05/11/2023
On this day, 14 years ago, we headed to JKIA at 4am to await the arrival of then ICC Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo.
His mission was to establish the ICC's presence in Kenya over the 2007/08 post election violence.
His plane touched down at 6.20am and he was immediately whisked out from the tarmac through the cargo exit. We left the airport and headed to Windsor where his team said he was to meet the then Justice Minister, the late Mutula Kilonzo.
Little did we know that this was a decoy as he was taken to Serena where his advance team was meeting with Kenyan officials ahead of a 10am meeting with the country's leadership.
At 10.55am, Ocampo arrived at the Office of the President for the meeting.
And at the steps of Harambee House, after the meeting with then President Mwai Kibaki and former Prime Minister Raila Odinga, Ocampo announced that he would ask The Hague based court to open an investigation on the 2007/08 post election violence.
"So I informed them, in December I would request to the judges of the International Criminal Court to open an investigation and that is the process established by the Rome Treaty," Ocampo said.
He made this comment despite Kibaki and Raila insisting that the country was in the process of establishing a local mechanism to deal with the issues emerging from the various probes on the PEV.
This was the beginning of the Kenyan ICC cases that would eventually collapse and a love-hate relationship between Kenya and the ICC that would then expose the court's inadequacy to deal with crimes against humanity.
How the cases developed and eventually collapsed were a contradiction to Ocampo's bravado during his first visit to Kenya. The then Prosecutor had promised the victims of the PEV that he would be done with the case in the shortest time possible to avoid a repeat in the 2013 elections.
"We have so many reports saying the same, I think I have a strong case. We expect to do the cases in four, five, six months that is our sty