ISIS, BOKO HARAM, AND THE GROWING ROLE OF HUMAN TRAFFICKING IN 21ST CENTURY TERRORISM | BY LOUISE I. SHELLEY12.26.2014

The list of atrocities committed by ISIS continues to grow, with the latest being a chilling pamphlet that details the organization’s policy on treating the women they kidnap and then use as sex slaves. This is the latest account of ISIS’s dealings in kidnapping and human trafficking in which they target women and children, often from the minority Yazidi religion, and sell them for as little as $25 or keep them as slaves.

ISIS is not the only terrorist group to engage in kidnapping and trafficking. Just a few days ago, Boko Haram kidnapped 200 villagers and killed dozens more in Nigeria, further terrorizing the already tormented community. Indeed, human trafficking plays a growing role in the operation of 21st-century terrorist organizations.

Several years ago I gave a public lecture on the topic and mentioned a case that is in the first chapter of my new book, Dirty Entanglements: Corruption, Crime and Terrorism. The White Lace Case in Los Angeles involved women from the former USSR trafficked into high-end prostitution. Many of the women arrived in the United States as part of sports and religious delegations. In order to extend their legal residence in the United States, they had to obtain other visas. One of the leaders of this trafficking ring registered the trafficked women as students at a language skills school, thereby obtaining “student visas” for the prostitutes in her organization. The language school did not focus on providing instruction but instead was a visa mill. This same language school also provided visas to the 9/11 hijackers. In other words, the 9/11 hijackers and the trafficking victims shared the same “facilitator.” This facilitator was a point of intersection of crime and terrorism.

When I finished this talk, a government official approached me. He informed me that he was on a task force studying human trafficking and his role was to find the links between trafficking and terrorism. In his months in this position, he had not found a single example such as this. He asked how I found it. I answered that I had gone and talked to many members of law enforcement who through their investigations understood these links.

At that time, pre -9/11, the links were more subtle and had to be hunted down. But this case, already 15 years ago, shows that there were links at that time between human trafficking and terrorist activity even in the United States. Today they are more direct, especially in many conflict regions of the world. Yet policymakers focus nearly all their attention on more visible crime-terrorism links—primarily drug trafficking—and miss the important links between human trafficking and terrorist organizations.
Human trafficking now serves three main purposes for terrorist groups: generating revenue, providing fighting power, and vanquishing the enemy. For terrorists, human trafficking is a dual-use crime like drug trafficking and kidnapping. It not only generates revenue, but it decimates communities. As we see in Nigeria and Iraq today, trafficking intimidates populations and reduces resistance just as enslavement and rape of women were used as tools of war in the past.

Trafficking and smuggling are part of the business of terrorism, and constitute one activity in the product mix of terrorist groups. Terrorists smuggle drugs, arms, and people. Maoist insurgents in Nepal have exploited the long-standing trade of young girls taken from their country to the brothels of India to finance their activities. Evidence suggests that the LTTE smuggled Sri Lankans to finance their activities and the PKK exploited the porous mountain borders in eastern Turkey to facilitate human smuggling from countries in the Middle East and South Asia. Cells of the Ulster Volunteer Force of Northern Ireland received narcotics as payment from Chinese “snakeheads” in support of their smuggling networks. German authorities in 2006 arrested an Iraqi and a Syrian who smuggled individuals from their home region and were suspected of having links with the Ansar al-Islam terrorist network.

While trafficking and smuggling does generate revenue, they are not central money-making endeavors for terrorists and are committed primarily for other reasons. Pakistani terrorists buy children to serve as suicide bombers. Rebels in Africa trade in children to fund their conflicts and obtain child soldiers. More recently, Boko Haram shocked the world by kidnapping 276 female students and threatened to traffic them. ISIS members have taken young Azidi girls, raped and sold them off for trivial prices. The girls and women may sell for as little as $25 and sometimes even less, suggesting that this is not a revenue-generating operation when a million dollars daily is gained from oil sales. Rather, human trafficking, like slavery in the past, is a way of demoralizing the conquered.

