CONTENTS | ANB-BIA HOMEPAGE | WEEKLY NEWS
by Joe M'Bandakhai, Kenya, August 1998
THEME = VIOLENCE
Hopefully, Kenyans will be forever grateful to the Israelis whose
rescue team
reached the Nairobi terrorist bomb site some 30 hours after the 7 August 1998,
mid-morning bomb explosion that left nearly 250 dead and thousands more injured
The Israelis went straight to work accompanied by sniffer dogs emblazoned with the Star of David. They saved only three people, but if they had come earlier it would have been a different story.
So ill-prepared were the Kenyan rescue services, notably the security organisations, that in the early hours of the operation, they seemed completely paralysed by the sheer scale of the tragedy. True to form, the police arrived at the scene with anti- riot gear only, to find armies of courageous people shifting through the rubble with their bare hands and guiding or carrying the heavily bleeding causalities out of danger.
Other members of the security services wrung their hands on desperation, waiting for the "appropriate" machinery to be set in motion - machinery which, in the long run, especially in these early stages of the rescue operation, only served to complicate the whole picture, some say even endangered those who were trapped. Finally, the crack General Services Unit turned up who thought their priority was guarding banks, etc.
A senior member of the Israeli rescue unit was not particularly happy with what he had witnessed and a Kenyan legislator, Augustine Kathangu, complained: "It's a disgrace - there is no coordination at all". Others are less critical, citing a lack of experience by the Kenyans in managing a disaster on this scale.
Critics say that the American marines on duty at the American Embassy also performed dismally. They say innocent Kenyans have reaped a very heavy toll in a matter that has nothing to do with them. The marines who ringed the embassy with razor wire, seemed aloof and refused to allow rescuers to tunnel from their embassy ground to reach some of the people trapped in Ufundi House nearby. (Editor's note: The bomb exploded in a car park between the US embassy building and Cooperative Bank House. Ufundi House, a five-storey building in front of the car park and sandwiched between the embassy and Cooperative House, was levelled).
Later, the American Ambassador, Prudence Bushnell, who was injured by flying glass in the 21-storey Cooperative Bank House, went to great lengths to defuse the anger expressed in local newspapers. Also injured in the same place was Kenya's Trade Minister, Joseph Kamotho, who sustained hideous cuts on the head.
Cooperative Bank House, near the embassy, is a modern solidly built structure, but its expensive glass windows became a terrible killer of people who worked in the building and close by. Many who died here were bankers, teachers and cooperative institution workers visiting their Headquarters.
Mrs.Bushnell was on the 14th floor and together with other survivors had to find her way to the ground floor down a dark staircase, all the while stumbling over the dead, collapsed sections of the building and computers which had been thrown wildly about by the explosion.
Rose Wanjiku put up a gallant struggle for her life. She was buried deep under the rubble of the four-storied Ufundi Cooperative House, a building that took the full blast of the car bomb and the counter blast deflected by the massively constructed United States Embassy next to it. While entombed, she kept up communication with a scrap metal dealer named Nganga whom the Israelis were able to save. As the days passed, rescuers being delayed by the unstable condition of the rubble, heard her cries for help.
Oxygen was pumped to her but perhaps she died because of lack of water or the blast burns on her face. Her lifeless body was retrieved at 3 am on 12 August.
Her plight had come to symbolise hope, and diverted attention from the fact that the bodies of some thirty girls in a secretarial school on the second floor of the collapsed building had perished in the senseless attack.
An amazing revelation was made by someone who said that three "Arab-looking men" had filmed the embassy only three days previously. He claimed to have told a security man at the embassy who dismissed the three as being "probably tourists". The informant didn't insist, in spite of being certain that the taller among the three was using a palm-sized video camera, and was deliberately and cleverly covered by the other two.
It also emerged that there was no security camera at the back of the embassy where vehicles are parked. This is an area which gives on to the underground parking bay below the embassy building.
Time will reveal the names of many unsung heroes. There's Joash Okindo, a private security guard hired by the embassy. On the fateful day, a group of "Arabs" arrived by car and asked to drive into the main parking area but were refused. They were instead sent to the rear of the building. Some of the Arabs jumped out and lobbed a grenade at the security guard, at which juncture an American marine opened fire and a shoot-out ensued.
Probably the same marine instinctively shouted to mainly young Kenyans who normally queue up along the embassy fencing for visas, to run for their lives moments before the explosion. Had this vehicle entered the main parking bay, there would have probably been more American casualties than the 12 killed together with their 30 Kenyan colleagues, many of whom had offices at the rear of the embassy building. The ferocity of the estimated 100 kilogram semtex explosive, yanked out bullet proof windows, allowing the force of the blast inside.
Even before the dust had settled, there were calls for the Americans to move their embassy outside town, away from built up areas. It was pointed out that the reason there were less casualties in Tanzania, where a similarly American targeted bomb went off almost simultaneously, was the embassy location in the exclusive Oyster Bay residential area.
President Daniel arap Moi went to the site five times in as many days. On his final visit, before the search and rescue were called off, he was accompanied by Anglican Archbishop David Gitari; Catholic Archbishop Ndingi Mwana Nzeki and retired Cardinal Maurice Otunga.
Moi said that both Kenya and Tanzania are working very closely to find those who were responsible. Kenyan Muslims, through the Supreme Council of Muslims of Kenya, sent a message of condolences to their fellow Kenyans - a message which stated: "Muslims should not be condemned wholesale".
Huge amounts of donations are pouring in, in the form of medicines and food from all over the world, following the initial dramatic responses to the tragedy from Kenyans themselves. For example, barely two hours after the explosion, several hundred people had lined up to donate blood at one city hospital. The exercise was suspended because the hospital ran short of blood bags - whereupon individuals went out and bought them with their own resources.
END
CONTENTS | ANB-BIA HOMEPAGE | WEEKLY NEWS
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