Vanity as M.Ps plan to pull Kenyan cases out of I.C.C

Vanity of vanities. It is all vanity.

As Kenya’s top echelons of power depart for the Hague, Netherlands to fight charges of crime against humanity leveled against them by the International Criminal Court, Members of Parliament are running helter skelter, passing motions and preparing bills to stop the cases, in a last minute bid to withdraw from the international court.

It is gainsaid to say that their efforts are mere vanity and will not hold.

A law scolar intimated to this writer that despite the efforts to withdraw from the Rome statute, the legal provision that makes countries to be parties to the International Criminal Court, the cases at hand must continue to full trial, and their efforts can only be used to forestall any future contact with the Hague based court.

So, my million Dollar question goes;”What about the victims?”

Kenyan president and his deputy together with Radio journalist Joshua Sang, are facing charges of crimes against humanity and their cases have gone to full trial.

The International Criminal Court had given the trio a lifeline to be tried by Kenyan courts, and although the move was defeated in parliament where majority voted that the cases be heard at the Hague. It remains a surprise that the M.Ps now want to pull out three year later.

Perhaps reality has just given them a slap on the face and awoken them from their slumber, now that the full trial has started.

However, M.Ps allied to former Prime Minister Raila Odinga’s Orange Democratic Movement have vowed to reject, and rally some M.Ps allied to The Natianal Alliance side, the party that boasts of a majority in Parliament to support their causes in rejecting te bill on the floor of the house.

Pulling out of the international court raises serious questions on what will happen in future when the local courts fail to prosecute wrongdoers in case of a repeat of the 2007 post election violence, which claimed the lives of around 1000Kenyansand left hundreds of thousands of others displaced.

Kenya remains a highly polarized country and the events of 2007 can recur in an instant over a barrage of contentious issues dogging the population, from ethnicity to division of resources to nepotism and corruption, just what might happen in future in case one of these factors lead Kenyans to slit each other’s throats?

As we await the answers to the above questions, we hope that the trials will run smoothly and that justice for the more than 500,000 people who were displaced, and the blood of all those who were slain will be avenged, and that justice will be done, or will be seen to be done.

I rest my case.