BY JAMES VERINI | MARCH 20, 2013
NAIROBI — For
now, Uhuru Kenyatta is the president-elect of Kenya. On Saturday, March 9,
after a week of suspense following voting, he bested his main rival and former
boss, Prime Minister Raila Odinga, who's challenging the results in court (and now claims, without
furnishing much evidence, that he won). This is causing a lot of handwringing among allies of Kenya's who make
human rights a centerpiece of their foreign policies, because Kenyatta is
facing trial in the International Criminal Court (ICC). In the violent wake of the last election, in 2007, ICC prosecutors allege, Kenyatta helped organize death
squads.
Before this
election, U.S. and European officials let out vague minatory noises about what
would be done if Kenyatta won. U.S. Assistant Secretary of State
Johnnie Carson warned, in what may have been the most
embittering and most meaningless phrase of the campaign, that "choices have
consequences." Kenyans have chosen. Now those consequences have to be defined.
What they may entail, beyond making a point of not phoning Kenyatta to congratulate him, no
one has said publically, but it's commonly agreed that the situation is
unprecedented. The West has had to deal with reprobates already in power, but
never has it suffered the anxiety of watching a man accused of crimes against
humanity run for and then win the highest office in a friendly nation (and with
British counsel). The journalist Steve Coll wrote in the New Yorker that "Kenyatta might well become the first
democratically elected alleged criminal on that scale in history."
That's not
entirely true. A quarter-century ago, the United States and Europe faced a
similar diplomatic tribulation. This one, closer to home, involved Nazis.
Peculiarly Mitteleuropean though it was in tone, it
provides an instructive precedent for what might be called "The Kenyatta
Affair."In 1986, Kurt
Waldheim ran for the presidency of Austria. Waldheim, who'd served as his
country's foreign minister and then secretary general of the United Nations,
was vain and unburdened by excessive intelligence (he once used his U.N.
diplomatic pouch to send soft American toilet paper back to Europe) but
otherwise seemed innocuous. Austrians, and most of the rest of the world,
believed he came with a reasonably clean bill of history. Waldheim had always
maintained that after Germany's 1938 annexation of Austria, he'd been
conscripted into the army, sent to the eastern front, invalided by a grenade,
discharged, and then returned to Vienna, where he sat out the remainder of hostilities
studying law and rubbing his shattered ankle. He claimed he'd never even
bothered to join the National Socialist party. (To see how well-practiced the
story was, watch this 1974 television interview.)
But for
years, rumors circulated that Waldheim was lying. In the U.N. archives
sat a
file, opened by its War Crime Commission in 1948, which said that
Waldheim was connected with a massacre of prisoners in the Balkans and
was wanted there
for war crimes. The file was mysteriously closed when Waldheim
considered
running for a third term as secretary general in 1980. As he readied his
presidential bid in Austria six years later, however, the file
reappeared,
along with other files from other archives indicating that Waldheim had
not
just been a Nazi, but one hell of a Nazi. He'd joined a Nazi youth
organization
three weeks after the Anschluss, then the Brownshirts, and then served
on the
staff of a general involved in the Final Solution, who was later hanged
in
Belgrade. In addition to the Balkans massacre, for which Waldheim was
decorated, he was, the evidence indicated, involved in the deportations
of
Greek Jews.The first
people to connect the dots were Waldheim's opponents in Austria's Socialist
party. They contacted a Vienna magazine, which printed the revelations. No one
in Austria much cared. So the World Jewish Congress, an international advocacy
organization, sent its general counsel to Vienna to investigate, and he brought his findings to the New
York Times. Confronted
by the paper, Waldheim slipped into the exculpatory-yet-incriminating ungrammar
that would constitute his responses to the allegations for the rest of his
life. "I regret these things most deeply," he told the reporter, and "it is
really the first that I hear that such things happened."
