Death came in the dark of night.  On the morning of August 24, 2000, Mill Hill Missionary Fr. Anthony John Kaiser was found mortally wounded on the side of a highway in Kenya.  He had been shot with a rifle in the back of the head, not far from the truck he had been driving.  The truck had scrapes of paint of another color on the side, as if it had been hit.  Many in Kenya and in his home community in Minnesota assumed that he had finally been murdered for daring to speak about the rampant corruption in the Kenyan government.  However, the Kenyan police quickly ruled it suicide to the great consternation of his colleagues.  Pressure was put on the US embassy to investigate and the FBI sent a team over.  The FBI, too, ruled that it was a suicide, cementing what AFJN and many others considered to be a whitewash if not a cover up.  The authorities in Kenya were too important to the U.S.to upset over such a small thing.  Finally, seven years later, after a reopening of the inquest, a Kenyan judge has ruled that Fr. Kaiser was indeed murdered.  Much remains to be done to finger the killers, but at least the laughable conclusion of the FBI has been officially discredited.  Our colleagues at The Nation newspaper in Kenya wrote....

Within the field of conflict resolution and peacebuilding, there exists a question of how present the international community ought to be in negotiations. In a recent analysis from the Council on Foreign Relations, author Stephanie Hanson summarizes a number of approaches currently being taken on the African continent and implies that most “homegrown” peace agreements are unsuccessful. She suggests that African countries are “hunting for an elusive peace” and that without international initiatives, it is unlikely that conflicts will be resolved. It may be true that recent attempts at peace negotiations have been less successful in the absence of international actors, but international efforts themselves are not without their flaws. Perhaps we need to begin to consider a new methodology when examining peace deals in Africa.

Ten years ago  the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (known as the TRC) handed over its final report to the then State President Nelson Mandela. The TRC continues to be viewed by many around the world as the classic model of a country moving from authoritarian rule and civil conflict to democracy and reconciliation. The final report was meant to bring closure to the turbulent years from 1960 to 1994 where an estimated 23,000 people were violently killed.  The TRC legislation stated that if alleged perpetrators failed to apply for amnesty, or were denied it, they could be subjected to prosecution. In the intervening 10 years no such prosecutions took place. However, the recent National Prosecuting Authority’s (NPA) decision (July 2007) to prosecute former police minister Adriaan Vlok and former police Commissioner Johan van der Merwe, along with three former police officers for the attempted murder of the Reverend Frank Chikane, Director General of the President’s office, has rekindled the national debate on reconciliation. The irony here is that it is common knowledge that a deal...