{UAH} On media and foreign policy, Raila is Kenyatta’s son and Uhuru Jaramogi’s - Opinion - nation.co.ke
|
2:19 PM |
No comments |
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 23, 2013
On media and foreign policy, Raila is Kenyatta's son and Uhuru Jaramogi's
The International Criminal Court (ICC) buildings at the Hague, Netherlands.
More by this Author
When the Nation's first editor, John Bierman published a report Jaramogi Oginga Odinga did not like about the Kanu leader's visit to China on the eve of Independence, the editor received a short call from Mr Oginga.
"Oh Mr Bierman, we will settle with you after uhuru." It was not an idle threat.
Shortly after Kenya attained self-rule, as we see from Gerry Loughran's history of this newspaper, The Birth of a Nation, Jaramogi launched a major assault on the media, with the aid of Information minister Achieng' Oneko.
Three British journalists were deported in short order and the words of Oneko rang in the ears of the media.
"When the time comes to exercise control over the press, no-one should come weeping and crying that the country was tough."
Kenyatta mostly ignored the media and when he was agitated, the president would issue verbal admonitions, such as when he told the Nation editor George Githii that he knew his mother and she would not have been impressed by his work.
Fast forward five decades and things have completely changed. Whatever you make of Raila Odinga, he is perhaps the most media-friendly politician on the scene today.
He swats aside even the harshest of criticisms because, as Miguna Miguna reported, his attitude is that any publicity is good publicity.
On the other hand, with their deep hostility towards an "irresponsible" media, UhuRuto are in that narrow sense at least heirs of Jaramogi and Oneko.
The shift is more dramatic on the foreign policy front. Kenyatta, the historian Timothy Parsons tells us in The Lanet Incident: January 1964:
Military Unrest and National Amnesia in Kenya, was exceedingly close to the British.
And the British valued their warm ties with Kenya so much they demanded that any country which wanted to offer military support to Nairobi had to do it through them. The Germans complied but the Israelis flouted the rule.
In return for allowing UK troops use of Kenyan port facilities and training grounds – and rejecting arms from Russia and China – the British promised that they would militarily back Kenya if its main enemies at the time, Somalia or Uganda, invaded.
Jaramogi, of course, was firmly in the Look East camp. Today, things have come full circle. Raila is said to have warm ties with the West – just as Kenyatta did – while Uhuru is racing eastwards.
On foreign policy and attitudes to the media, Uhuru is Jaramogi's heir while Raila is Kenyatta's son. Maybe they were wrong. History does not quite repeat itself.
***
I totally oppose the proposal by African states to pull out of the ICC – and we will regret such a decision in future when some warlord president unleashes mayhem on his people.
But it is also true that the power Western nations wield over decisions around the institution needs to be whittled down.
At around the time African leaders were meeting in Addis to discuss withdrawing from the Rome Statute, two Palestinian intellectuals, Raji Sourani and Shawan Jabarin wrote an opinion piece on the Al Jazeera website http://aje.me/17IUrqb lamenting that Palestine was being warned against joining the ICC by America and several European states – the same nations which were urging the AU not to pull out of the ICC.
The article quoted a Guardian newspaper report which said the UK told the Palestinians they would back a UN resolution supporting the State of Palestine as long as they refrained "from applying for membership of the International Criminal Court or the International Court of Justice, which could both be used to pursue war crimes charges or other legal claims against Israel".
President Mahmoud Abbas reported similar pressures from the US: "I heard from the Americans .... They said, 'If you will have your state, you will go to the ICC. We don't want you to go the ICC.'"
In summary, African leaders can be tried in The Hague but not Israeli ones. That doesn't sound fair. And the ultimate irony is that if Uhuru was looking for an ally that's hostile to ICC he might have been better served turning to Tel Aviv rather than the West Bank (!).
International politics is indeed a confusing and murky game.
Murithi Mutiga is a Chevening Scholar at the London School of Economics. mmutiga@gmail.com
0 comments:
Post a Comment