Those not in the direct sight of terrorist groups may also become victims of human trafficking, even as they flee to safety. People displaced by terrorists are vulnerable to trafficking—both sexual and labor. Young girls fleeing with their families from the Syrian conflict today have been trafficked in Jordan and other neighboring states, just as occurred with earlier waves of refugees from Iraq. In Turkey, crime groups in border areas are exploiting the labor of Syrian male refugees who cannot find legitimate employment. Many more illegal migrants face labor trafficking in Europe as they flee the conflict regions of North Africa and the Middle East.

Human trafficking was once a crime associated primarily with a range of small to large crime groups. But as terrorist groups begin to function more as businesses, we unfortunately observe the expansion of terrorist groups into this criminality. Historically, conquering armies have seized inhabitants of conquered areas and enslaved them. But what is different is that traditional practices of the past have been combined with the business acumen of terrorist groups today. In their effort to diversify their revenue, they have capitalized on traditional practices to new advantage. Women and children are disproportionately victims, but they are not alone. Exploitation of trafficking victims may be most acute in conflict and adjoining regions, but it is not confined to these areas.

Pope Francis, in Christmas Address, Focuses on Children’s Plight | By ELISABETTA POVOLEDODEC. 25, 2014

Pope Francis on Thursday used a traditional Christmas address to emphasize the plight of children in areas of conflict, pointing out their “impotent silence” that “cries out under the spade of many Herods,” a reference to the ancient king who slaughtered all the male newborns of Bethlehem, according to the New Testament.

Vast numbers of children today are victims of violence, objects of trade and trafficking, or forced to become soldiers, and they need to be saved, he said.

The pope spoke of “children displaced due to war and persecution, abused and taken advantage of before our very eyes and our complicit silence.” He singled out “infants massacred in bomb attacks,” including in the Middle East and in Pakistan, where 132 children were killed in a Taliban attack on a school this month.

“So many abused children,” Francis said, in one of several off-the-cuff asides during the address, known as the “Urbi et Orbi” message — Latin for “to the city and the world” — that popes traditionally deliver to the world’s 1.2 billion Roman Catholics on special occasions like Christmas.

In calling for global peace and for an end to violence and conflict in the Middle East, Ukraine and parts of Africa, Francis went off script to denounce “the globalization of indifference” that permits suffering and injustice to persist.

“So many men and women immersed in worldliness and indifference” are affected by hardness of the heart, he said, calling for reflection and change. And he chided the Vatican’s bureaucratic machine in another address this week for losing touch with its spiritual side in the pursuit of power.

As Christians exchanged gifts and shared family meals, the pope’s thoughts were with the world’s dispossessed; refugees and exiles; those suffering “brutal” ethnic or religious persecution; and those held as hostages or killed because of their religious beliefs.

“Truly there are so many tears this Christmas,” Francis said from the central balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica before thousands of faithful in the square below. The address was also broadcast live on the Internet.

To underscore his closeness to those suffering religious persecution, a theme of his nearly two years as pope, on Christmas Eve, Francis spoke with displaced Christians who are in a tent camp in northern Iraq and told them that they were like Jesus. Many in the camps have been forced to leave their homes by militants of the Islamic State.

“You are like Jesus on the night of his birth when he had been forced to flee,” the pope told them in a telephone call broadcast live by an Italian Catholic television station. “You are like Jesus in this situation, and that means we are praying even harder for you.”

The pope also denounced abortion, and his thoughts turned to “infants killed in the womb, deprived of that generous love of their parents and then buried in the egoism of a culture that does not love life.”

In his message on Thursday, the pope said he hoped that the world would respond to the plight of the needy by increasing humanitarian aid, and he asked “that the necessary assistance and treatment be provided” for the victims of Ebola.

