By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN,
Published: March 30, 201, http://www.nytimes.com, NAIROBI, Kenya — Kenya’s Supreme Court on Saturday unanimously upheld the election victory of Uhuru Kenyatta as the country’s president, dismissing allegations that the election had been rigged.
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The decision eliminated the last hurdle for Mr. Kenyatta to take office,
but it could leave Western nations with a serious headache. He has been
charged by the International Criminal Court with crimes against
humanity, accused of using his vast family fortune to bankroll death
squads during the chaos that erupted after Kenya’s last election in
2007.
American officials have already voiced discomfort about working with Mr.
Kenyatta, though most analysts say Kenya has become such a strategic
ally in Africa that the United States has little choice.
In front of a hushed courtroom, Chief Justice Willy Mutunga read out the
decision on Saturday, saying that the election had been conducted “in
compliance with the Constitution and the law” and that it was now up to
the Kenyan people to “ensure that the unity, peace, sovereignty and
prosperity of the nation is preserved.”
Mr. Kenyatta, the son of Kenya’s first president and one of the richest
men in this part of Africa (and also an Amherst graduate), was elected
this month, but the second-place finisher, Raila Odinga, Kenya’s prime
minister, cried foul and filed a complaint to the Supreme Court claiming
numerous irregularities. The dispute has kept Kenya on edge, because
the 2007 election, in which Mr. Odinga also lost, set off ethnic clashes
that left more than 1,000 dead and brought Kenya’s economy to its
knees.
The question now is: What will be the reaction? Mr. Odinga was scheduled
to hold a news conference on Saturday evening, and his followers seemed
to be waiting for his cue.
In Kisumu, Mr. Odinga’s ethnic stronghold, where more than 95 percent of
the people voted for him, the streets were quiet but tense.
“There is no violence yet,” said Kennedy Odede, a community activist. But, he added, “there are police everywhere.”
In downtown Nairobi, some of Mr. Odinga’s supporters smashed shop
windows and were chased away by heavily armed police officers.
Mr. Kenyatta has denied the International Criminal Court’s charges
against him, saying they were based on gossip. His running mate, William
Ruto, who is soon to be sworn in as Kenya’s deputy president, has also
been charged by the court with crimes against humanity, accused of
organizing young men to kill villagers during the last election.
The Supreme Court verdict caps weeks, if not months, of distraction,
anxiety, hope and dread across Kenya. The horrific memories from 2007
and early 2008 have been fresh in the minds of many Kenyans, like little
shards of glass, painfully embedded just below the surface. Many
Kenyans have feared that another disputed, ethnically tinged election
could detonate the same type of grievances and violence unleashed last
time.
In Kenya, many people identify very strongly with their ethnic groups —
speaking their “mother tongues,” keeping second homes in their ethnic
heartlands and marrying within the so-called tribes. When it comes to
elections, many Kenyans vote along ethnic lines. This often leads to a
sharp rise in ethnic tensions around election time.
On March 4, Kenyans streamed into polling places. The turnout was
tremendous, around 86 percent. Some people waited 10 hours on their
feet, without any food or drink, under a punishing sun, to scratch an X
next to their favored candidates. And this election was especially
complicated. The reforms after the disastrous vote in 2007 called for a
reinvigorated emphasis on local government, to minimize the
winner-take-all nature of Kenyan presidential elections.
This time, voters chose governors and senators, county representatives
and women’s representatives, casting six different ballots into six
different plastic tubs, spawning an abnormally high number of rejected
ballots, including ones put in the wrong tub, for example.
The actual voting was carried out in a remarkably peaceful manner.
(Although several police officers were attacked in the Mombasa area,
those episodes might not have been related to the election itself.)
But problems began to crop up almost immediately. A new biometric voter
identification system, in which voters were supposed to verify their
identities by a computer scan of their thumbprints, failed across the
country. In some places, poll workers were sent to rural areas that had
no electricity and given no spare batteries for their computers, which
died within hours.
Then, after the polls closed, a second computer malfunction hit. A new
system to transmit results directly from the polling places to election
headquarters in Nairobi crashed. Mr. Odinga’s side said it was a
conspiracy. The election commission said it was an accident. Either way,
officials had to tally the results manually, which took days and opened
up more possibilities for fraud. The Supreme Court itself discovered
dozens of errors and discrepancies in the vote tallying after it ordered
an audit of some results.
Kenya remained anxious but peaceful while all this was being sorted out.
Mr. Odinga, Mr. Kenyatta and other leaders of all stripes urged their
followers not to riot or protest. The national police service banned any
protests. Television and radio stations played peace messages around
the clock, telling Kenyans to accept the results, no matter how
disappointed they were.
In court, Mr. Odinga’s lawyers attacked the election commission, saying
that it had committed “grave errors” and that the election needed to be
rerun. The commission fired back, saying that “in every election, votes get stolen” and that Mr. Odinga was just being a sore loser.
Mr. Kenyatta’s lawyers did not dispute that there had been some
irregularities; they just chalked it up to human fallibility, saying
there was no mischief, no conspiracy, just “one or two clerical errors.”
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