Page 24 - SEPTEMBER 2017 A ISSUE

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SHOCK AS KENYA COURT CANCELS
VOTE RESULT, DEMANDS RE-RUN
KENYA’S Supreme Court on Friday
ordered a new presidential election
within 60 days, in a shock ruling
cancelling the results of last month’s
poll over widespread irregularities.
Chief Justice David Maraga said a
majority decision by the panel of six
judges, with two dissenting, found that
President Uhuru Kenyatta “was not
validly elected”, rendering the result
“invalid, null and void”.
Supporters of veteran opposition
leader Raila Odinga’s wept and cheered,
utterly stunned at what they saw as a
historic ruling, after losses in successive
polls they believe were rigged, from a
judiciary long seen as compromised in
favour of the ruling elite.
Odinga, 72, hailed the “historic”
ruling which is a first in Africa.
“It is now clear that no one in Kenya
is above the law,” he said.
Maraga said the election commission
(IEBC) had “failed, neglected or refused
to conduct the presidential election in a
manner consistent with the dictates of
the constitution”.
Kenyatta, the first African president
to have his re-election overturned by
a court ruling, cheerfully took to the
streets to address supporters saying he
was ready to campaign again.
He slammed Maraga and his
fellow judges as “crooks” as he spoke
off the cuff, after earlier saying that
US-backed Syria force
US-backed Syrian fighters
ousted the Islamic State group from
Raqa’s Old City on Friday, bringing
them closer than ever to the jihadist
bastion’s well-defended and densely
populated heart.
Backed by US-led coalition air
strikes, the Syrian Democratic Forces
first broke into Raqa in early June
and penetrated its Old City a month
later.
On Friday, they successfully
Smoke billows in an eastern area of the
embattled northern Syrian city of Raqa
on August 15, 2017, as Syrian Democratic
Forces (SDF), a US backed Kurdish-Arab
alliance, battle to retake the city from the
Islamic State (IS) group
INTERNATIONAL / GLOBAL NEWS
while he disagreed with the ruling, he
respected it.
‘Kudos to the judges!’ Kenya has a
long history of disputed votes, election
violence and a lack of faith in the
judiciary’s independence.
“It was a surprise because the
trend in justice in Kenya is not good,
but this time justice has been done,”
said 39-year-old accountancy student
Donna Abongo.
“Kudos to the judges!”
“For the first time we have got
justice. They have stolen elections for so
long,” said fishmonger Lynette Akello in
western Kisumu.
The run-up to the August 8
election was marred by the murder of
top IEBC IT official Chris Msando and
opposition allegations that rigging
was certain.
Indeed Odinga and his National
Super Alliance (NASA) cried foul
shortly after counting began, claiming
the system transmitting votes had been
hacked, and that forms from polling
stations that were meant to back up
the electronic results were not being
uploaded.
The August 11 declaration of
Kenyatta’s victory with 54.27 percent
of the vote—with not all the tallying
forms in—sparked two days of protests
in the slums of Nairobi and Kisumu,
traditional opposition strongholds.
captured the entire historic district from
jihadists.
“Our forces today seized full control
of the Old City in Raqa after clashes
with Daesh,” spokesman Talal Sello
said, using the Arabic acronym for IS.
“We are on the edges of IS’s security
quarter in the city centre, where most of
its main bases are.”
SDF forces are in control of
neighbourhoods across Raqa’s south,
west and east—constituting more than
At least 21 people, including a baby
and a nine-year-old girl, were killed,
mostly by police, according to an AFP
tally.
‘Irregularities and illegalities’. It
was the third time in a row that Odinga
claimed he had been cheated out of
victory at the polls, after his losses in
2007 and 2013.
However, the protests remained
isolated and did not reach the levels of
the disputed 2007 election which saw
politically-motivated ethnic violence in
which over 1,100 people were killed.
In 2013, Odinga took his grievances
to court and lost.
This time he initially refused to take
the case to court but changed his mind,
saying NASA wanted the truth to come
out even if they believed they had no
hope of winning.
However, in a dramatic and
unexpected turn of events, the Supreme
Court agreed with the opposition
coalition.
Maraga said there had been
“irregularities and illegalities”, notably
in the transmission of election results.