Closing the address, he called on Jesus’ strength to turn “arms into plowshares, destruction into creativity, hatred into love and tenderness.”

In Britain, the archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev. Justin Welby, the spiritual leader of the Church of England, pulled out of the traditional Christmas Day ceremony at Canterbury Cathedral because of what his office described as a “severe cold.”

A draft of the sermon he had planned to deliver, and which was released on his website, reflected on the temporary truce on Christmas Day in 1914, early in the First World War, between British and German soldiers.

“The problem is that the way it is told now it seems to end with a ‘happy ever after,’” the draft said.

It added: “The following day the war continued with the same severity. Nothing had changed; it was a one-day wonder. That is not the world in which we live — truces are rare.”

Nigeria’s global lesson for quashing Ebola | By William Wallis in Lagos | October 14, 2014

Bucking the regional trend & despite hurdles, Nigeria seems to have stopped Ebola spread.

When Liberian development consultant Patrick Sawyer collapsed in the arrivals hall of Lagos airport with the symptoms of Ebola in July, the initial reaction, both inside and outside Nigeria, was close to panic.

The fear was that Nigeria’s rickety, overstretched health service would be unable to contain the deadly virus. In a sign of the strains the system was under, Nigerian doctors were on strike for higher pay when Mr Sawyer entered the country.

Against the odds, however, public health officials say one of the world’s more chaotic nations has provided an object lesson in how to deal with Ebola. It is a lesson that could prove salutary for western governments scrambling to come up with their own response.

For public-health experts, the idea of Ebola gaining a grip in Nigeria – Africa’s most populous nation and largest economy – is a nightmare scenario. There are 170m Nigerians, eight times the combined population of Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, where the disease is raging. The country’s peripatetic elites and prolific traders have connections across the globe.

Yet Nigeria has quashed its outbreak – and is now just a week short of being clear of a live case for 42 days, the period required by the World Health Organisation before it can be officially declared Ebola free.

Dr Simon Mardel, a global specialist in emerging pathogens, describes the effects of the disease as a series of vicious circles. These attack the individual first and then the surrounding society, he says. On both counts Nigeria appears to have broken the cycle.

That outcome, far from assured at the outset, is the result of a rare national effort that saw the Lagos state government, federal institutions, the private sector and global non-governmental organisations all pulling in the same direction to defeat the disease.

Together they have provided hope at a time when public confidence in the state has been knocked by large-scale corruption scandals and the poor performance of the army in combating Islamist insurgents in the country’s north.

“President [Bill] Clinton, when he came here 14 years ago, said that from what he could see there is no problem Nigerians can’t fix if they get together,” says Dr Benjamin Ohiaeri, director at the First Consultants clinic where Sawyer was taken on July 20 and later died.

Like the current case in Texas, Nigeria’s outbreak was the result of a lone traveller entering from Liberia. Dr Ohiaeri’s clinic bore the brunt of the tragedy that subsequently unfolded and it was partly thanks to the courage of his staff in preventing Sawyer from leaving the premises that the disease did not spread further.

Eleven of his staff and their family members contracted Ebola, many in the 48 hours between Sawyer’s admission and the positive result of the laboratory tests. Four of them later died. But Nigeria got its act together quickly after that.

An emergency presidential decree enabled officials to access mobile phone records and empowered them to lean on law-enforcement agencies where necessary to track down people at risk. Thereafter, a strict system to monitor potential cases was put in place by the Lagos state government.

“They were very organised. They put resources into tracking down every contact. In the US the wife [of the first Ebola victim in Texas] was left for five days with contaminated material. Here they disinfected houses immediately,” says Dr Eilish Cleary, a public health expert on contract to WHO who has been debriefing the Nigerian survivors.

Senegal, which borders Guinea, where the current outbreak of Ebola took root, has been even more successful in containing an initial scare to just one case.

