Ruto lawyer, Bensouda clash over witnesses

Deputy President William Ruto and his lawyer Karim Khan (second right), outside the International Criminal Court during a break. Mr Ruto’s case started September 10, 2013. Photo/BILLY MUTAI  Nation Media Group

By MACHARIA GAITHO

In Summary

• In her opening remarks, Ms Bensouda referred to the withdrawal of prosecution witnesses as a worrying development that must be investigated.
• But in a rejoinder when he got to his feet, Mr Khan hit out at the prosecution for bringing what he termed as a shoddy case that was ‘‘crumbling before it started’’.

Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda and William Ruto’s lawyer Karim Khan got into an early tussle over the withdrawal of witnesses as the ICC trial opened Tuesday.

In her opening remarks, Ms Bensouda referred to the withdrawal of prosecution witnesses as a worrying development that must be investigated. She suggested that withdrawal of her witnesses and recanting of testimony was due to bribes, threats and intimidation; warning that investigations had been launched into what she said were ongoing attempts to intimidate remaining witnesses, which she called a serious offence.

But in a rejoinder when he got to his feet, Mr Khan hit out at the prosecution for bringing what he termed as a shoddy case that was ‘‘crumbling before it started’’. He charged that the withdrawal of witnesses was just an example of incompetent investigations launched by Ms Bensouda’s predecessor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo.

“We don’t want witnesses to withdraw, we want them to come and tell the truth without inducement or coaching”, he told the court.

He went on to charge that many of those lined up by the prosecution had been coached coerced by NGO’s and their false testimony taken up with investigation. He termed the prosecution case a conspiracy of lies and woeful inadequacies.

In an indication of how the case might unfold, Mr Khan on Mr Ruto side and the prosecution represented by Ms Bensouda and her lead counsel Anton Steynberg duelled over Mr Ruto’s role and character in relation to ethnic rivalries in the Rift Valley pitting the Kikuyu and the Kalenjin communities.\

The prosecution portrayed Mr Ruto as the anointed Kalenjin leader who up to 18 months before the 2007 elections was allegedly assembling an ethnic network, an organised criminal group, to seize power by violent means if he failed at the ballot box. Part of his strategy, the prosecution claimed, was to exploit historical Kalenjin grievances against Kikuyu who had settled in their traditional lands in the Rift Valley from the early years of independence.

Mr Ruto sought, she said, to shore up his leadership of the Kalenjin community by uniting the people against the Kikuyu who he allegedly preached must be ejected from the Rift Valley. For that purpose he founded a network comprising elders, community leaders, leading businessmen and politicians, retired soldiers and groups of youth who were armed, trained, indoctrinated and primed to wage war against the Kikuyu.

Much of the indoctrination, hate speech and co-ordination of the attacks, she claimed, was handled by his co-accused, Joshua Sang, who allegedly put at Mr Ruto’s disposal the ‘network’ of his popular Kalenjin language programme on Kass FM.

“This man who hates Kikuyu, this ethnic cleanser…did the prosecution check that his two sisters are married to Kikuyu? Mr Khan posed.

He pointed out that Mr Ruto’s nephews from those marriages carry not Kalenjin, but Kikuyu names. “Was that fact not of interests to the prosecution?” he asked, pointing out that Mr Ruto gave land to his sisters and pays for their children’s education, yet he stood accused of plotting war against Kikuyus.

He also wondered whether the prosecution looked at the electoral list in Mr Ruto’s former Eldoret North constituency. They would have found, he said, that Eldoret was a cosmopolitan constituency comprising all various ethnic groups, yet he got the highest votes in Kenya.

He said that even a check of the security machinery in Eldoret would have shown that many of the top police chiefs and provincial administration officials were Kikuyu, yet Mr Ruto, an opposition MP at the time, was accused of holding large meetings and assembling a virtual private army right under their noses.

Even the person who ran the public address system at Mr Ruto’s house where plans were allegedly hatched before a large gathering to eliminate Kikuyu’s was himself a Kikuyu.

The prosecution had also displayed a clip of Mr Ruto being crowned a Kalenjin elder, to which Mr Khan retorted that even President Kibaki and Mr Raila Odinga had publicly gone through similar ceremonies from elders of the community.