What
transpired next still astounds. Waldheim's opponents assumed that their
exposures would provoke international condemnation and force Waldheim to drop
out of the race (the World Jewish Congress gave him three days to fold). They were half right. Countries from Canada to Britain got in a lather. But they underestimated Waldheim's
glibness, and overestimated the national conscience. His opponents failed to
appreciate that Austrians, Hitler's real Landsmänner, had never seen the point in the paroxysms of
guilt suffered by his adopted countrymen the Germans. Many Austrian politicians
of Waldheim's generation had been proud Nazis, some with more appalling résumés than his. The president of
parliament, Friedrich Peter, had served in an S.S.
extermination unit
and had probably personally killed hundreds. As late as the 1980s, Austria was
lousy with Hitler nostalgists. These weren't thugs in black nylon and
crew-cuts, either, but everyday people, the satisfied children of historian Daniel
Goldhagen's willing executioners, if not the executioners
themselves. In 2010, I interviewed Neal Sher, who was at the time of the
Waldheim Affair, as it came to be known, the chief prosecutor in the Office of Special
Investigations, the U.S. Justice
Department division that investigates war criminals. Sher recalled a pair of
old Austrian women who, having seen his picture in the newspaper, approached
him in a Vienna café. He smiled and greeted them. "Judenschweine!" they hissed back.
Waldheim's
campaign managers, on the other hand, understood Austria perfectly. Even while
he denied the charges, they designed campaign posters that looked like National
Socialist propaganda. They warned crowds of a Jewish plot emanating from New
York. (At the same time, because of his years at the U.N., Waldheim chose as
his campaign theme song "New York, New York.") It worked. The Socialists
realized that every time they brought up the war, they didn't win voters, but
lost them. Someone, maybe from Waldheim's campaign, maybe just a fed-up
citizen, posted flyers announcing "We Austrians Will
Vote For Whom We Want!".Nor was the
indignation limited to nationalists. In her account of the Waldheim Affair in the New Yorker, Jane Kramer recorded that the
mother of the magazine journalist who exposed Waldheim -- a resistance fighter
interred at Auschwitz -- actually voted for Waldheim, because "of the hypocrisy
of the whole campaign" against him. Jews voted for Waldheim, too, including,
probably, Bruno Kreisky, the popular
chancellor who had included Holocaust-collaborators such as Peter in his
government. Kreisky was the soul of pragmatism: if he excluded competent
one-time Nazis from posts, he pointed out, he wouldn't have much to work with.
Kreisky was also tired of hearing about the past, just as most Austrians,
including Jews, were tired of hearing about the past -- just as most Kenyans are
tired of it today. (And if they had to hear about it, they certainly didn't
want to hear about it from the Americans, who in the late 1940s, it was well
known, had recruited Nazis, including some prominent
Austrians, to use against the Soviets.) No less than Nazi-hunter Simon Weisenthal
came to Waldheim's defense.
Waldheim won
the presidency handily. This presented a headache in Washington, which, it was
easy to forget, he'd often gone out of his way to help. In 1973, during the Yom
Kippur War, he'd acted as a shuttle between Israel, Egypt, the White House, and
the Kremlin (eliciting from Henry Kissinger the most un-Kissingerian sentence
of his career: "Thank god for the United
Nations"). In 1979, Waldheim had flown to Tehran
to try to negotiate the release of American hostages, and for his troubles was abused by the Ayatollah's drudges.Unluckily for
him, however, World War II was an inviolable canon for then president Ronald
Reagan. (Unlike Waldheim, he hadn't fought in it.) When the Justice Department
reached its conclusions -- that Waldheim had "assisted or participated in the
transfer of civilian prisoners to the SS for exploitation as slave labor, the
mass deportation of civilians to concentration and death camps" and "the
utilization of anti-Semitic propaganda; the mistreatment and execution of
Allied prisoners; and reprisal executions of hostages and other civilians" --
Reagan, whose sense of humor was always undervalued, did two things: He sent
Waldheim a congratulatory note on winning the election; then he added his name
to a list of people barred from entering the United States.
