African leaders complain of bias at ICC as Kenya trials get underway THE HAGUE - There are eight cases and 21 defendants in front of the International Criminal Court, and every last one of them is from Africa. Now the continent's leaders are debating whether that's a problem. The 11-year-old court of last resort was set up to take on some of the world's most heinous crimes. But its choice of cases has frustrated African leaders, who say that comparable crimes elsewhere in the world are being ignored and that race is a factor in the decision making. With Kenya's president and deputy president on trial, African leaders are pushing for changes that some ICC advocates say would undermine the court completely. At stake is the future of a court whose creation was touted as a major breakthrough in ensuring that those who commit crimes against humanity do not escape justice - a dream that African nations, more than any other region in the world, signed up for. Now, however, the African Union is campaigning against the court, with some leaders voicing disillusionment and saying that justice seems not to be equally applied around the globe. Atrocities in Syria, Colombia and Afghanistan have gone unpunished, African leaders say, even as the U.N. Security Council was quick to authorize the ICC in 2011 to turn its attention to North Africa and take up work against Libya's leaders at the time: Moammar Gaddafi, his sons and his intelligence chief. "They're treating us like toddlers," Kenyan Foreign Minister Amina Mohamed said in an interview in The Hague, where Kenyan Deputy President William Ruto is on trial in one of the ICC's small wood-lined courtrooms on the outskirts of the Dutch city. Africa feels marginalized. This is a good time to think about the relationship between Africa and the international community. Not just Africa and the ICC," she said. Ruto and Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta were indicted in 2011 on charges that they helped stoke violence, some of it ethnically targeted, that killed at least 1,100 people after disputed elections in December 2007. Both profess innocence. They have sought permission to skip judicial proceedings in the name of national security and have pushed for immunity from ICC prosecution for sitting heads of state. The September attack on the Westgate mall in Nairobi by gunmen possibly tied to the al-Qaeda-linked Somali group al-Shabaab has only increased pressure from the Kenyans. Ruto was in The Hague on the day the attack started but was excused to rush home to coordinate a response. Kenyan officials have said that the ICC prosecutions are distracting their leaders from counterterrorism efforts. In the aftermath of the attack, Kenya helped convene an October summit of the African Union, at which the ICC's focus on Africa was condemned in angry terms. It pushed the court and the U.N. Security Council for a delay in the case and lost at both venues, though Kenyatta's trial was pushed back until next year for unrelated reasons. But at a meeting of the court's governing body last month, Kenya's leaders won concessions that will make it easier for them to skip some court sessions and to attend others remotely by video link rather than in person at The Hague.