WikiLeaks Founder: Kenya report leak influenced 2007 Kenya poll

Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks claims his leak of the Kroll report shifted the 2007 Kenya poll

By ANTONY KARANJA

The leaked Kroll report may have shifted the 2008 general elections in Kenya, an online whistleblowing activist claimed on Monday.

Julian Assange the most talked about man in the US media today is credited with leaking the report which highlighted massive looting of state coffers during the regime of former president Daniel Arap Moi. Australian born Assange is the Editor-in-Chief of WikiLeaks a website that collects and posts highly classified documents and videos online. His website has sparked a heated debate on how much the public should know after classified Afghan war documents were posted on the site with the White House saying that this has a potential to harm America’s military. In 2003, according to Mr Assange who was speaking in a Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED) conference, the then newly elected government of Mwai Kibaki commissioned the Kroll investigation shortly after his election on an anti-corruption platform. The report was handed over to the Kenyan government in 2004 a fact that was confirmed in 2007 by the government spokesman Alfred Mutua. However Mr. Mutua dubbed the report as “incomplete and inaccurate and based on a lot of hearsay.”

Mr Assange said he went to Kenya in 2007 and was able to get hold of the report just prior to the December elections. He said that he released the report three days after Moi had announced his support of President Kibaki’s re-election bid.

This association between the two made it difficult for the Kibaki to release the damaging report and according to Assange it became “a dead albatross around president Kibaki’s neck.” Moi drummed up support for Kibaki in the Rift Valley area. In October 2007, the then ODM presidential candidate Raila Odinga claimed that the Kroll report was being withheld by the government to bait Moi into backing President Kibaki for a second term. The activist points out that details of the report however became front page news in the Guardian Newspaper in UK and became major news in other African countries. Assange further claims that when the Kenyan TV discussed the report for almost twenty consecutive days, the vote shifted 10 points according to a Kenyan intelligence report and “that changed the results.”

Related story: http://habarizanyumbani.jambonewspot.com/2010/11/29/us-envoys-see-kenya-as-a-%e2%80%98swamp%e2%80%99-of-corruption/

#KrollReport