In total 20 Nigerians became infected, of whom eight died. Teams of state officials and volunteers tracked down more than 800 people who had primary or secondary contact with the Sawyer case. These included the congregations of two churches in the city of Port Harcourt where an infected man had worshipped, according to Dr Tochi Okwor, who runs the public awareness campaign in Lagos state.

In addition, hundreds of private clinics have been trained in identifying Ebola patients and keeping them away from the community until they are evacuated to isolation wards. A social media campaign set up in the wake of the first case by volunteer technology experts, manning twitter handles, web sites and helplines, complemented these efforts.

In the process, according to Dr Cleary and other top World Health Organisation officials, Nigeria has shown the importance of logistics and public information awareness on top of medical care in containing the disease.

Nigeria was fortunate that Mr Sawyer entered the country through the airport, into the commercial capital and straight to a top private clinic. The country could be far more vulnerable, according to Dr Mardel, if another case arrives by land, and ends up in a remote public hospital.

But if Ebola strikes again, the country will be better prepared. “People are determined that they don’t want Ebola in Nigeria. We could have had much higher casualty figures. But within weeks we would still have got it right,” says Dr Okwor.

Treatment: Rehydration seen as key for patients No one would guess that Dr Ada Igonoh recently emerged from two weeks battling Ebola in an isolation ward in Lagos.

Radiating good health, the doctor, who was infected at her Lagos clinic by Patrick Sawyer, the Liberian who brought Ebola to Nigeria, insists there is no magic formula or miracle cure to thank for her recovery. She credits plenty of water and her own determination to survive for her ability to defeat the deadly virus.

Her experience is consistent with other survivors of the disease in Nigeria – all of whom engaged in an endurance test of rehydration as soon as they were diagnosed, drinking up to five litres of a solution of water combined with rehydration salts each day.

“The disease knocks every system slightly. But when it comes to dehydration it is shocking. It takes you by surprise every time,” says Dr Simon Mardel. “Behind every survivor there is a heroic tale of rehydration.”

Dr Mardel, who has examined more Ebola patients than anyone, believes there are important public health lessons to be learnt from Nigeria’s survivors. He argues the case, in a forthcoming article for the Lancet magazine, that far more attention needs to be given to providing rehydration than is currently practised in the worst affected countries.

This means ensuring that patients are drinking a rehydration solution consistently during the early stages of the disease. Later it becomes much more difficult.

“With Ebola things multiply – they don’t add up,” he says, adding that if you miss a day of water, you have to make up for it the next with twice as much. “Changing this from an epidemic of fear to a disease that is treatable is central to defeating this outbreak,” he says.

The psychology of patients is key. In Nigeria, according to World Health Organisation officials, those victims who believed that only medicine from the west could save them, mostly died. Those who lived, would not have done so without simple H2O combined with salts.

“All of them decided to survive. Because they wanted to survive they forced themselves to take more oral rehydration solution. The mind has huge power over the body. That’s not talked about enough,” says Dr Eilish Cleary, the Ebola expert.

FT

What is the growth outlook in East Africa? | By Ke Wang, Nikoloz Gigineishvili and Paolo Mauro | Oct 8 2014

Figure 1. EAC and member countries, average real growth rates (%)

Figure 2. EAC: Sector shares and changes, 2000 vs. 2010 (average; %)

Figure 3. Number of export products

Figure 4. Sophistication Index, 1990 vs. 2010

Sustained rapid growth in many African economies has generated a debate on the sources and likely persistence of a so-called “African growth miracle” (see McMillan, 2014). The East African Community (EAC) countries’ have been an especially vibrant part of the continent.

Its economic growth performance during the past decade has been impressive. At 6.2%, the EAC’s average growth rate (unweighted, see Figure 1) in 2004-2013 is in the top one-fifth of the distribution of ten­-year growth-rate episodes experienced by all countries worldwide since 1960. Such performance is even more remarkable taking into account that the past decade encompasses the global economic and financial crisis that began in 2007.

