The journey to ending impunity in Africa is long, arduous and filled with all kinds of traps. This is the lesson that we are learning this week, as the diplomatic row between Kenya and Sudan continues, following a ruling by the High Court Judge Nicholas Ombijah that President Omar Al Bashir be arrested should he set foot in Kenya.
Al Bashir is wanted by the ICC for crimes against humanity including murder, extermination, forcible transfer, torture and rape as well as two counts of war crimes and three of genocide in Darfur.
Now the Attorney General is seeking to overturn the ruling, the executive and the judiciary are going head-on, just about a year after we passed a new constitution which among other things, was supposed to strengthen our judiciary.
Some may say that not enough is being done to ensure justice for the millions of Africans whose human rights have been abused in ways that one cannot even begin to imagine. For the ‘common’ man, as we are commonly referred to, the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, appears to be the knight in shining armour, the only thing that can help us to deal with a breed of political class that has run amok and forgotten what it once felt like to be ‘common.’ Just ask those Kenyans who named their children after the outgoing ICC Chief Prosecutor José Luis Moreno Ocampo. When the ICC got involved after the 2007/8 election violence, they saw a light at the end of a very dark tunnel. Six individuals, who are suspected to bear the greatest responsibility for the politically instigated violence, appeared before the pre-trial chamber in The Hague between September and October of this year. Some people might have changed their minds about him since then. But that is not the issue here.
Meanwhile, Laurent Gbagbo, former president of the Ivory Coast, is resident at The Hague, and his confirmation of charges hearing has been set to start on 18 June 2012.
Maybe after navigating the complicated path in pursuit of justice, what the ‘common’ man might get is a postcard from those who take a trip (sometimes financed by the state) to The Hague, or get a retirement package there. In the meantime, I guess we’ll just watch the drama unfold between Sudan, Kenya (Judiciary) and Kenya (Executive) and see if the new order that we fought for in the constitution actually works.
