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In Kenya, A Focal Point In The War On Terror, "We Can't Say We Are Safe."
NAIROBI, Kenya, September 12, 2004 (St. Petersburg Times) – For 18 hours Elizabeth Maloba had been searching for her husband when someone finally uttered the dreaded word "mortuary."
Fred Maloba, father of three, was an economist at the U.S. Embassy in the heart of Nairobi. At 10:30 that Friday morning, a truck bomb exploded outside the embassy, a blast so powerful it threw a city bus 20 feet into the air and knocked office workers out of their chairs several blocks away.
By 11 a.m., Elizabeth Maloba had heard the news, and by early afternoon she and relatives had joined the desperate crowds surging through Nairobi hospitals, hoping to find loved ones still alive. At 6 p.m. the next day, the look on a relative's face told Maloba her quest had ended.
"We went to the mortuary at Kenyatta Hospital and found some bodies on the floor. As I was looking down at the bodies, I realized he was one of them. The whole top of his head was gone, his eyes were gone . . ."
Maloba pauses.
"But the bottom of his face was still there and I recognized him by the clothes."
Her husband was among 230 people killed Aug. 7, 1998, in near-simultaneous bombings at the American embassies in Kenya and neighboring Tanzania. They were the first in a series of al-Qaida suicide attacks that would spectacularly peak, but not end, with the Sept. 11 hijackings in the United States.
Fourteen months after 9/11, al-Qaida struck again in Kenya, this time killing 13 people just minutes after Israeli tourists checked into a hotel near Mombasa. The same day, two missiles nearly hit an Israeli passenger jet taking off from the city.
Since al-Qaida surfaced in Kenya six years ago, security has improved, "but it still has a long way to go," Maloba says. "We still don't know the next target of these terrorists, we can't say we are safe."
That is also a concern of the U.S. government. Although Iraq and Afghanistan draw far more attention, this East African nation of 30-million - at least 10 percent of them Muslim - has become a major focal point of the war on terror.
"Kenya is vulnerable as a site of terrorist activity," says Princeton Lyman, a former U.S. ambassador to South Africa and Nigeria and now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
"What's happened is that terrorists have found a sinew within the Arabic-origin community of Kenya and elsewhere in the East Africa and that is exacerbated by the easy traffic that goes back and forth across the border and along the seacoast."
As portrayed in the Oscar-winning movie Out of Africa, Kenya is a land rich in scenery and wildlife that has captivated generations of colonials and tourists. But long after its 1963 independence, many parts of the country lack paved roads and remain mired in poverty.
Nowhere is that truer than along the dusty border with Somalia, a Muslim country ruled by warlords and clans since its government collapsed in 1991. Today, it is largely a no-go area for Americans, who still recoil at the gruesome photos of dead U.S. soldiers dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, the capital, in 1993.
Although Somalia has yet to become the terrorist breeding ground some experts feared, its lawlessness makes it an ideal transit point for Islamic radicals bound for Kenya and other African nations. Those responsible for the 2002 Mombasa attack are said to have smuggled weapons through Somalia.
To counter the region's threat, the Bush administration two years ago launched the Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa. Run by U.S. Central Command in Tampa, it is responsible for fighting terrorism in nine countries including Kenya, Somalia and Yemen, site of the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole.
"Terrorists need a sanctuary," Brig. Gen. Samuel Helland, task force commander, said last month. "They will look for places with chaos, lawlessness, a lack of government control."
Although based in the tiny nation of Djibouti, American soldiers operate in almost every country except Somalia as they work with their local counterparts to patrol borders, beef up training and improve intelligence-gathering.
U.S. troops also provide humanitarian help, but that has been controversial. In December, Muslim leaders in Kenya urged residents of Gerissa, east of Nairobi, to boycott a U.S. team offering free medical and veterinarian aid. The Americans' presence could attract terrorists to the area, the leaders charged.
Despite violent protests, the team went ahead with its work, treating 1,000 patients - human and four-legged - over three days.
Apart from task force operations, the U.S. government has spent millions of dollars improving airport security in Kenya and training more than 500 Kenyan police officers. Today, the State Department praises Kenya as a "responsive and active" partner in the war on terror, but that hasn't always been the case, experts say.
For years, Kenya saw itself as a victim, not a cause, of terrorism. But during the 2001 trial of four men linked to the embassy bombing, evidence revealed "a terrorist network that had flourished in Kenya taking advantage of lax immigration and security laws," regional expert Gilbert Khadiagala said in a seminar last year.
Established in 1994 by Osama bin Laden's secretary, al-Qaida's Kenya cell was led by Somalis, Pakistanis and Gulf Arabs who blended into Kenya's coastal communities and recruited local residents. It was not until last year that Kenya's foreign ministry acknowledged the involvement of Kenyan citizens in the embassy and Mombasa attacks.
One reason for the government's slow response to homegrown terrorism has been a reluctance to alienate Kenya's Muslim minority. But authorities began to take a harder line after Muslim protesters demonstrated in support of al-Qaida after the 9/11 hijackings.
"Some of the actions and proposed legislation have worried the Islamic population that they're being targeted," says Lyman, the former ambassador. "You have the dilemma that you want to crack down but you end up offending the very population you don't want to offend. Kenya is struggling."
