Kevin J. Kelley
16 August 2008
Nairobi — Access to minutes of the mediation sessions led earlier this year by Kofi Annan has enabled an American journalist to reconstruct the closed-door process that led to the agreement to form Kenya's Grand Coalition government.
Writing in the August 14 edition of the New York Review of Books, Roger Cohen, a columnist for the International Herald Tribune and New York Times, recounts bitter exchanges involving Martha Karua and William Ruto.
Ms Karua, Kenya's Justice Minister, and Mr Ruto, now the country's Agriculture Minister, then represented, respectively, the camps led by President Mwai Kibaki and now-Prime Minister Raila Odinga.
Ms Karua charges during the February 19 negotiating session that Mr Annan is biased in favour of Mr Odinga's Orange Democratic Movement. She accuses the former United Nations secretary general of attempting to engineer "a civilian coup" by proposing that Mr Odinga occupy a prime minister's post with substantial executive powers.
One week later, with momentum in favour of that proposal growing stronger, Ms Karua angrily remarks: "The international community has pushed an agenda that has resulted in loss of life and destruction of property."
That assertion draws a sharp objection from Mr Annan. According to Mr Cohen's account -- which, he writes, is based on minutes that Mr Annan provided exclusively to him -- the former UN chief calls Ms Karua's comments "unfair and insulting to the international community and African leaders who have come forward to help Kenya."
Ms Karua is unrepentant, however. "We could have reached an agreement without outside involvement," she declares in response.
After five weeks of inconclusive talks, Mr Annan decided at that point that the deadlock could be broken only if President Kibaki and Mr Odinga personally and directly negotiated an agreement.
"I couldn't let them hide behind the mediators any longer," Mr Annan told Mr Cohen.
Only five individuals were present at the decisive meeting in Nairobi on February 28: Mr Annan, President Kibaki, Mr Odinga and the former and current presidents of Tanzania: Benjamin Mkapa and Jakaya Kikwete.
"Five elders for five hours and they got there," an Annan aide, Meredith Preston McGhie, told Mr Cohen. "All that was missing was the village tree. This was an African solution to an African problem."
The urgency of the situation, with 1,000 Kenyans having been killed in the post-election violence, helped convince the two sides that compromise had to be reached.
"If we'd had 5,000 dead, the entrenchment of displacement would have reached a point where you could never walk it back, and that would have laid the groundwork for genocide later on," Mr McGhie commented to Mr Cohen.
The shoulder-to-shoulder stance adopted by the African Union, the United Nations and the United States also served to persuade the Kenyan parties that they must achieve an accord or face international isolation, Mr Cohen observes.
Of special significance, he suggests, was the unequivocal support that the Bush administration gave to Mr Annan's mediation effort. "Co-ordination was particularly intense with US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice," Mr Cohen writes.
The State Department even agreed to have its draft statements on the Kenya conflict vetted by Mr Annan's team prior to their release, Mr Cohen reports.
"This was unheard of!" Mr McGhie exclaims. "I would give the statements to Annan and he would approve them before they went out."
The Bush administration, after initially expressing acceptance of Kibaki's claimed election victory, "became emphatic in backing the power-sharing accord Annan envisaged," Mr Cohen writes. "Washington gave Annan significant leverage."
There was no threat of US military intervention in Kenya, but it was nonetheless clear to President Kibaki that he had no viable choice but to accept the US-backed proposal to give Mr Odinga executive powers as prime minister, Mr Cohen indicates.
Ms Karua resented the authoritative role played by Washington and its European allies.
"Why are your countries superior to mine?" she asked Mr Cohen on February 27 -- the day before the deal was clinched.
"There is a class issue and a kind of racism in the world: I am a Kenyan minister and nobody listens to me. The election was not rigged. The whole world fell for propaganda. Why should Washington run the world?"
Mr Annan did sympathise with the Orange Democratic Movement based on evidence of election fraud, Mr Cohen reports.
"On the other hand," he adds, "there was also evidence that some post-electoral violence was co-ordinated by ODM agitators. Neither side was clean."
Referring to himself as "a prisoner of peace," Mr Annan said afterward that he agreed to remain in Nairobi for five weeks because of concern that Kenya could be destroyed as a nation.
"What was in my head," Mr Annan told Mr Cohen, "was that we can't let this happen to Kenya. We'd seen a lot of destruction in the region -- Rwanda, Somalia, Sudan, Darfur -- and Kenya had been the safe haven for refugees. And suddenly Kenya itself was going.
"I think we've learned that when you have ethnic violence, if you don't mediate quickly, you get a hopeless situation."
At the start of each of his negotiating sessions, Mr Annan would ask a delegate to the talks to lead a prayer, Mr Cohen recounts.
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