ICC accuses top Kenyan officials of 2007-2008 electoral violence

The International Criminal Court in The Hague on Wednesday accused six government officials of orchestrating the 2007-2008 violence in which 1,200 people were killed. The ICC stepped in after Kenya failed to set up its own investigative tribunal.

By News Wires (text)

AFP - The International Criminal Court on Wednesday accused six Kenyans, including the son of the nation’s founder Jomo Kenyatta, of masterminding the 2007-08 post-election violence that claimed 1,500 lives.

The Hague-based court took charge of trying key suspects in connection with the country’s worst violence since independence in 1963, after Nairobi last year failed to set up a tribunal of its own in line with agreements that ended the chaos.

Those named include Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Uhuru Muigai Kenyatta, the son of Kenya’s founding father Jomo Kenyatta, as well as former education minister William Ruto.

“Today at 11.58 the office of the prosecutor filed its document presenting the results of its investigation in the last eight months for the crimes committed in Kenya,” the court’s chief prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo told a press conference

He said the six including Kenyatta and Ruto “are the most responsible, but of course there are many others... We concentrate on the most responsible... of course; Kenya can decide to prosecute more.”

Moreno-Ocampo accused Ruto, a presidential candidate for 2012, of “preparing a criminal plan to attack ... the Party of National Unity,” and inciting violence.

“They immediately... began to attack,” he said.

The prosecutors previously indicated that the suspects were from or linked to the two sides of Kenya’s coalition government, formed after a contested presidential election and the ensuing bloodbath.

Under an internationally brokered peace deal, President Mwai Kibaki’s Party of National Unity shares power with and Prime Minister Raila Odinga’s Orange Democratic Party.

The ICC, which started operating in The Hague in 2002, is the world’s only independent, permanent tribunal with the jurisdiction to try allegations of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Kenya was plunged into violence after the December 27, 2007 general elections in which the then opposition chief Odinga accused Kibaki of having rigged his re-election.

What began as political riots soon turned into ethnic killings targeting Kibaki’s Kikuyu tribe.

They launched reprisal attacks in which homes were torched, people hacked to death and some 300,000 forced to flee their homes.