Breaking news on Kenya!

The International Criminal Court in The Hague is on the move again in Africa. Coming fast on the heels of its laudable decision last year to issue an arrest warrant to apprehend Omar al-Bashir (head of the Sudanese regime) to stand trial for “war crimes and crimes against humanity” committed in Darfur, the ICC has turned its attention to Kenya. The court has empowered Luis Moreno-Ocampo, its indefatigable chief prosecutor, to embark on the investigation into the December 2007 post-election widespread violence in Kenya when 1300 people were murdered. It declares that “information available provides a reasonable basis to believe that crimes against humanity [were] committed on Kenyan territory” during the polls. Moreno-Ocampo had asked the court’s authorisation to investigate these murders because he believed that Kenyan “political leaders organised and financed” some of the killings.

For 44 years, African peoples have waited patiently, sometimes in understandable despair, for this kind of news report. The report is indeed extraordinary. Little did these Kenyan “leaders” believe that as they plotted and unleashed unimaginable violence on their very own citizens over elections that the regime and its allies had fraudulently organised and consequently rigged, they might account to some tribunal for perpetrating this heinous crime. The tens of thousands who survived the massacres and are still displaced from their homes and communities have waited anxiously for justice. They will undoubtedly view the ICC intervention as the beginning of this overdue process of restitution. Thankfully, there is no statute of limitations on pursuing the perpetrators of the crimes against humanity.
Until now, African “leaderships” have felt that they could murder any one, people or peoples tagged as “opponents” within the country’s population as ruthlessly and horrifically as they wished because they envisaged no sanctions whatsoever from their colleagues elsewhere in Africa or from the rest of the world. The background to this impunity was of course laid in Nigeria on 29 May 1966. On this day, the north Nigeria political, religious, business and military establishment ordered a janjaweed attack on Igbo population centres across the entire stretch of north Nigeria – killing, raping, looting, wasting and heralding the first phase of the Igbo genocide which would claim 3.1 million lives by 12 January 1970. The world stood by as these murders were committed. Even some major powers and transnational institutions of the time were either complicit in the genocide or supported it outright. It is precisely because the perpetrators of the Igbo genocide appeared to have been let off the hook for their crimes by the world that Africa did not wait very long before the politics of the Nigeria genocide state morphed violently beyond the country’s frontiers. Leaders elsewhere on the continent including Rwanda, the Sudan, Uganda, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Somalia Democratic Republic of Congo and Kenya particularly waged their own vile versions of liquidations of peoples, à la Nigeria, because they expected no sanctions as a result. The tragic consequence for Africa for not stopping these regimes, since 1970, has been the additional state murders of 12 million children, women and men.

The ICC’s next port of call in its Africa journey cannot but be Nigeria. This was where this infectious malady was incubated. As should be expected, Moreno-Ocampo is assured a very busy workload here. Many of those responsible for the genocide, pogroms and other acts of murder against the Igbo are still alive. Many are in their 60s-70s while some are in their 80s and 90s. A number of them are ex-heads of regime, ex-military and ex-police personnel, ex-civil servants, legislators, retired professors, businesspeople, even “diplomats”. Prior to the genocide, Igbo people were murdered in Jos (1945) and Kano (1953) for what were effectively “dress rehearsals” for the slaughtering of 1966-1970. Subsequently, the Igbo have been subjected to 16 planned pogroms/other acts of murder in Nigeria during the following years: 1980, 1982, 1985, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1999, 2000, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010. Lately, in the wake of a catastrophic strain in state hegemonic coalition, the Berom of the plateau central region have been targeted as well as the earlier destruction of the village of Odi.

With this historic ICC intervention, members of Africa’s “leaderships” (at whatever tiers of their regimes) who have murdered people/peoples in their country or are currently murdering people/peoples in their country or are in the process of planning to murder people/peoples in their country now know that they can no longer hide under the bogus rubric of “immunity from prosecution” or seek the protective “diplomatic cover” offered by a London or Moscow or whoever else as often occurred in the past. The world, even if belatedly, now demands and expects justice for the slain and the survivor from Africa’s states of death.