He said this had compromised the
“integrity of the entire presidential
election”.
The court’s full ruling must be made
available within 21 days.
Election commission vows change.
Odinga said he no longer had faith in
says seizes
60 percent of the city.
IS, in turn, holds part of the north
and centre, where up to 25,000 civilians
are estimated to still be trapped.
IS’s prized “security quarter” lies
directly west of the Old City and is
home to buildings formerly used by
Syria’s government but now taken up
as bases by IS.
The Syrian Observatory for Human
Rights, a Britain-based monitoring
group, said the SDF was still locked in
clashes with IS in a small part of the Old
City on Friday.
Observatory head Rami Abdel
Rahman said that around 1,000
jihadists were still left in the whole city. to schedule”.
‘Sigh of relief’. IS overran Raqa in
2014, turning it into the de facto capital
of its self-declared “caliphate”.
The city was the scene of some of
the group’s worst atrocities, including
public beheadings.
The SDF advanced into the Old
City two months ago by breaching the
Rafiqah Wall, a 2.5-kilometre (one-
and-a-half-mile) wall surrounding the
district.
US-led coalition air strikes had
opened up two breaches in the wall,
September 2017 – No. 17 • UK & Europe Edition
the current election commission and
called for them to step down.
But IEBC chairman Wafula
Chebukati refused to resign, saying
he had not been implicated in any
wrongdoing personally, but vowed
“internal changes to our personnel”.
He called for those guilty of
wrongdoing to be prosecuted.
NASA official and lawyer,
James Orengo, had argued that
irregularities—including unsigned
and fake tally forms, hacked servers
and deliberate miscounting—had
affected around one-third of the 15.5
million votes cast.
But lawyers for the election
commission and Kenyatta countered
Raqa Old City from IS
which dates back to the late 8th century
when Raqa was briefly the centre of the
Islamic world.
“Control over the Old City—which
has historical importance—is a moral
victory against IS, which is collapsing
in Raqa. Its defeat there is inevitable,” Wall remained mostly intact and could
We didn’tSello told AFP. lose the
most important
historical element
of the Old City.
The wall is the
symbol of
the city.”
He declined to say when the alliance
expected to seize all of Raqa, but said
operations were proceeding “according
Syria’s antiquities chief Maamoun
Abdulkarim told AFP on Friday that
he “breathed a sigh of relief” when he
learned that IS had been ousted from
the Old City.
“Raqa was one of the Abbasid
Stunned supporters of Kenya’s opposition
rushed onto the streets of Kibera slum
and elsewhere across the capital Nairobi
to celebrate the court’s decision
that errors were simply “clerical”
mistakes and technicalities that did not
affect the outcome of the vote.
A report filed by the court registrar
found a number of errors in the 41,451
polling station tally sheets—known as
form 34A—as well as in 291 of the form
34B constituency tally sheets, some of
which were unsigned, not stamped,
illegible or lacking serial numbers or
watermarks.
In addition, the registrar’s report
found that the electoral commission
failed to provide full court-ordered
access to its servers, which NASA had
demanded in order to back up its
allegations of hacking. n Fran Blandy, AFP
NewsSeptember 1, 2017
capitals and it means a lot to us. The
end of Daesh there would mean the
protection of Syrian cultural heritage in
an historically important city,” he said.
Despite the damage, Abdulkarim
said he was reassured that the Rafiqah
be restored.
“We didn’t lose the most important
historical element of the Old City. The
wall is the symbol of the city.”
The SDF’s advance is the latest in a
string of setbacks for IS, both in Syria
and in neighbouring Iraq.
In Syria’s east, Russian-backed
government troops are pushing steadily
into the oil-rich province of Deir Ezzor,
where IS still holds key territory.
In Iraq, soldiers recaptured the
northern city of Tal Afar and the
surrounding region from ISon Thursday,
just two months after defeating the
jihadists in second city Mosul.
The fall of Tal Afar, located in
the northern province of Nineveh,
deprives IS of what was once a key
supply hub between its territory in Iraq
and neighbouring Syria. n Ayham al-
Mohammad with Rouba El Husseini in Beirut |
AFP September 2017