humanitarian.info

I’ve just read “On the Brink of the Precipice: A Human Rights Account of Kenya’s post-2007 Election Violence” (.pdf, 169 pages, ~2mb), an ambitious report by Kenya’s national human rights institution, the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights (KNCHR) with the technical help of my alma mater No Peace Without Justice.

The bulk of On the Brink is a detailed narrative overview of the violence that occured in Kenya between December 2007 and March 2008. Whilst there is some discussion about the antecedents of the political crisis, the most solid stuff is in the analysis of the recent violence. Here, the authors slice the same source material different ways to give nuanced assessments of the violence through the lens of Kenyan criminal law, international criminal law, and Kenya’s commitments under international human rights law.

KNCHR find ample evidence of crimes against humanity, but note that they din’t find enough information to sustain the argument that these were in furtherance of any state or organizational policy. They also found that whilst much of the violence was motivated by ethnicity, genocide was not committed since “the intent was not to destroy but to create means by which to leverage political power following the disputed presidential election results.” The report’s standout recommendation for action is likely to be highly unwelcome, particularly now everyone’s friends again:

The Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) should open investigations on Kenya to determine who bears the greatest responsibility in the commission of crimes against humanity detailed in this report.

This is the fourth major outing for “conflict mapping”, the investigation methodology behind this report. In 2004, I co-wrote a similar report for Sierra Leone using the same method. Investigators take lengthy statements from a key persons in all areas affected by violence throughout the country. From the statements, data analysts draw out references to unique “episodes”, simple information about which is then put into a database.  Episodes can include a wide range of topics, from a source’s recollection of specific acts of violence, to information about gangs, troop movements,  public statements of local politicians, and other sit-rep style information. It also includes hearsay, or information about things that the source was not a direct witness to. From the 1102 statements collected by KNHCR in the early part of this year, 7500 distinct episodes were separated out and databased. From these, it’s possible for analysts to build a “low resolution” picture of a mass event, and identify its scale, severity, major incidents and overall dynamics.

This wide not deep approach is designed to look for evidence of policies, planning and systematisation, all critical to the judgement about whether patterns of violence can be framed as crimes against humanity. As Kenya is a State Party to the International Criminal Court, this is something Kenyan policy makers and activists must consider anyhow, but other information available to help them with this is likely too narrowly focussed, raw or detailed, to be useful to this particular decision. In this respect, conflict mapping is fit-for-purpose; at this early stage, attempting to individually investigate every incident, of which there will be tens of thousands, is not.

The immediate deployment of investigators across across a wide geographical area is a good demonstration of capacity which might help a national human rights instituation fend off attempts to marginalise it.  It also creates an immediate context to the severity and significance of criminal incidents, something that it is hard to assess as events are unfolding. The popularly known atrocities aren’t necessarily either the most sure-fire winners for prosecutors, or the worst things that have happened. This, and the mapping exercise’s rapid generation of leads, can help prosecutors later by giving them a guide to where to invest investigative resource.

The report certainly won’t stand up in court, but it’s not designed to, and it wouldn’t be possible to produce a document of that sort in anything like a useful timescale. This is designed to provide timely analysis as part of the complex decision making process of bringing to account those most responsible for the violence.  Framed this way, On the Brink may have lost a lot of impact due the long period of drafting. I hope the recent appearance on Wikileaks of an embargoed confidential annex to the report (.pdf, 59 pages, ~2.5mb) containing the names of 250 alleged leaders, planners, faciliators and perpetrators of the violence makes up for this.