Geneva: A vigorous dialogue after all

The reality is that politicians on both sides of the Grand Coalition and those in the national private sector that support and benefit from them, were implicated in the post-election violence.

The new alliances forming across the parties to the coalition must be seen in that light — they are not just in the interests of succession but also in the interests of impunity. So, how to ensure that the Bills, if re-introduced, will go through this time round?

The legitimate concerns of those individual parliamentarians sceptical about the prospects for justice through a Special Tribunal will need to be taken into account in any redrafting of the Bills before re-introduction.

In fact, much technical input had been put forward to insulate a Special Tribunal from interference and manipulation but was not taken on board. It now should be.

To cut the political ground from under the feet of individual parliamentarians seeking to evade justice, we must fast-track criminal justice proceedings for lower-level perpetrators.

The Attorney General has, for example, already publicly indicated that beyond the two most visible cases — those relating to the extrajudicial executions in Kisumu and the burning of the Kiamba church in Eldoret — another 154 cases are ready for prosecution.

As the CIPEV report pointed out, impunity for the electoral violence in the 1990s led us directly to this point. Continued impunity cannot be allowed — given the scale and speed of the post-election violence in 2007/8, we will not survive another round.

Many aspects of the response to Kenya’s crisis were unique.

On the humanitarian front, Kenyans contributed to the relief effort ourselves.

And the Kenya Red Cross, without the capacity to do so itself, took leadership of the relief effort, with all multilateral agencies and their sub-contractors falling in quietly behind it in support.

The African Union took leadership in a manner that was similarly unprecedented, again with other multilateral agencies falling in quietly behind it in support.

From the visit of the then AU chair to the visits of the Forum of Former African Heads of State and Government to the quality of the AU’s Panel of African Eminent Persons eventually charged with the mediation, the AU signalled its concern right from the start.

Kenya’s civil society also helped generate the demand for peace, truth and justice.

And Kenya’s private sector, including the media, also early on shifted from an initial concern about the continued movement and production of goods and services to a broader concern about the survival of the country through a negotiated settlement.

The result was a ceasefire agreement that also broadly spelt out the more long-term issues that needed to be dealt with.