Will this prove to be an isolated episode, with growth returning to lower levels in the years ahead, or is strong growth going to persist?

Figure 1. EAC and member countries, average real growth rates (%)

Outlook, International Monetary Fund.  Notes: For Burundi the growth series starts in 1997 to exclude the period of rapid contraction in the first years of the civil war. For Rwanda, the series starts in 1998 to exclude the genocide-related contraction in 1994 and the subsequent sharp rebound in 1995-97.

Informed guesses about medium-term economic growth are indispensable to policymaking, despite the economics profession’s abysmal record at forecasting turning points in growth (Loungani and Juhn, 2012). For example, economic growth is perhaps the most important determinant of whether a country’s fiscal policy is sustainable, and growth slowdowns have caused many public debt crises in the past (Easterly, 1991).

In a recent effort (Gigineishvili, Mauro, and Wang, 2014), we looked at more disaggregated information on the sources of recent growth in the EAC in order to help inform judgments about the sustainability of its growth in the future. In particular, we analysed changes in the composition of output and exports by economic sector, and various indicators of improvements in the quality of goods produced and exported by countries in the region. The extent to which developments in the EAC countries reflect a move toward more modern economic processes and outputs may be a valuable indicator of whether growth is likely to be longer lasting.

Our key findings are as follows:

•Correlates of growth. To validate the information from official statistics on output growth, we considered developments in correlates of production, consumption, and economic development, such as consumption of electricity, the mortality rate, credit, and fiscal revenues (Easterly, 1999). These corroborate the overall picture of healthy economic growth.

•Structural transformation in output. The trend decline in agriculture’s output share has been steeper than in the rest of Sub-Saharan Africa or in low-income countries worldwide since 1970. Using a newly-collected, detailed database for 2000-2011, we show that the decline in the share of agriculture was mirrored by broadly-distributed gains in a wide range of other sectors (see Figure 2). The biggest winners were construction, transport and communications, wholesale trade, and public administration. The shares of manufacturing, mining and utilities displayed smaller gains.

Figure 2. EAC: Sector shares and changes, 2000 vs. 2010 (average; %)

Note: 1/ Real estate & business services. 2/ Transport and communications.

Sources: Data assembled with IMF desk economists’ input; authors’ calculations.

•Rising international integration and diversification. Exports as a share of GDP in the EAC rose from 12% in 1990 to 19% in 2010. They became more geographically diversified (using a Theil index or the share of the top ten destination countries in total exports).

•Structural transformation in exports. The share of agriculture in exports fell from 4/5 of all exports in the 1970s-90s to 2/3 in 2010, with mirroring gains in manufacturing. Considering data since the early 1960s, exported products have become more diversified in all EAC countries at a more rapid pace than for the Sub-Saharan average, with a steeper trend since the early 1990s, using the Theil index or the share of the top ten products in total exports of goods. The sheer number of distinct export products has also increased substantially (Figure 3).

Figure 3. Number of export products

Sources and notes: UN COMTRADE, authors’ calculations. Number of distinct products for which export revenues exceed $1 million (or $10 million).

•Increasing sophistication of exports. The EAC countries have generally moved toward exporting more “sophisticated” products, defined as those predominantly produced by advanced economies. A “sophistication” index (calculated from COMTRADE data at the 4-digit SITC level using a method similar to Hausmann and others, 2007), rose visibly in all EAC countries between 1990 and 2010 (Figure 4).
Figure 4. Sophistication Index, 1990 vs. 2010

Sources: UN COMTRADE, Penn World Table, authors’ calculations.

•Improved quality of individual items being exported. Summary measures of the quality of exports (Henn and others, 2013) within each export category also indicate a trend toward improved quality for each of the EAC countries. Focusing on changes in the quality of the various export items, there is no clear rising trend, perhaps not too surprising given that most of the products are primary commodities or goods that involve limited processing. It is also worth mentioning that the quality is measured relative to trading partners, suggesting that the countries in the region are broadly keeping pace with, but are not moving faster than their competitors.

