Date: Sat, 9 Feb 2008     22:49:32 -0500
 

On February 7^th  2008, the United States Senate Foreign Relations Committee held a hearing titled “The Immediate and Underlying Causes andConsequences of Kenya’s Flawed Election”. This timely hearing
was chaired by the astute Senator Russ Feingold D-WI who, along withother committee Senators, made incisive queries of a number of American witnesses. The hearing resulted in a formal measure supporting a peaceful resolution of the current crisis in Kenya.

For readers who may be unacquainted, the people of Kenya have been painstakingly forging a nascent democracy over the past several decades. National elections were held on December 27^th 2007 after an unprecedented peaceful and vigorous campaign season. There was real hope for the entrenchment of robust democracy by way of free and fair elections.

This was tragically not to be, for in the 11^th hour, during vote-tallying, evidence of blatant and widespread rigging became exposed. A pre-meditated plan by the Kenyan government to outright steal the vote was enacted in front of the whole world. In fact, numerous international observers and official bodies have
roundly pointed to a flawed vote-tallying process. The result has been a discredited election that saw  incumbent Mr. Mwai Kibaki surreptitiously sworn in under the cover of secrecy and darkness, and the immediate, pre-meditated repression of civil liberties by a widespread lethal police crackdown on freedoms of speech, media and public assembly.

What has followed is truly horrific. Kenya has been convulsed by rioting in direct response both to the theft of votes as well as to the brutal police crackdown on anticipated protests; a crackdown which has included a
‘shoot-to-kill’ order toward unarmed protesters (Kenyans do not enjoy a right to bear arms as Americans do). The immediate post-election reaction by Kenyans has been one of outright rage at the blatant theft of their precious vote. This rage, and the lethal police suppression of it, has spiraled into the uncorking of
deep-seated land grievances and related ethnic rivalries.

The simplistic “tribal clashes” aphorism that has been imposed by Western media to neatly explain away the complex emotions being vented by Kenyans of all walks of life should be dispelled lest it become a self-fulfilling
prophecy. The facts are actually to the contrary. The poor of Kenya of all ethnic identities are the foot soldiers of a disenfranchised majority, and have taken to the streets to voice their disgust with a government which has robbed them of their barely realized liberty. It is the secondary action of a few shadowy nefarious characters, which has exploited the unstable situation to egg-on atavistic tendencies of impressionable youth to rally around parochial tribal identities.

In the meantime, the United States’ State Department and Embassy in Nairobi have been thrust into the role of attempting an honest brokerage between the protagonists the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) opposition, and Party of National Unity (PNU) government. This brokerage has had the somewhat nebulous aim of restoring peace, and resolving ‘the post-election violence.’

As a result, in an attempt to be even-handed, the U.S Ambassador to Kenya Mr. Michael Ranneberger proclaimed that “There is ample evidence of rigging on both sides.” The folly of this position is that there is actually no evidence at all of rigging by the opposition. This is because the opposition could not steal the vote even if it had wanted to; the partisan state apparatus has menacingly controlled the voting process
from an early beginning to the extreme end. In fact, on multiple levels, including the personnel appointments of the duplicitous Electoral Commission of Kenya, all organs of Kenyan government are directly dominated by Mr. Kibaki’s imperial presidency.

Mr. Ranneberger should have called squarely the uneven hand of the government which has buried Kenya in its reckless house of cards. The government PNU can and did steal votes- on the order of at least hundreds of thousands and probably over one million in an electorate of but 9 million, in order to tip the balance in favor of PNU’s unpopular Mr. Kibaki.
The evidence of this government orchestrated rigging has been openly put before Mr. Kofi Annan who is currently in Nairobi attempting feverishly to mediate dialogue between the leadership of the two parties. In the meantime, those who have the least to lose, mainly dwellers of Nairobi’s informal settlements, and poor country farmers and peasants, are caught up in an escalating cycle of violence characterized by the widespread killings of unarmed civilians by paramilitary police, murders of neighbors in heretofore
peaceable communities, then revenge killings, all of which continue with impunity.

