On the
morning of August 7, 1998, a truck laden with a bomb powerful enough to level a
number of building blocks was driven to the gate of the United States Embassy
in downtown Nairobi. A gunfight ensued between the occupants of that truck and
the US Marines guarding the embassy before the bomb went off, completely
destroying the nearby Ufundi House and massively damaging Co-Operative House.
The embassy itself suffered minimal damage because of the solid nature of the
building.
It is said
that had the terrorists managed to drive their death machine into the basement
of the embassy as had been the plan, a number of buildings in the immediate
vicinity would have been brought down, and the death toll would have been much
higher than the 213 souls that were lost on that day.
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| Aftermath of the US Embassy Bomb Blast |
On the
morning of September 11, 2001, a commercial airliner carrying passengers
crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City killing
everyone on board and many others in that building. A short while later,
another passenger aircraft crashed into the South Tower of WTC, repeating the
cycle of death that had been witnessed earlier. Two other planes were to crash
later, one into the Pentagon and another one in an open field in Pennsylvania. All these
aircraft had been hijacked by terrorists to unleash untold horror on an
unsuspecting civilian population. This incident became known as 9/11. Almost
3,000 people lost their lives that day.
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| The second plane approaches and slams into the South Tower of the WTC |
The reason I
mention these two incidents is the difference in which the respective
governments of the two nations reacted to these acts of terror. The Government
of Kenya took immediate decisive steps to protect its citizens from further
terror attacks, but they were cosmetic in nature and were quickly forgotten as
soon as we “moved on”. After all, Kenya was not really the target of that
attack; America was. Al-Qaeda had said as much, that they were targeting US
interests. So in our collective mind, we were not really the intended victims of the US Embassy
bombing. This was not our fight. The terrorists had made their point and it was
unlikely that we would be targeted again.
In contrast,
the US Government threw a bitch fit and went all John Rambo on Afghanistan in
their “shock and awe” campaign as punishment for that country’s insistence on
sheltering Osama bin Laden, who had ordered the 9/11 attacks. Beyond that, the
Bush administration took a long hard look at what had caused the massive
failure in their intelligence network and local law enforcement. They changed
the way they did things, and they vowed that no terror attack on such a scale
would be allowed to happen again on the US homeland.
On the
morning of September 21, 2013, an unknown number of gunmen walked into the
Westgate Mall in the Westlands area of Nairobi and opened fire indiscriminately
on innocent civilians. They went on to lay siege on the building for almost
four days, and at the time of writing this post, the official government
position on the dead is 61 civilians, 5 terrorists and 6 security agents who
lost their lives in the course of the liberation of the building. 175 people
were injured in the incident.
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| Westgate Mall after the siege |
For me
personally, Westgate was probably worse than the other attacks I have mentioned
on account of the nature of horror that characterized it. Sure, more lives were
lost in the embassy bombing and 9/11, but it was the personal engagement
between the victims at the mall and their killers that makes it more horrifying
than any Hollywood fictional movie has the imagination to capture.
These terrorists
took out their targets one by one.
They saw their faces. They saw the look of fear in their eyes. They heard the
pleas for mercy. They saw pregnant women and small children. And in the end, it
did not matter to them. These were not human beings. They were animals to be
slaughtered as a means to score political points on the altar of religion. They
used Islam as an excuse to carry out their madness.
The people
who managed to get out of Westgate on that Saturday morning, either by means of
escape or death, were the lucky ones. We are now hearing unconfirmed reports of
unspeakable torture and horror visited upon the hostages that remained behind.
The details of the goings on inside the mall from Saturday night until the end
of the siege do not bear repeating here.
On the three
occasions that President Uhuru Kenyatta addressed the nation on the attack, it
was very clear that he was going through personal pain at what had happened,
and not just because he had lost close relatives. In fact, in his last address
on the evening of Tuesday following the end of the Westgate horror, he appeared
to be holding back tears. This had happened on his watch, and I am sure he was
taking personal responsibility as the nation’s Commander in Chief.
I was not at
Westgate that morning. I did not suffer personal loss in that attack. Yet I
feel affected mentally by this whole tragedy. I feel impotent in the face of
such danger. I watched TV coverage of events for the entire period of the
siege, and I could not bring myself to think about what the victims were going
through. It could have been me in there. It
could have been any one of us, really.
Are we going
to accept the inevitability of
Westgate and “move on”, just like we “moved on” from August 7, 1998?
Or, are we
going to allow ourselves as a nation to be sufficiently affronted by the
audacity of Al-Shabaab and change our mindset on how we approach issues of
security?
I have
confidence that President Kenyatta will do whatever it takes to ensure that
Westgate never happens again anywhere else. But he will need to become badass,
just like George W. Bush post 9/11. He has no choice but to shake up the
intelligence network and the police service, and ensure that there is seamless
coordination between the two security organs.
The colossal
failure of inaction against credible intelligence reports on a possible attack
on Westgate cannot be excused. The corruption cartels in government that allow
for the registration of persons of dubious origin must be brought down
ruthlessly. Firepower that had the ability to kill 61 civilians and hold a
whole security battalion for days was introduced into Westgate Mall! How was
that allowed to happen? Is that the WTF-est thing about this whole sad episode
or what?
My fear is
this: Kenyans, God bless us, have a very short attention span. We forget
quickly. Perhaps it is because we just have too much drama going on from one
week to the next. But we “move on” quickly. And the danger in that is that we
will forget that we are still exposed as a country to possible future attacks
by Al-Shabaab.
I do not care
how we couch this, but the terrorists won this one. By killing as many people
as they could, and in such a cold, calculated manner, and then dragging out the
whole thing for as long as they did in front of a global audience, they won the
propaganda war. They are the baddest
group of madmen in the world right now. They got everyone’s attention, which
was the intended purpose of this horror show.
My humble
submission is this: President Kenyatta must not “move on” from Westgate. The
responsibility of securing the nation’s borders and preventing any possible
future terrorist attacks lie at his doorstep. He must ask himself if he has the
right people working for him because as much as history has been kind to him up
to this point, it is about to get seven kinds of mean if he drops the ball on
this one.
The rest of
us must also not “move on”. We must be actively engaged in our immediate
security. We must keep our eyes and ears open to any suspicious activity
because none of these things happen in a vacuum. We must become “nosy” and find
out who our neighbours are. What they are up to.
This is what
happened in America after 9/11. And this is why the US has never suffered
another terrorist attack on a massive scale, not because none has been planned,
but because they always manage to stop the act in its planning stages.
I am not
“moving on”. I will do my bit.
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| #WeAreOne |
***************************************************************************
So, in the
week before the unfortunate events at the Westgate Mall, we were all talking
about Njeri Mucheru-Oyatta and her controversial blog in which she
sensationally hung out her (dirty?) laundry to air. Wow!
Her husband
must have, in a tragic twist of fate, been relieved to suddenly have everyone not talk about the social media drama that his life
and that of his family had suddenly become.
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| Isn't she just the preeetiest you guys? |
Perhaps we
have “moved on” from that story.
Maybe.
