Kenya’s new leader wanted in the Hague for war crimes

Uhuru Kenyatta, the son of Kenya’s founding president, has taken up his father’s mantle to become head of state despite facing international charges of crimes against humanity over election violence five years ago.
Uhuru, meaning “freedom”, and Kenyatta, the “light of Kenya” in Swahili, carries his country’s aspirations in his name, but brings with him controversy.
Kenyatta, 51, and his deputy William Ruto, 46, face trial in the International Criminal Court (ICC) for crimes against humanity over their alleged role in having orchestrated 2007-08 post-election unrest.
Last month Kenya’s Supreme Court ruled that the March 4 polls were valid, with Kenyatta sworn into office as the country’s fourth president at a ceremony Tuesday.
He was born in 1961 shortly after the release of his father Jomo Kenyatta from nearly 10 years’ incarceration by British colonial forces, and two years before Kenya’s independence.
Fifty years on, the outgoing deputy prime minister and former finance minister is one of Kenya’s richest and most powerful men, with the Kenyatta family owning vast swathes of some of the country’s richest lands.

The Kenyatta family business empire also includes major banking and media interests as well as Kenya’s main dairy business.
Educated in the United States at the elite Amherst College, where he studied political science and economics, he is viewed as the top political leader of the Kikuyu people, Kenya’s largest tribe making up some 17 percent of the population.
However, he also appeals to Kenyans from different ethnic backgrounds, able to mingle not only with the elite he was born into but also with the average Kenyan, cracking jokes using local street slang.
With permanent heavy bags beneath his eyes and well dressed in pin-stripe business suits, Kenyatta exudes an image of power and entitlement.
But while a leaked 2009 US diplomatic cable described him as “bright and charming, even charismatic”, it also noted that he “drinks too much and is not a hard worker”.
In the 1990s, he joined with the sons of other independence heroes to call for reform but gradually drew closer to autocratic former president Daniel arap Moi.
“He went into politics partly because Moi asked him to, and probably because it was a good way to protect his family’s interests at a time of political transition,” said Daniel Branch, a professor at Britain’s Warwick University.
“Until recently, politics never mattered as much personally for Kenyatta as for Raila,” he added, referring to his key rival he beat in the election, outgoing Prime Minister Raila Odinga.