Kenya opposition figure deported as judicial row intensifies
KENYA - Kenyan authorities have deported a senior opposition figure in a wide-ranging crackdown on political opponents and an intensifying confrontation with the judiciary.
Miguna Miguna, who had been held in police custody in defiance of a court order demanding his release, was put on a flight to Canada via Europe at about 10pm on Tuesday. The lawyer was in a dawn raid on his home in Nairobi. He had participated in a attended by thousands of people in the capital last month, where Raila Odinga, who leads the main opposition coalition in Kenya, was sworn in as a people’s president.
Government lawyers called the ceremony an act of treason. Three TV networks were closed down after broadcasting the ceremony. Two have since reopened. Fourteen opposition members have had their passports suspended. Judges ordered the authorities to free Miguna, but instead they presented him in court in a small town 60km (37 miles) from the capital on Tuesday, to be charged with “being present and consenting to the administration of an oath to commit a capital offence”.
The crackdown and confrontation with the judiciary comes three months after Uhuru Kenyatta won another five-year term as president in an election rerun triggered when the supreme court annulled the result of an August election because of irregularities.
Kenyatta won the rerun with 98% of the vote, but turnout was only 39% after the opposition boycotted the poll, saying it was neither free nor fair. Odinga dismissed the October election as “fake” and the supreme court was again asked to dismiss the result, but it upheld Kenyatta’s victory. The arrests and broadcast bans are a shock to Kenyans, who have grown used to a freewheeling media and irreverent political culture since decades of autocratic rule ended in 2002. Odinga’s supporters protested on Tuesday, blocking roads and clashing with police in the western city of Kisumu. A man was killed by a stray bullet after police fired into the air to disperse demonstrators in nearby Ahero, Miguna’s home town.
(The Guardian)