Why Ocampo won’t spare Kenya

In mid-September 2004, Kofi Annan was a man under siege. The United States had launched a war in Iraq without the Security Council’s authorisation, severely undermining the authority of the United Nations.

Genocide was unfolding in Darfur. The UN and Mr Annan seemed helpless to stop it, as they had been in Rwanda and Yugoslavia years before. Journalists were at Mr Annan’s throat. Nicholas Kristof, the New York Times columnist, summed up attitudes towards the secretary- general:

“I hate to say it but the way things are going, when he dies, his obituary will begin: Kofi Annan, the former UN secretary-general who at various points in his career presided ineffectually over the failure to stop genocide, first in Rwanda and then in Sudan, died today.”

It was a cruel blow. Mr Annan’s response was to launch one of the most ambitious attempts at reforming the UN in its history. The results of that effort go some way towards explaining the rationale that Mr Annan used for his intervention in Kenya last year.

It also illustrates how far off the mark are those who think Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the International Criminal Court chief prosecutor, will not act against the perpetrators of the post-election violence some time soon.

The doctrine, which was endorsed by the review team Mr Annan set up, is known as the “Responsibility to Protect”. It recognises that states have the right to control their own affairs. But it also says that the state has the responsibility to protect its people, and when it fails to shield its citizens from war crimes, ethnic cleansing and genocide, that responsibility shifts to the international community.

Mr Annan told his biographer James Traub in The Best Intentions, Kofi Annan and the UN in the Era of American World Power that he bitterly regrets the failure of the UN to do more in Rwanda when he was head of its peacekeeping operations in the mid-1990s.

The UN failed again in Darfur, mostly because of the reluctance of major powers to commit troops. The endorsement of the “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine as a new human rights norm was an admission of the UN’s failures in the past, and Mr Annan hoped, a call to action for the organisation not to turn the blind eye to major atrocities in the future.

Kenya was the first theatre in which this doctrine was tested. Mr Annan arrived in the country with the clear message that claims to sovereignty rang hollow in the face of massive crimes against humanity. He achieved peace in the short term.

But he, like many others, understands that until the financiers of the gangs that killed, raped and looted are brought to justice, there can be no lasting stability. That is the context in which Mr Moreno-Ocampo is acting, no doubt with the tacit support of Mr Annan and major Western powers. He is, as he admitted this week, “one small piece” in a broad coalition of actors determined that the war criminals should face the law in an attempt to end the culture of impunity that strangles this nation.

The victims of the violence are lucky that, this time, their interests coincide with those of the international players pushing hard to ensure trials take place. They are also boosted by the fact that Mr Annan surely has an eye on his own place in history and is determined that the violence does not recur. Holding the warlords to account will doubtless aid that cause.

mmutiga@ke.nationmedia.com