Try as one might, it is near impossible to sympathise with the plight of Messrs Uhuru Kenyatta, William Ruto, Joshua arap Sang or Francis Muthaura, who face the prospect of a protracted trial at The Hague for crimes against humanity. Should their trials proceed, and should they be convicted, and should they further lose all their appeals, the face the even grimmer prospect of spending a significant proportion of the rest of their lives in a foreign prison, cut off from their nearest and dearest and detested back home by the victims of the violence that roiled the country in the aftermath of the fiasco that was the 2007 general elections.
It is impossible to imagine how their families and friends will cope with such a result. And yet, despite these grim possibilities, one cannot feel sympathy for these men when thousands upon thousands of men, women, and children, the aged and the young, the employed and the unemployed, the rich and the poor, suffered such grievous harm - physically, materially and spiritually and the men and women that visited these violations upon them walk free, the Director of Public Prosecutions having done nothing in the months since he was appointed in 2011.
Messrs Ruto and Kenyatta did not suffer as the people that suffered did. Their families did not fall victim to marauding hordes of murderers, arsonists, robbers, burglars, thieves or rapists. Their properties, secure behind high walls, chain-link fences, and gun-toting private security agents, remained secure, while billions of shillings in low-income housing and the bric-a-brac of everyday life went up in smoke. Or was looted.
Their children have not suffered the indignity of spending four years living amongst hostile host communities, in fields, under tents without running water, electricity, with the sub-conscious (and frequently, conscious) knowledge that their lives and their safety are not in the hands of the much-reviled Provincial Administration or Kenya Police, but in the hands of politicians like Mr Kenyatta and Mr Ruto. Despite what the two, and the men and women that sing their praises, say about the state of reconciliation between ethnic communities in Kenya, particularly between the ethnic communities that reside around Mt Kenya and in the Rift Valley respectively, not a soul believes that the next general elections will not be followed by another round of blood-letting and score-settling between the winning and losing coalitions and alliances.
Every time the twisting and winding road to the ICC trial brings the four accused persons to a new stage, the callous way in which the suffering of thousands upon thousands is swatted away in an orgy of prayer for the accused, there are not enough tears to shed for the victims of 2007/08. What makes it a double-whammy into the solar plexus is the incessant images of men and women of the cloth completely forsaking their duty to be a source of solace for the lesser of this world and laying their hands upon those accused of some of the most inhumane acts this nation has witnessed since Independence in 1963.
Compound this with the manner in which their government, however imperfect it may be, has treated them. The Grand Coalition has used the plight of the homeless and the maimed as a plaything being fought over by two-year olds. It is shameful that for a Cabinet of over forty men and women, some of them very accomplished professionals, who have made their fortunes in all manner of legitimate, semi-legitimate and patently illegitimate ways, and who have on every possible occasion declared their solidarity with the victims of 2007/08, to see their plight persist, the promises of the government being forgotten, and the concern of the President and Prime Minister and their respective acolytes directed at the ICC accused and the ICC accused alone.
So it is impossible to sympathise with the ICC accused, with their high-priced lawyers, layers of professional security, billions in private assets, living in comfort and luxury while the men, women and children that suffered in 2007/08 continue to suffer. It is impossible to sympathise with Messrs Uhuru, Ruto, Sang and Muthaura when the victims' own government abandons them, refuses to restore to them their illegally appropriated property, and consistently demonstrates that its sympathies lie with the accused and not the victims. Since the accused have the sympathies of my government, one is not expected to add to that considerable amount of goodwill; one can only spare a thought of the families whose pain and suffering is yet to soften the hardened heart of their government.
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