NGOs take war with government to ASP

The Kenyan Government delegation to the ICC’s Assembly of State Parties (ASP) meeting currently taking place in New York clashed with Kenyan civil society organisations as they took diametrically opposing views on the court’s involvement in Kenya.

Kenya’s permanent representative to the UN Ambassador Macharia Kamau braved a diplomatic coup by a section of the Kenyan civil society groups, who had earlier on Thursday accused the Government of frustrating the ICC leading to collapse of President Uhuru Kenyatta’s case.

They also distributed a document illustrating the alleged strategy the Kenyan Government employed to beat the ICC in the case.

By the time Mr Kamau spoke about the “Kenyan position” at the 13th ASP meeting, the groups coalescing under the Kenyans for Peace with Truth and Justice (KPTJ) framework had already turned the tables against the Government.

The assembly is the political wing of the ICC, which meets yearly to review court’s work, legal framework and offer political guidance to the court. “Let me make it clear, Mr President, any state party, civil society organisation, functionary or staff of any institution, including the ICC, or any individual that professes anything to the contrary about Kenya, is perpetrating naked lies, is rumour mongering and is representing an agenda that is anathema to us as a State party,” Kamau warned.

He told the delegates attending the assembly that Kenyans are determined to “move on” from the events of the 2007/2008 post-election violence but are being held back by ICC involvement. He said Kenyans want to reconcile.

“Dismal effort”

Earlier on, KPTJ through James Gondi of African Centre for Open Governance (Africog) had told the delegates at a session on cooperation that the Kenyan Government had shown “dismal effort” in pursuing justice for post-election violence victims both in Kenya and at the ICC.

They said the government had adopted a policy of non-prosecution within Kenya and withholding from the court important evidence which would unravel the truth.

They said many witnesses had died in “very unclear circumstances” while others have disappeared without trace with others bribed, threatened and intimidated into pulling out. “If the court and State Parties can come under such pressure as we have seen in the last two years, you can imagine what pressure victims, witnesses and organisations working on promoting accountability experience on a daily basis,” Gondi told the delegates.

The group said Kenya had made extensive efforts to discredit the work of the court through a campaign ran by both government officials and individuals employed specifically to execute the campaign agenda.

But Kamau trashed it all during his presentation saying Kenya had done its duties under the Rome Statute well and that it only wished to enhance the philosophy of the statute through its experiences. He said Kenya, like other countries in the world before, wished to pursue reconciliation because ICC intervention will not solve matters.

He gave examples of the American civil war where Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson pardoned the confederate soldiers “as a step towards unity and reconstruction”.

“They took the long view, reasoning that reconciliation, rather than redistribution, would steer them away from the killing fields and towards the high point of the hill on which they rested the democracy of the US. I could have spoken of the Nelson Mandela and Frederick De Clerk and the post-Apartheid South Africa or taken examples from many parts of the world but the point would be the same,” he said.

Later, KPTJ distributed a document titled “Kenya’s 7-step formula for impunity” which irked Government-aligned delegates leading to spill-out of war in social media.

According to the groups, step one entailed what they described as “playing of jurisdictional shell games”, step two block investigations and prosecutions, step three ignore victims, step four disregard courts and established procedure, step five “rig the system”, step six harness state apparatus in anti-ICC war and step seven silence critics.

Ngunjiri Wambugu, a pro-government civil society activist with Kenyan Citizens Coalition who is attending the meeting chided his anti-government colleagues for “bad show”. He said what the KPTJ group did earlier in the day was evil.

“Clearly, Office of the Prosecutor is using NGOs like KPTJ to refer Kenya to the ASP through the back door after the court rejected the OTP request,” Wambugu wrote on tweeter.

The assembly ends on Wednesday.