It was the
strongest international rebuke. Israel merely recalled its ambassador. Nevertheless,
Moscow denounced the Washington-Zionist axis, as did Arab League nations; never
particularly interested in Austria before, they now extended effusive
invitations to Waldheim. Pope John Paul II not only met with Waldheim but,
bizarrely, conferred on him a papal knighthood. He was followed by Vaclav
Havel, who, as usual, stole the show. Invited by Waldheim to address the
Salzburg Festival in 1990, the Czech president agreed, defying a tacit boycott
of Austria by European leaders. Havel spoke on the redemptive powers of
confronting one's past. Waldheim died
in 2007, never having come clean about his war record, even after more revelations emerged. Before expiring, he was,
amazingly, invited to Israel. He went, and without actually telling the truth, apologized for not being more truthful.What can Kenya's allies learn from the
Waldheim Affair? One lesson is that diplomatic isolation makes a nation's
internal neuroses worse, not better. After Waldheim, Austria went from being
unremorseful about its history to aggressively conflicted. It twice elected
Nazi apologist Jörg Haider to a governorship, and then imprisoned historian David Irving for denying the Holocaust. Something similar may
already be coming to pass in Kenya, where, after inviting in scores of
international observers and media organizations to cover the election, the
government, unhappy with the coverage, is threatening to expel foreign journalists. (Uhuru Kenyatta has accused the British government of trying to deny him the election.)
Another lesson is that while a proud nation
can endure its own shame, it won't abide the shame of others. That Kenya
received $875 million in U.S. assistance in 2012 doesn't make Kenyans feel any
more obliged to Washington's best hopes for them. Nor does the fact that Kenya
is a signatory to the International Criminal Court, while the United States is
not. After Carson made his remark about choices and consequences, there was
much talk about the new Kenyan friendships with China and Russia. Kenyatta's
sworn-enemy-turned-running-mate, William Ruto, who's facing charges at the ICC
for backing the Kalenjin gangs that battled Kenyatta's Kikuyu gangs, responded to Carson by saying "We know
that you have a stooge, a puppet. But now that you have realized your stooge is
going nowhere, you have resorted to threats." He was referring to defeated
Prime Minister Raila Odinga, and, though exaggerating for effect, he was
essentially right. Odinga was the candidate of the West, as well as of the
Kenyan intellectual classes, not just because he isn't indicted -- though,
according to Kenyan reports, he probably should have been --
but because he represented, they felt, Kenyans' only chance to confront their
past. Imprisoned and tortured in the 1980s for his efforts to reform Kenya,
Odinga evokes the tragic strain in its history. He sees himself as an essential
lump in the national throat, offering liberation through truth, if only Kenyans would agree to weep.
But most Kenyans don't want to weep. They
want to forget the past, as this election shows, not confront it. They didn't
care to hear, again, about the murders and evictions that accompanied the 2007
election, nor about the decades of grief that came before. Kramer
wrote of Austrian Jews in the 1986 that they "liked the euphemistic surfaces of
Austrian life," and the same can be said of Kenyans today. A nation of aspiring
entrepreneurs (and, like Americans, lifestyle-aspirants in the ballot booth),
they preferred to recall the theme of success in Kenyan history. Perhaps the
most telling summary of this election that I heard was a ten-second FM radio
service announcement that aired a few weeks before voting: "It's important the
youth remember Kenya is a brand," the DJ purred, "a brand people are
comfortable investing in." Nobody symbolizes the comforts of investment like
Kenyatta, maybe the country's richest man, through little effort of his own.
His family is the premier brand in Kenya.What
Kenyatta's foreign critics, like Waldheim's, failed to concede -- this may be
the most valuable lesson -- is that countries will confront their pasts, or
not, only on their own terms. In post-conflict societies, many public figures
have blood on their hands. Kenyans
are as aware of this now as Austrians once were. They can take it. What they
don't want is sanctimony. They'd far rather see defiance, even if it entails a
certain sadistic hypocrisy. So, like the Auschwitz survivors who voted for
Waldheim, Kenyans who saw family and friends killed after the last election
voted for Kenyatta, though they knew he may have ordered those deaths. No, because he may have ordered those deaths.
He allied with Ruto not to avoid these dark imputations, but to drive them
home. Though tribe was the watchword of this election, their alliance, and their
victory, was nationalistic, not tribal -- just as Waldheim's was. Their
unspoken but resounding message was this: Yes,
we killed. We killed for you, for Kenya. And we'd kill again. It's the most
seductive platform in politics.
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