Minister's court victory on ethnic clashes questioned

A recent court ruling ordering the removal of powerful cabinet minister Nicholas Biwott's name from a list of those implicated in ethnic clashes which rocked the country between 1992 and 1997 has raised questions regarding the independence of Kenya's judicial system, according to local analysts. Biwott, who is the trade and industry minister, had in November gone to court to seek the removal of his name from a judicial commission report, in which he was adversely mentioned in the clashes in the Coast and Rift Valley provinces which left more than 2,000 people dead and thousands of families homeless. The judicial commission, named after its chairman Judge Akilano Akiwumi, was set up in 1997 to investigate the clashes, but its report was not made public until October 2002, following intense pressure from the human rights fraternity. The report had recommended that 85 people, mostly prominent politicians, including Biwott, should be investigated for their alleged roles in the violence. Last week, however, the High Court said the commission had acted "against the natural rules of justice" by failing to call Biwott as a witness during its investigations. Biwott said he was "delighted that the truth has finally come out". "The truth must always prevail," he told IRIN. "If you are innocent, the truth will come out always. I have relied on the truth, the law and God. I am delighted that the truth eventually has come out." This was the fourth successive court victory for Biwott in the past two years. In 2000, the minister won a US $126,000 libel award against two Kenyan bookshops which sold Dr Ian West's "Casebook" - an account of the 1990 murder of Kenya's former foreign minister Robert Ouko in which Biwott was implicated. Dr. West, the author of the book, is a British pathologist who was involved in the investigations. In March this year, Biwott also won another US $252,000 from the publisher of the independent 'People Daily' newspaper over an article linking him to a controversial hydro-power project in the Rift Valley province. Another Kenyan bookshop, Text Book Centre, was in June ordered to pay Biwott another US $94,600 for distributing the "Rogue Ambassador", a book by former US ambassador Smith Hempstone, in which Biwott was implicated in the Ouko murder. "I am a principled man who believes in justice," Biwott told IRIN. "If I make a mistake, I expect to be dealt with like anyone else. If you want to know where my strength lies, it is because of my belief in the rule of law." However, Haroun Ndubi, who runs the Kituo cha Sheria [Kiswahili for legal centre], said it was wrong for the court to expunge Biwott's name from the report, especially after the judicial commission had been disbanded. Ndubi told IRIN that Biwott's successive court cases in the past two years were an indication that the minister was seeking to "sanitise" his name before the next government comes into power in January, after the 27 December general elections.