Intense debate: impunity or justice?

Everyone will remember the violence that broke out after the elections at the end of last December. Kofi Annan brokered a peace deal and the two contestants for President eventually agreed to a power sharing arrangement with Kibaki as President and Odinga as Prime Minister. Although everyone breathed a sigh of relief and most tried to pick up the pieces of their lives, there was still considerable unrest because of the unresolved lootings, burning and murder. Several thousand people are still in camps unable or unwilling to return to their homes.
But all the while two commissions were working. One, headed by Kriegler a South African, was charged with looking at the vote itself. He laid considerable blame on the Electoral Commission (ECK) whose members still refuse to resign. Kriegler stated he was unable to say there had been a clear winner because there was tampering with the vote counting on all sides.
The second commission was headed by a Kenyan Judge named Waki. He presented his report in summary to Kibaki about ten days ago. The paper has been printing harrowing stories and pictures that came out during this inquiry. There are hundreds of pages of interviews with over a thousand people, many of whom testified under witness protection. There seems to have been a lot more going on and the situation was much more dangerous than we even thought at the time.
Waki has named sitting Cabinet ministers and MPs as major instigators and direct plotters of the mayhem last January. (One of the submissions is that some meetings were held in State House itself to plan some of the ethnic reprisals) BUT these names are not in his report. They were handed in a sealed envelope to Kofi Annan to avoid the people in question from interfering with any investigation. .
What is more, all the evidence is in a safe at the UN and only Annan has the key and the combination, both of which are needed to access the material.
The terms of the report are these: Kenya has until the end of February to set up a tribunal and initiate a prosecutorial investigation. If it does not do so, the sealed envelope and the documentation will be handed to the International Criminal Court in the Hague for follow up, an indication of how serious the accusations are.
The debate is intense. Certain key politicians (who likely feel they are named) are trying very hard to discredit the report. Everyone is fearful because we all know that indictment of powerful regional leaders could trigger more violence.
The President himself at Independence Day last week seemed to hint at ‘forgiving and forgetting’. However, the tone of most articles and discussions seems to be that Kenya must end the cycle of impunity which has endured over forty years since independence.
One commentator says: "There is a real opportunity for us as a nation now to say a resounding ‘NO’ to ethnic violence by trying and punishing those who planned and perpetrated it. But the signs are not good.
Already there is political game-playing and horse-trading going on. And we are hearing the usual noises about why implementing this report would be such a bad idea.
... We are talking about people who masked themselves, formed mobs and then went out to attack others in cold blood. They hacked them like bits of meat, they raped them. They destroyed their livelihoods, they mutilated them...
Can we really look away and pretend none of this happened? It would be to our shame as a nation and would be our undoing. Justice exists for a reason, and we must exercise it to the fullest when faced with crimes of this nature. And let us detach justice from amnesty, guilt from forgiveness."
One of the delaying tactics may well be that a new Constitutional amendment will have to be passed to allow the investigation and prosecution to be conducted in Kenya. The tribunal to be formed will have Kenyans sitting but the majority will be foreigners. (Naturally there is already opposition to the concept of non-Kenyans passing judgement)
Most people seem to have reacted with incredulity when the University of Nairobi awarded Honorary doctoral degrees last week not only to Kofi Annan, but also to Kibaki and Odinga for the peace deal. Seeing that the Waki report seems to blame these two if not for instigating, at least for allowing the violence in January, they appear to be poor choices for honours.
It is most interesting to be observers at this evolution in the political structures of the country.