The arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) have brought back less than fond memories for many Kenyans. More than a decade ago, then Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta and his deputy – current President William Ruto – became the first sitting heads of state or government to actually face an ICC trial, having been indicted before coming to power.

Although both Kenyatta and Ruto chose to cooperate with the court – at least on the face of it – and attended their trials, eliminating the need for an arrest warrant, Netanyahu and Gallant are unlikely to make a trip to the country. The Hague soon.

Kenyatta and Ruto were accused of being responsible for the violence that followed the disputed 2007 elections, which left more than 1,300 people dead. The two were on opposite sides of the conflict and are said to have organized and financed ‘tribal’ militias to carry out killings.

To date, only a handful of people have ever been prosecuted for the killings, rapes and mutilations that led to the forced displacement of 660,000 people, and it was only after the Kenyan state proved unwilling to take action that the ICC intervened.

Similarly, when ICC prosecutor Karim Khan – who happened to head Ruto’s defense team – applied for arrest warrants for Israel’s leaders in May, he also indicated that he would be happy to delay the prosecution if the Israeli justice system shows any willingness to take action to take against Netanyahu and Gallant. “to participate in independent and impartial judicial processes that do not protect suspects and are not a sham.”

The ICC judges now agree that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the two are criminally liable for the many crimes committed by Israel against the Palestinians during its ongoing genocidal assault on Gaza. With an official death toll of over 44,000, Gaza has witnessed widespread killings, rapes and displacement, as well as mass starvation and the deliberate targeting of schools, hospitals and places of worship.

Many have complained about the seven-month delay in the issuance of the arrest warrants by the ICC judges, but Kenyans had to wait two years for the ICC prosecutor to send a request for an investigation and then another five months for the court approved it. . It then took another twelve months before the actual charges against specific individuals – six of them – were handed down.

By comparison, Palestinian affairs have moved much faster.

One of the reasons for the delay in the Palestine case was the numerous documents challenging the jurisdiction of the court and the admissibility of the charges. Much pressure was also put on the ICC by Israel and its Western friends.

There were Israeli attempts to intimidate the court even before the war started last year, with Khan’s predecessor, Fatou Bensouda, being threatened by the Mossad not to launch an investigation into Israel’s 2021 war crimes. Khan himself now faces charges of sexual misconduct.

It is noteworthy that few western countries came to Kenyatta and Ruto’s aid. On the contrary, more than a subtle hint was given to Kenyans that electing Kenyatta and Ruto would be a bad idea – that “choices have consequences”.

I’m not saying they should have resisted the duo’s charges, but there’s more than a hint of double standards here. It seems that there is a greater interest in justice being done if the people in the dock are Africans, and not just anti-Western.

That point becomes clear when you consider how the charges against Israeli officials have been framed in the Western press. The Guardian, for example, described it as “the first time a Western ally of a modern democracy has been charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity by a global judicial body.”

This story comes as a surprise to Kenya, which has considered itself a ‘Western ally’ for more than sixty years and which – after all that time regularly holding elections – can be described as a kind of ‘modern democracy’, whatever that means. may mean. Unless of course these are euphemistic descriptions of more problematic relationships.

Kenyans have a name for this kind of thing: the “mtu wetu (our guy) syndrome”. Whenever our politicians are investigated or – God forbid! – accused of crimes, they try to unite their ethnic kin around the idea that it is the “tribe” that is being targeted.

The mobilization of an imagined identity is a political tactic that is highly effective in deterring prosecutors and intimidating judges, both locally and internationally. ‘Mtu wetu’ is how Kenyatta and Ruto were able to avoid prosecution at home and then instrumentalize their control of the Kenyan state to undermine their cases at the ICC.

That is why the ICC was accused of ‘race hunting’ – of focusing on the persecution of black Africans, an accusation that conveniently ignored the fact that most of the situations the ICC pursued had been referred to it by African governments.

“Mtu wetu” is why Netanyahu today accused the court of anti-Semitism, suggesting his prosecution is an attack on all Jews. “Mtu wetu” is why Germany suddenly seems less eager to fulfill its obligations under international law, and why American politicians threaten everyone, even those in Canada and Europe who perhaps wrongly thought they would always be part of the tribe.

It is a sad irony that on the 140th anniversary of the Berlin West African Conference – which set the stage for the European colonization of Africa and subsequently introduced the scourge of tribalism to the continent – ​​the same irrational and totalizing conception of identity is being weaponized in the West to defend people accused of some of the worst types of crimes imaginable.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.