Putting all of this together

The picture that emerges is that recent diversification and structural transformation bode well for continued economic growth. Yet, the kind of growth observed seems to be one in which consumer and investment demands for more sophisticated goods and services are beginning to be met, as one would expect as per capita incomes rise in the region. There do not yet seem to be any clear winners on the production side that are likely to embed a clear and durable comparative advantage in international markets, particularly beyond the region.

Nor are there major quality improvements vis-à-vis competitor countries, where progress is also being made. These observations may instill a further note of caution against projecting continued rapid growth into the distant future (see also Ho and Mauro, 2014). Going forward, economic growth is likely to remain healthy but to slow down to a more moderate pace than during the past decade.

Published in collaboration with VoxEU

Authors: Nikoloz Gigineishvili is a senior economist at the International Monetary Fund, where he has worked for the past 11 years. Paolo Mauro is currently senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Ke Wang is an Economist in the Caribbean I Division of the IMF’s Western Hemisphere Department.

Image: Kenyan workers prepare clothes for export at the Alltex export processing zone (EPZ) factory in Athi River, near the Kenyan capital Nairobi, July 31, 2009. REUTERS/Thomas Mukoya

Kenyatta’s Hague speech: “God bless Kenya, God bless the ICC” | By Sophie van Leeuwen | October 8, 2014

Uhuru Kenyatta outside the ICC (Photos: Sophie van Leeuwen & João Pires/The Hague Trials Kenya)

Once again, the Kenyan national anthem has been sung at the International Criminal Court. After the ICC Status Conference ended, supporters of President Uhuru Kenyatta rushed outside to hail their leader in the rain. The Kenyan head of state held a short speech in front of a red-green-black mass full of umbrellas. 

”You’ve presented your evidence. Now everybody knows the truth,” Kenyatta stated a couple of minutes after exiting the ICC building in The Hague. He’s now the first sitting head of state to appear at the ICC as an indictee.

Kenyatta’s case seems to have completely blocked since the prosecutor keeps asking for evidence while the defense claims full cooperation. The ICC judges haven’t made up their mind yet, but the Kenyan visitors in The Hague believe the end of the Kenyatta case is near.

People were pushed back and forth in order to make space for the president on his way out. They were screaming and singing. While shaking hands, Kenyatta seemed confident about his ICC case. ”God bless the Netherlands, God bless Kenya, God bless the ICC and God bless you!”

Kenyatta also said in Kiswahili: „We all know how far we have come. We all know why we are here. We all know where we are going. Everyone can see there is nothing.”

As he made his way to his car some well-dressed ladies blew kisses at him. Once he was in his car, he rolled down the dark tinted window and waved to the crowd. Then he left to have lunch in his chic hotel.

Chairman James Mureu of the Kenyan Chamber of Commerce and Industry, who was also at the status conference, told The Hague Trials Kenya that he travelled on the same plane as the president. ”What happened today is bad news for our country. There is ongoing uncertainty, while foreign investors are only interested in a stable country. We want a clear outcome,” he added.

Some other visitors were disappointed. Kenyan student Mawailho, who lives in the Netherlands,  said that: ”we expected a verdict! After everything that happened, we thought it would be over. And now there’s another delay. They’ve left us again in confusion.”

Tonight Kenyatta will leave the Netherlands and fly back home, accompanied by part of the Kenyan delegation.

”Normally you shoot a bullet and then you hit. The ICC shot a bullet, and now the bullet is flying around and going nowhere.” That’s Mureu’s take on today’s status conference. He also indicated that he will be flying back home with Kenyatta.

