FIVE years after a violent election that drove Kenya to the brink of civil war, some of the alleged leading perpetrators are at last to go on trial. The first, on September 10th, is William Ruto, a leader of the Kalenjin group, who was elected vice-president in March. A month or two later it will be the turn of his boss, President Uhuru Kenyatta, a leader of the Kikuyu tribe, who is being tried separately.

The two men stand accused of pitting their communities against each other in campaigns of ethnic cleansing and murder in early 2008 that left a good 1,300 people dead. But they teamed up last year to win parliamentary and presidential elections held this March, partly by stirring up national and tribal feeling against the International Criminal Court (ICC) at The Hague, where they are to be tried.

Warnings from Kenya’s Western allies evidently had little effect on the voters. As a result, their relations with Mr Kenyatta and his new government have been frosty, though on a visit to London in May he did meet Britain’s prime minister. Kenya seems quite cheery. In June the World Bank said its economy “could be in a position for a take-off”. With an indictee of the ICC riding so high, the court looks isolated as it tries a sitting head of state for the first time.

Messrs Kenyatta and Ruto face long prison sentences if convicted. Their trials may last several years and could keep Kenya’s leaders away from government business for long, disruptive periods. Strains are already showing. Some witnesses who had previously agreed to testify against Mr Kenyatta are unwilling to do so now. Their reluctance has resulted in the dropping of separate charges against Francis Muthaura, the former head of the civil service, one of several other people originally indicted.

Partisan coverage in some local papers has fostered the impression that the cases against the two leaders have already been fatally weakened. Readers are lapping it up. Since the election, opinion polls show waning support for the prosecution. Approval rates for the ICC have dipped from nearly 60% to less than 40%.

James Gondi, who campaigns for legal rights, says the country’s leaders are conducting a “propaganda war” and parading themselves as heroes defending their communities. But he still hopes that once the trials get under way Kenyan consciences will be pricked by the gravity of the charges against the president and his deputy.

The accused have not had it all their own way. Mr Ruto failed in his application to have the hearings moved from the Netherlands to Kenya or neighbouring Tanzania. A ruling on a similar appeal by Mr Kenyatta is expected on September 7th. The defendants’ attempts to rally support at the UN Security Council to have their cases dropped came to nothing. African Union leaders have condemned the prosecution of two of their own but none of the 34 African states that signed up to the Rome statute of the ICC has withdrawn from it.

“A perception game is afoot,” says Elizabeth Evenson of Human Rights Watch, a New York-based lobby, and so far the ICC has been doing badly. The court looks feeble after dropping charges against one of the accused and failing to protect witnesses. Kenyan victim groups say they have been warned against watching the hearings on television. Mr Ruto is to travel to The Hague with 100 MPs to show he has popular support. They will try to force Kenya to withdraw from the Rome statute, though that would not affect the trial. Judges must wonder if the accused will eventually stop turning up, making a mockery of the new system of international justice. Whether Kenya or the court would look more isolated is moot.

Meanwhile, the ICC needs to bolster its credibility elsewhere. It would help if war criminals outside Africa were brought before it; the Balkan villains of the 1990s were tried under separate UN-sponsored tribunals. While preliminary investigations are under way in Latin America and the Middle East, they have so far failed to lead to indictments, let alone convictions. This has allowed the court’s African critics to accuse it of “race hunting”, even though most African cases were referred to the ICC by African governments; Kenya’s consented. When the ICC’s flamboyant chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo, an Argentine, stood down, he was replaced by a doughty Gambian lady, Fatou Bensouda.

In any case, the ICC’s wheels of justice grind too slowly. The court at The Hague, as distinct from the temporary tribunals that have judged people in former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, has convicted only one person, a Congolese warlord, Thomas Lubanga. That took six years. Some fear the Kenyan trials may take even longer.