Aug 20th 1998
WHEN someone dies in Kenya, family and friends place notices of remembrance and condolence in the newspapers. These days there are pages and pages of them for the 241 Kenyans who were killed in the car-bomb attack on the American embassy in Nairobi on August 7th. Ten people died in a similar attack in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’s capital. In both Kenya and Tanzania, thought to be two of Africa’s most stable countries, the bombs caused profound shock. In Kenya, this may lead to changes in the ways people think.
One of the changes is Kenyans’ view of the United States. People are still bitter about the way that the Americans, immediately after the bombing, concentrated on their own dead and wounded, doing nothing to help others. In particular, they are bitter that marines prevented people from entering the bombed embassy compound to reach victims buried in the rubble of the collapsed building next door.
America’s ambassador, Prudence Bushnell, herself slightly injured, stumbled into making things even worse by saying that the marines were guarding the embassy against looters. Kenyans were deeply insulted by this suggestion: few people had looting on their minds when they rushed to the rescue. Later, however, she impressed Kenyans with the sincerity of her attempts to repair the battered relationship.
Trying to get things straight, the Americans issued a flurry of official denials, inserted messages of condolence in the press, and promised financial aid. President Bill Clinton sent a video-recorded message saying that America was grieving with East Africa’s people. And, this week, Madeleine Albright, the secretary of state, paid a flying visit to the two capitals. In Nairobi, she acknowledged that American personnel had mishandled things, but tried to argue that they were acting out of concern for people’s safety, not from callousness.
A more lasting effect of the bomb may be how Kenyans see themselves. When Kenya’s ill-equipped and untrained police arrived at the scene, carrying truncheons and rifles instead of spades and pickaxes, Nairobians, often thought selfish and corrupt by other Kenyans, contemptuously swept the police aside as they plunged in to free victims from the rubble.
Smart executives mingled with street-children; Asian businessmen rushed employees to the scene in pick-up trucks; men worked in vests, having ripped off their shirts as bandages; drivers threw out their passengers to take hundreds of injured to hospital. As a result, the casualty wings of all Nairobi’s hospitals were full within half an hour of the blast. The response to requests for blood donations was so overwhelming that all the city’s main blood banks were full within 24 hours.
Almost as astonishing, for Kenyans, was the appearance of President Daniel arap Moi at the scene with the leaders of all Kenya’s opposition parties beside him in the presidential car. No doubt they will soon be back at each other’s throats. But the way that the terrorist attack united the country, albeit only temporarily, has given Kenyans a new confidence. They got a glimpse of a different Kenya, displaying a spirit of unity and solidarity that, to those old enough to remember, brought back the days when Kenya won its independence 35 years ago.
In Nairobi, Mrs Albright correctly refused to comment on the FBI investigations into the attacks. But she, like many others, pointed a finger at Osama bin Laden, the rich Saudi who, from his various hideaways, has long been suspected of financing operations aimed at getting American troops out of Saudi Arabia. The confession in Pakistan of a suspect in the bombing, Muhammad Sadiq Howaida, a Jordanian-born Palestinian engineer married to a Kenyan, is said to have implicated Mr bin Laden, who now lives in Afghanistan, in what must be one of the worst ever acts of peacetime terrorism.
WHEN someone dies in Kenya, family and friends place notices of remembrance and condolence in the newspapers. These days there are pages and pages of them for the 241 Kenyans who were killed in the car-bomb attack on the American embassy in Nairobi on August 7th. Ten people died in a similar attack in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’s capital. In both Kenya and Tanzania, thought to be two of Africa’s most stable countries, the bombs caused profound shock. In Kenya, this may lead to changes in the ways people think.
One of the changes is Kenyans’ view of the United States. People are still bitter about the way that the Americans, immediately after the bombing, concentrated on their own dead and wounded, doing nothing to help others. In particular, they are bitter that marines prevented people from entering the bombed embassy compound to reach victims buried in the rubble of the collapsed building next door.
America’s ambassador, Prudence Bushnell, herself slightly injured, stumbled into making things even worse by saying that the marines were guarding the embassy against looters. Kenyans were deeply insulted by this suggestion: few people had looting on their minds when they rushed to the rescue. Later, however, she impressed Kenyans with the sincerity of her attempts to repair the battered relationship.
Trying to get things straight, the Americans issued a flurry of official denials, inserted messages of condolence in the press, and promised financial aid. President Bill Clinton sent a video-recorded message saying that America was grieving with East Africa’s people. And, this week, Madeleine Albright, the secretary of state, paid a flying visit to the two capitals. In Nairobi, she acknowledged that American personnel had mishandled things, but tried to argue that they were acting out of concern for people’s safety, not from callousness.
A more lasting effect of the bomb may be how Kenyans see themselves. When Kenya’s ill-equipped and untrained police arrived at the scene, carrying truncheons and rifles instead of spades and pickaxes, Nairobians, often thought selfish and corrupt by other Kenyans, contemptuously swept the police aside as they plunged in to free victims from the rubble.
Smart executives mingled with street-children; Asian businessmen rushed employees to the scene in pick-up trucks; men worked in vests, having ripped off their shirts as bandages; drivers threw out their passengers to take hundreds of injured to hospital. As a result, the casualty wings of all Nairobi’s hospitals were full within half an hour of the blast. The response to requests for blood donations was so overwhelming that all the city’s main blood banks were full within 24 hours.
Almost as astonishing, for Kenyans, was the appearance of President Daniel arap Moi at the scene with the leaders of all Kenya’s opposition parties beside him in the presidential car. No doubt they will soon be back at each other’s throats. But the way that the terrorist attack united the country, albeit only temporarily, has given Kenyans a new confidence. They got a glimpse of a different Kenya, displaying a spirit of unity and solidarity that, to those old enough to remember, brought back the days when Kenya won its independence 35 years ago.
In Nairobi, Mrs Albright correctly refused to comment on the FBI investigations into the attacks. But she, like many others, pointed a finger at Osama bin Laden, the rich Saudi who, from his various hideaways, has long been suspected of financing operations aimed at getting American troops out of Saudi Arabia. The confession in Pakistan of a suspect in the bombing, Muhammad Sadiq Howaida, a Jordanian-born Palestinian engineer married to a Kenyan, is said to have implicated Mr bin Laden, who now lives in Afghanistan, in what must be one of the worst ever acts of peacetime terrorism.
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