Will the Kenyan president soon be a free man or not?

via HagueTrials

Hague Court Opens Kenyatta Status Hearing | October 07, 2014 | Lisa Bryant

Uhuru Kenyatta reviewing troops before addressing MPs. Photo: Simon Maina/AFP/Getty

The Hague-based International Criminal Court (ICC) has begun a two-day status hearing on the case against Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta. The Kenyan leader faces crimes against humanity charges related to his alleged role in post-election violence seven years ago in Kenya. Kenyatta is expected to attend Wednesday’s wrap-up hearing.

The first day of the status hearing at the ICC pretty much ended the way it began, with the prosecution claiming the Kenyan government was blocking access to key documents for its case against Kenyatta and the defense arguing it was doing its best to comply.

At the end of the two-hour hearing, prosecution lawyer Benjamin Gumpert summed up his frustrations.

“There has been no indication from the representative of the government of Kenya that they intend to adopt any of the measures, which the prosecution has urged upon them, and which in some cases the chamber has suggested they should adopt to overcome what they say is the impossibility of providing any more material. And as long as that remains the case, then we are, I would respectfully submit, deadlocked,” said Gumpert.

Kenya’s president faces five counts at the ICC for his alleged role in overseeing post-election violence in late 2007 and early 2008 that killed about 1,100 people and displaced more than half a million. Kenyatta says he is innocent.

Much of Tuesday’s hearing was spent wading through bureaucratic details as the prosecution described unsuccessful efforts to get complete records of Kenyatta’s bank statements, phone calls and tax filings. It argues these documents will help prove Kenyatta’s role in bankrolling and orchestrating the violence.

But Kenya Attorney General Githu Muigai said the prosecution’s demands were sometimes impossible to meet.

“We have come here today offering many alternatives, including requesting, like we have done before, for the prosecution to give us actionable information, material that can help us to access. … Please give us that information. We will supply whatever you need within 72 hours,” said Muigai.

This status conference aims to set a date for Kenyatta’s trial. But the prosecution says its case is faltering, not just for lack of key documents, but because witnesses have been intimidated to change their story or pull out.

The court has summoned Kenyatta to appear Wednesday, which will make him the first sitting president to appear before the ICC. He has temporarily handed power over to deputy president William Ruto, who is also on trial at the ICC for alleged crimes against humanity. Ruto also denies the charges.

via VOC

Kenyan president to attend International Criminal Court | October 6, 2014

Nairobi (AFP) – Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta said Monday he will go to the International Criminal Court, where he faces charges of crimes against humanity, becoming the first sitting president to appear.

“Let it not be said that I am attending the status conference as the president of Kenya,” Kenyatta told parliament as several lawmakers stamped their feet in support.

“Nothing in my position or my deeds as president warrants my being in court,” said the president, who is due to appear in The Hague-based court on Wednesday.

Kenyatta, 52, faces five counts at the ICC over his alleged role in masterminding post-election violence in 2007 and 2008 that left 1,200 people dead and 600,000 displaced.

The Kenyan leader has appeared at the ICC before, but not since he was elected president in March 2013.

He said he would take an “unprecedented” move to temporarily hand power over to Deputy President William Ruto — whose trial at the ICC has already began — in order to protect the position of president in the country.

“I will shortly issue the legal notice necessary to appoint Honourable William Ruto, deputy president, as acting president while I attend the status conference,” Kenyatta told a special sitting of both houses of parliament.

“My conscience is clear, has been clear and will remain forever clear,” he said, noting that he had “cooperated with the prosecutor to assist in establishing the truth at all material times.”

It will be Kenyatta’s first appearance as president in court, as he has repeatedly argued he needed to remain in Kenya to fight militants from the Al-Qaeda-linked Shebab group, and manage state affairs.

But he stressed he was going in a personal capacity.

“To all those who are concerned that my personal attendance at the status conference compromises the sovereignty of our people, or sets a precedent for the attendance of presidents before the court, be assured, this is not the case,” he said.

Kenya’s post-electoral unrest shattered the east African country’s image as a beacon of regional stability in late 2007, when opposition chief Raila Odinga accused then president Mwai Kibaki of rigging his way back to power.

