ICC to Probe Radio's Role in Kenya Violence

Tuesday, 10 May, 2011

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Robbie Corey-Boulet

Of the six Kenyans who appeared before the International Criminal Court, ICC, in The Hague last month— a line-up that included the country’s finance minister, civil service chief and former police commissioner — Joshua Arap Sang stands out because he is a broadcast journalist rather than a politician or official.

In a summons request filed in December, ICC chief prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo accused Arap Sang of planning the violence that followed the disputed 2007 presidential election and of using his radio show to help carry it out. Arap Sang hosts a popular phone-in programme on the Nairobi-based KASS FM radio station, which broadcasts to an audience in the Rift Valley in Kalenjin, a minority language.

In the space of just over two months, violence involving supporters of incumbent president Mwai Kibaki and Prime Minister Raila Odinga claimed more than 1,000 lives and displaced hundreds of thousands of people. It ended in early 2008 when international mediators brokered a power-sharing agreement between Kibaki and Odinga.

ICC judges in the pre-trial chamber have ruled that while Arap Sang could not be held to be an “indirect co-perpetrator” of the violence, there were reasonable grounds to believe that he had “otherwise contributed” to murder, forcible population transfer, and persecution.

This is the first time that ICC prosecutors have taken action against a journalist for alleged complicity in crimes against humanity.

The clearest precedent is with the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, at which three journalists were convicted of the genocide against the ethnic Tutsi population, and a fourth of inciting genocide. Radio Television Libre des Mille Collines, RTLM, was deemed partly responsible for inciting the genocide.

Prior to that, the last journalist to be found guilty of similar crimes was Julius Streicher, the editor of the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer who was sentenced to death at the Nuremberg war crimes court in 1946. He was convicted because he played a central role in preaching anti-Semitism.

In a March 2011 court filing, ICC Judge Hans-Peter Kaul said there was evidence indicating that on KASS FM, Arap Sang had “urged listeners to take action” during the violence. The judge said the journalist had used expressions such as “the war has begun”.

According to a Human Rights Watch report on the violence, KASS FM broadcast calls for the “people of the milk” — the Kalenjin — to “cut the grass”, or drive members of other ethnic groups, especially Kikuyu, from parts of the Rift Valley.

In a 2010 paper on the role of vernacular radio in the violence, Keith Somerville, a journalism lecturer at Brunel University in the UK, drew parallels between some of the language used on KASS FM and the coded messages employed by RTLM during the Rwandan genocide, when listeners were urged to “go to work” and target Tutsi “cockroaches”. But in an interview for IWPR he drew a distinction, in the Kenyan case, between what he called “intemperate and violent” language and excplit calls to expel or kill people.

During his initial appearance before the ICC on April 7, Arap Sang presented himself to judges as an “innocent journalist”.

In an interview for IWPR the following week at the KASS FM studio in Nairobi, he expanded on this, saying, “According to my own conscience, these are framed allegations.”

Asked to describe his reaction to Ocampo’s December 15 announcement of the six principal suspects, Arap Sang said, “I was really shocked, beyond any doubt. I didn’t comprehend. I was with this guy six days ago, and here he says I’m bearing the greatest responsibility for the violence.”

He had met Ocampo earlier in December at a forum for journalists in Nairobi.

Responding to allegations that he incited violence, Arap Sang said, “I don’t remember in my conscience saying things like that. I myself am a Christian. I do not advocate killing. The pouring of blood is not part of my life.”

Arap Sang says he was only doing his job as a broadcaster and believes that his freedom of speech is being restricted.

“It is a threat, because if you start taking journalists to a court like that, you will wonder where is freedom now? Where is freedom?” he said. “I was doing my job as a journalist of informing, educating, entertaining and all those kinds of things.”

Aside from allegations about the content of radio broadcasts, Ocampo’s summons request states that Arap Sang attended meetings, rallies and other events in the year before the election, and that in the course of these, he and two other suspects in the Kenyan case– suspended Higher Education Minister William Ruto and member of parliament Henry Kosgey — planned and incited violence and “distributed resources” to those who were to “physically execute the attacks”.

Arap Sang denies attending meetings of this kind, saying, “I am not a politician.”

Robbie Corey-Boulet is a freelance reporter in Nairobi.