fox News has grown thinner. The one between beauty and Photoshop has almost disappeared! With all this ambiguity flying around, news consumers are often thrown on a wild goose chase with stories that border on amateur comedy. I felt no shame in laughing when I heard that a Kenyan judge had issued an arrest warrant for Sudan’s leader Gen. Omar El Bashir. Kenya’s Justice Nicholas Ombija ordered President Bashir’s arrest after the Kenyan chapter of the International Commission of Jurists filed a suit seeking a new arrest warrant for the Sudanese leader. Expectedly the people in Khartoum were not happy and ordered the expulsion of Kenya’s ambassador within 72 hours and summoned their own envoy from Nairobi. The court ruling was certainly quite laughable on many fronts. First of all, President Bashir is not obliged to visit Kenya in order for the arrest to be effected. More importantly, the ruling was a mockery of Kenya’s relations with the ICC which many consider to be manipulated by western powers to exclusively hunt down African leaders for crimes against humanity. When Kenya was promulgating its new constitution in August last year, Pres. Bashir was one for the guests even with the ICC warrant hanging on his head. The Kenyan authorities went out of their way to make the man comfortable and brushed off criticism from foreign governments for failing to arrest him then. Of course the argument that the Kenyan courts are independent of the political leadership of Kenya and so it was an independent decision by a competent judge soon came up. In this era of Chief Justice Willy Mutunga, the Kenyan judiciary is struggling to carve a new positive and progressive reputation. “Any dissatisfaction with a decision of the court should be followed with an appeal and not proclamations of non-observance of court orders,” were the words of the Chief Justice as quoted in the Daily Nation newspaper. Interestingly this development appeared to be a clear case of déjà vu considering that after the ICC had decided to have the alleged key perpetrators of the 2007 Post-Election Violence in Hague, the Kenyan government dispatched Vice President Musyoka on an errand of shuttle diplomacy against the ICC plans. This time it was Foreign Affairs Minister, Hon. Moses Wetangula who was handed the mission to put out this new fire brewing between Khartoum and Nairobi. And by the time of writing this, he was quoted saying that Sudan had rescinded the decision to expel the Kenyan envoy following a meeting with President Bashir in Khartoum. But that was not the end of the drama about Sudan. Khartoum’s ambitious application to join the East African Community even before South Sudan which some claim to be a natural candidate, was thrown out by the summit of heads of state in Bujumbura. Interestingly, Kenya, Rwanda and Burundi were said to have been the EAC members that supported the consideration (not admission) of Sudan’s request to join the bloc while Uganda and Tanzania were not having any of it. Diplomacy is really nothing more than saying nasty things in a decent way no matter how oxymoronic they may sound later. “The summit observed that this application does not meet the criterion on geographical proximity and contiguity and cannot therefore be considered at this point in time,” said the EAC Secretary General, Amb. Richard Sezibera. In other news, Former US leader, George W. Bush was warmly received in Tanzania, on Thursday as he made his first stop on an African philanthropic tour, despite a human rights group’s call for his arrest on torture charges. I swear I didn’t make that up. Amnesty International, urged Ethiopia, Tanzania and Zambia to arrest Bush for violating international torture laws. “All countries to which George W. Bush travels have an obligation to bring him to justice for his role in this torture,” Amnesty’s senior legal advisor, Matt Pollard said. And for those who just love criticising my Tanzanian brothers whenever there is a disagreement on any EAC protocol, I think I should end this piece by letting you know that Tanzania finally signed a crucial report to fast-track the East African Community after its complaints were addressed by the 13th Heads of State summit in Bujumbura. Happy 50th independence to all Tanzanians. Email: ssenyonga@gmail.comBlog: www.ssenyonga.wordpress.comTwitter: @ssojo81