What began as political riots quickly turned into ethnic killings of Kenyatta’s Kikuyu tribe, who in return launched reprisal attacks, plunging Kenya into its worst wave of unrest since independence in 1963.

The Kenyan leader’s lawyers previously asked that he be excused from travelling to the ICC, citing a summit in Uganda’s capital Kampala on the same day he was called to attend.

AFP

Gebrselassie quits race in Glasgow | October 5, 2014

Haile Gebrselassie quit the defence of his Great Scottish Run title 19 minutes into the half-marathon race in Glasgow.

The former world and Olympic 10,000m gold medallist seemed to be struggling and stopped by the side of the road before walking away from the course.

The reason for his withdrawal is not yet fully clear.

The 41-year-old Ethiopian won the race last year in the fastest time ever recorded in Scotland for the 13.1-mile half-marathon distance.

His time of 61 minutes and nine seconds was also a world age-group record.

Scotland’s Susan Partridge is bidding to retain the women’s title against a quality field.

Around 30,000 participants of all ages started Scotland’s biggest running event, which is televised live on the BBC.

Runners can choose between a 10,000m or half-marathon challenge through the heart of the city, starting in George Square and finishing on Glasgow Green.

BBC Sport

Kenya’s economy grows by 25% after recalculation | September 30, 2014

Kenya’s economy is believed to be 25% larger than previously estimated following a change in the way its size is calculated.

The recalculation means it will now be considered by economists and the World Bank as a middle-income country, rather than a low-income one.

As a result growth for 2013 was calculated to have been 5.7%, up from an earlier estimate of 4.7%.

It is now the fourth biggest economy in sub-Saharan African.

Nigeria, South Africa and Angola are the three biggest economies in the region.

Economic output was calculated to be 4.76 trillion shillings ($53.1bn; £32.8bn) in 2013 after rebasing, up from 3.8 trillion shillings, the minister for devolution and planning, Anne Waiguru, said on Tuesday.

Some of the most profitable sectors in Kenya – communications and property – were not considered in earlier calculations of GDP which used 2001 as a base year.

Authorities in the East African country have now changed the base calculation year to 2009 and revised the annual and quarterly national accounts statistics for the period 2006 to 2013.

Poverty levels

Standard Chartered Bank Africa economist Razia Khan said the recalculation confirmed “what we had previously suspected”.

“The economy has demonstrated good momentum and has been growing faster than the official data indicated all along. It fits with much of the anecdotal evidence available to us – still-robust business confidence and healthy private sector credit growth.”

Ms Khan said the rebasing lifted the average per capita income in Kenya to $1,246 “effectively meaning that the country moves to lower middle income status”.

According to the World Bank middle economies are those with a GDP per capita of more than $1,045 but less than $12,746.

While the recalculation is expected to lower debt levels and increase foreign investor confidence, analysts said the figure will change little for much of the population.

Poverty levels in the country remain at 45.9%, and life expectancy is at 61 years, as estimated by a 2013 World Bank report.

Several African countries have recently been reworking their economy figures, a trend which the Africa Development bank has said will show the continent’s economies collectively being one third bigger than previously thought.

Earlier this year Nigeria vaulted ahead of South Africa to clinch the number one position after it conducted a similar rebasing of its economy, placing the country’s GDP at $522.6bn.

BBC Africa

41st BMW Berlin Marathon | By Boris Streubel (GETTY) | BERLIN, GERMANY – SEPTEMBER 28, 2014

BERLIN, GERMANY – First place winner and new world record holder Dennis Kimetto of Kenya (C) poses with second place winner Emmanuel Mutai (L) of Kenya and third place winner Abara Kuma of Ethiopia on the podium after the 41th BMW Berlin Marathon on September 28, 2014 in Berlin, Germany. (Photo by Boris Streubel/Bongarts/Getty Images)