Al Shabab has miscalculated

What does Al Shabab want? Like all terrorist groups, it wants to win headlines, to mobilise grassroots communities and to destabilise the state. On the first count, the attack on Nairobi’s Westgate mall has scored top marks. This symbol of the consumerist ‘new Africa’ that is exciting foreign investors presented a perfect hubristic target. As planned, the siege has monopolised media and social networks.

On the second count, Al Shabab has probably miscalculated. This raid may be the most horrific spectacular it has staged in Kenya, but it follows a spate of grenade explosions and church attacks that had turned the public against refugees fleeing war in neighbouring Somalia, as well as Kenya’s ethnic Somalis.

Once the Westgate crisis is over, a crackdown on this community is likely. Al Shabab, which has lost a series of towns in Somalia to peacekeeping forces in recent years and is fighting its own internal war, must hope this will push alienated Somalis into its arms. But it could well have the opposite effect, persuading them to turn the radicals in.

But it is on the third count that Al Shabab has truly failed. At times of crisis, as any New Yorker who lived through September 11 2001 knows, nations rally together. As thousands queued to give blood and donations poured in for the victims, President Uhuru Kenyatta took to the same platform as arch-rival Raila Odinga to broadcast a joint message of peace and unity. The hashtag on Westgate-related tweets is #WeAreOne.

‘We are one’ was the message from the international community, too, rushing in with condolences and offers of help. It is a promise of solidarity that both shores up the fragile Kenyan state and suggests rocky times ahead for the International Criminal Court (ICC). The raid coincided with the moment when the leaders of the government, only six months old and struggling to establish its credibility after a toxic election, began responding to war crimes charges brought by the ICC in The Hague.

It is hard to recall how divided the nation felt this time last week, as deputy president William Ruto sat in the dock in the Netherlands to face charges of orchestrating the ethnic strife that followed the 2007 general election. So febrile was the mood that the prosecution at the ICC decided its first witness must testify in camera.

Impossible position

The prosecutions have put Kenya’s allies and donors in an impossible position. On one hand, even western governments that have not signed up to the court see the need to end Africa’s culture of impunity. On the other, they are desperate to remain on speaking terms with a proactive African ally in the war on Islamic fundamentalism. Kenya has a 4,000 troops in Somalia.

With 9/11, the logic of the Cold War was dusted off by western champions of realpolitik, leaving democracy and governance agendas looking like unaffordable luxuries. By driving home the fact that Kenya, for all its faults, is a relatively stable friend in a dangerous neighbourhood, the attack has reminded the West why it needs Kenyatta and Ruto, whatever their misdeeds.

In theory, the logic of international courts is dictated by justice alone. In fact, the attitudes of Kenya’s donors will decide the ICC’s survival. By determining the consequences in terms of aid and global co-operation of a guilty verdict, a defendant absconding or a trial collapse — all possible outcomes in the Kenyan cases — they decide whether the ICC’s verdicts have any bite.

Since he stepped into the dock, Ruto has been trying to be excused from attending all the court’s sessions. The ICC’s decision to grant him a week’s leave to return home to deal with what his lawyer called “Kenya’s 9/11”, a first in the court’s 10-year history, will be seen by human rights campaigners as setting a worrying precedent.

Nothing could have undermined the court, or shored up an uncertain administration, as effectively as this terrible attack.

— Financial Times

Michela Wrong is the author of It’s Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistleblower.