Report praising IDP resettlement boost for Uhuru Kenyatta

A new report praising the Kenya government for the steps it has taken in resettling internally displaced people has been seen as boosting efforts by President Kenyatta’s administration to demand that the West allows the continent to tackle its own problems.

The report is compiled by the Permanent Representative Committee on Refugees, Returnees and Displaced Persons of the African Union and praises Kenya for mounting one of the largest efforts to resettle displaced persons in Africa. 

According to official figures, over 663,921 people or about 250,000 households were displaced during the 2007/8 post-election crisis. 

The government resettled about 303,466 displaced households over the last decade, a figure higher than the number of households displaced during the crisis because it took in other displaced people such as those evicted from various forests and water catchment areas.

The team, which was led by the Manuel Goncalves, Mozambique’s ambassador to Ethiopia, who chairs the sub-committee on displaced persons and Olabisi Dare, the head of the refugees division, however noted that Kenya was yet to sign the AU Convention on Protection and Assistance for Internally Displaced Persons, an observation which will be taken as a subtle request to the Kenyan government to join the convention.

The AU report comes at a crucial moment for the Kenyatta administration at a time when it has opened a multi-pronged attack on institutions dominated by the European Union such as the International Criminal Court, which it accuses of meddling in internal politics.

At the African Union heads of state summit, Kenya has been lobbying member states to sign a new statute that would establish a new African Court of Justice, which would have original jurisdiction over any suspected war crimes committed on the continent.

Writing in the Saturday Nation, President Kenyatta cast the initiative as an effort to insulate the continent from Western driven plots to weaken the continent.

“As Africans, we are obviously united in our desire to see peace and justice prevail across this great continent,” he said. “However, it is also our firm position that those best placed to tackle the challenges we face are Africans.”

AFRICAN COURT

Mr Kenyatta said he would urge fellow African leaders to adopt a number of amendments to the protocol on the statute of the African Court of Justice and Human Rights, which would establish the new court.

The President also renewed his attack on the ICC, saying Deputy President William Ruto’s case in The Hague was a threat to peace.

“It remains my view that the case against Deputy President William Ruto and Joshua arap Sang is an obstacle in the path of reconciliation in Kenya and is singularly unhelpful,” he said.  

During the summit, senior Kenyan officials including Foreign Affairs Cabinet Secretary Amina Mohammed have pointed to the report on IDPs to make their point that seemingly entrenched problems can be solved internally by Africans.

According to the independent Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), a web-based source of data on internally displaced people worldwide, Kenya and Mali were among the countries in which the IDP situation took a turn for the better in the last few years.

Meanwhile, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon thanked President Kenyatta on Friday for Kenya’s hospitality toward refugees.
The leaders met on the sidelines of the African Union summit in Addis.

“They discussed the security challenges facing the country and the situation in Somalia,” according to the UN’s account of the talks. The secretary-general also sought President Kenyatta’s views on the Igad-led peace talks on South Sudan, the UN statement added.
Kenya hosts more than 550,000 refugees in Daadab and Kakuma camps according to the UN.

Additional reporting by Kevin Kelly in New York