The problem for the United States, is how and where to take a stand on the Kenyan post-election crisis. In order to articulate the import of such a stand, it is useful to recall Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s maxim “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” This maxim should not be dismissed as a trite feel-good adage, if only for the mere fact that we currently have soldiers foisting democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq in order to preserve a fragile terrorism-free security on our own home front. The central problem with Mr. Ranneberger’s well-meaning proclamation is that he sacrificed the defense of justice, for the expediency of trying to equalize an unequal peace. This is problematic because, invoking Dr. King once more, “True peace is not merely the absence of tension: it is the presence of justice.” Seemingly similar, distinguishing between a True Peace and an unequal peace is crucial for Kenya. With True Peace there is justice; in an unequal peace there is not. The mediated settlement the Kenyan opposition ODM has demanded is in fact one predicated explicitly on political justice, and therefore would lead to a True Peace if extolled by all. The government, through guile and
not-so-clever manipulation of repressive instruments of power freely at its disposal, will try to force an unequal peace. As an example, the recent shocking murder of two opposition members of parliament
has now reduced the hard-won opposition ODM majority in parliament.
The government line on these political murders (which have a long precedence in recent Kenyan history) is that one is ‘merely unexplained’ and the other ‘the result of a love triangle’. In the second murder, the lecherous government propaganda machine shows that it does not even leave its own unscathed. The murderous culprit of this obtusely angled fairy-tale turns out to be none other than a shoot-to-kill-loving policeman, as so witlessly confessed by the government police boss himself.

Notwithstanding the direct and insurmountable evidence of unjust election rigging by government agents, there is conversely equally compelling circumstantial evidence supporting the opposition’s contention that
veritable justice must be a central deliberate outcome of any mediated negotiation. This circumstantial evidence exists most powerfully as the telling convergence of now official conclusions by the US, EU and Canada, with the longstanding platform manifesto of the ODM: that the traditional framework of Kenyan government as enshrined in its neocolonial constitution, and as defiled by the wanton corruption of its likeminded oligarchs, is inherently undemocratic. Even the weak-minded United States Bureau of African
Affairs Assistant Secretary of State, Dr. Jendayi Frazer, testified February 7th at Senator Feingold’s hearing that Kenya is in bad need of radical constitutional and other institutional reform. All other civil society American witnesses who testified at this same hearing re-iterated the fundamental problem of Kenya’s tyrannical constitution which preserves an imperial presidency without independent checks and balances.

ODM presidential candidate Mr. Raila Odinga had campaigned on an open platform of bringing a new
constitution to bear within six months. Such a constitution, known colloquially in Kenya as the Bomas Draft, had already been authored by eminent persons from across the political divide and has been eagerly awaited enactment by a savvy majority of Kenyans. This new constitution has as its pillar the devolution of power from the presidency and creation of the necessary political spaces to accommodate all of Kenya’s varied and deserving communities. Of course, its enactment has been heartlessly stymied by the greedy cronies of Mr. Kibaki’s government.

America has a special historical role in championing freedom and democracy both at home and all around the world. The great American Martin Luther King Jr. was prescient in his perseverating sensation that the cause of justice must be the bedrock upon which peace is lastingly unfurled. I hail the resolute efforts of Senator Feingold to exact truth from Kenya’s treacherous predicament. He and his committee’s devotion affirm the
universal dictum that ‘suffering truth shall set us free.’ For Kenya, the distillation of truths from the poisoned chalice of the recent election has exposed immediate political, social and economic injustices. The corollary therefore is that directly addressing glaring injustices arising from the flawed Kenyan election is the
essential stand that will at long last set Kenyans free.

The voices for justice on this West side of the Atlantic and on that East side of Africa are finally synchronous because of the cathartic space that Kenya’s post-election crisis has loosed upon the world. Those of us who have
a conscience and are aware of the unfolding calamity in Kenya should see therefore that our fair-minded voices sound firmly on the side justice. We should for the sake of those in Kenya who, though corralled in the great Rift of their burning Valley, thirst first for the quenching stream of justice to wash away the torment of their fair, yet freedom famished land. Don’t just take it from me. The great Russian Novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who made the world aware of the Soviet Union’s great sin of Gulag labor camps, states it best: “Justice is conscience, not a personal conscience but the  conscience of the whole of humanity. Those who clearly recognize the voice of their own conscience usually recognize also the voice of justice.”

– Omondi