Among the most unpopular moves was closing Muslim charities funded by Saudi Arabia and espousing a rigid interpretation of Islam. Many operated in Kenya's poorest areas.
Among the charities affected is the Saudi-based Al Haramain Foundation, accused by the United States of supporting al-Qaida. Officials say al-Qaida's Kenya cell helped finance the embassy attack with profits from a wholesale fish business started with Al Haramain funds.
It is unclear whether Al Haramain has halted its Kenyan operations. Recently, young boys were seen emerging from a madrasa, or religious school, just outside the huge Dadaab refugee camp in remote eastern Kenya near Somalia. A large sign at the school said "Al Haramain Foundation," with more writing in Arabic and a picture of the Koran.
No one at the school would comment, but Shaban insisted Al Haramain is no longer running it - local Muslims refused to take down the sign in an act of "defiance" against the Kenyan government, he says.
The camp, squalid home to 100,000 Somali refugees, has been described by the U.S. Fund for Peace as a "nerve center" of arms trafficking and fertile ground for terrorists. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, which operates the camp, refused to let two St. Petersburg Times journalists enter last month.
Taking care of their own
Despite differences over government policies, Muslims and Christians in Kenya get along well, religious leaders say, and are united against terrorism.
"We are like any other country where these things happen," said Lattif Shaban, an official of the Supreme Council of Kenya Muslims. "This is not Islam - Islam doesn't tell you to go kill somebody. To be engaged in large-scale, long-running terrorism, no. One of our strengths is not killing each other."
Charles Odongo is not so sure.
"We are not very free with Muslims," says Odongo, a Christian. "They're arrogant, they like wars."
On Aug. 7, 1998, Odongo was in his office at the Co-Operative Bank, next to the U.S. Embassy, when the truck bomb exploded. He saw colleagues blown through windows and killed; Odongo, seated farther away, broke a leg and shattered an eardrum when doors and cabinets crashed on top of him.
Such were the twists of fate, sparing some, dooming others. Rachel Pussy, who worked for the U.S. government in another building, had gone to the embassy that morning to get a visa for her daughter. She died.
Two women got so cold waiting in the visa line they went across the street to buy tea. They lived.
And in the midst of so much death came life - Gladys Ihaji, severely cut by flying glass, gave birth that night to a baby girl. Her mother named her Joy Prudence - "Joy, because I was able to smile and laugh;" Prudence, after U.S. Ambassador Prudence Bushnell, who was injured.
Like the 9/11 attacks, the embassy bombing was a national tragedy. Yet it no longer commands the kind of obsessive attention devoted to the hijackings in America.
For most Kenyans, the only visible reminder is a small memorial park where the embassy stood. The black granite slab there is engraved with 219 names and an inscription:
"May the innocent victims of this tragic event rest in the knowledge that it has strengthened our resolve to work for a world in which man is able to live alongside his brother in peace."
Apart from the eloquent words, many survivors feel forgotten. The Kenyan government, they complain, did little except buy coffins and set up a fund to collect donations for victims. Isaac Bosire, a banker who lost an eye and suffered other serious injuries, got 30,000 shillings - about $375.
"I'm married, I have seven kids, I am not able to feed them," says Bosire, who has not worked since that August day. "Two of the kids are resorting to street children, looking for food in garbage cans."
Rosemary Muthoni, the youngest survivor, was asleep in her mother's lap when the bomb blew out the windows of the No. 26 bus. Now 7, her face is so badly scarred that schoolmates taunt her and refuse to play with her. Sometimes, she blames her mother: "She tells me, "You could have left me home, you were the one who made me suffer,' " Judy Muthoni says.
Her face is etched with scars. But there is no money for plastic surgery; the $7,800 she and her daughter got from the fund went for medical bills and to build a small house after Judy's husband abandoned them.
Soon after the blast, Congress appropriated $43-million for medical treatment, counseling and reconstruction of businesses. The money ran out last year, and no more was authorized, even though many victims say they desperately need help. And they are bitter that relatives of victims of the 9/11 attacks in the United States have received an average of $1.8-million.
"If not for the Americans, we would not be suffering," says Teresia Karanja, a mother of four who was paralyzed from the waist down and can no longer afford some of her medication. "They take care of their own, they should also take care of those who are afflicted because of them. Do they even remember there are people who suffered because of them?"
In 2001, hundreds of Kenyan victims sued the U.S. government, alleging it had failed to secure the embassy or warn the public of the risk of attack. Another victims' suit sought a share of the billions of dollars in frozen assests of bin Laden and his associates. But the legal action went nowhere.
"The U.S. all along has indicated it was not liable in the legal sense because we were victims like the people of Kenya due to an act of terrorism," says Peter Claussen of the U.S. Embassy, now in a heavily fortified compound far from central Nairobi. "Our position is that we did what we could to try to restore and make amends."
Elizabeth Maloba, whose husband Fred died in the bombing, is more fortunate than most. Because he was an embassy employee, she got his U.S. government pension and some benefits, including tuition assistance for her three children.
Still, she was so devastated by his death that she had a mental breakdown and had to take a year off from her job as a teacher.
"I have a lot of anger, but I don't know where to drive that anger. I don't know if I should blame our security, if I should blame al-Qaida, who I should blame. But the anger is still in here, even after six years."
Susan Taylor Martin can be contacted at susan@sptimes.com
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