The Foreign Service Journal, May 2008

seized Ohwali. Things were not going according to his plan, and he fled in panic. Seconds later, Owhali’s col- league in the truck, known only as “Azzam,” gave up on getting into the embassy basement and pushed the remote detonator button. The bomb exploded in the parking lot a few feet from our car. I was thrown to the floor in pitch darkness. As I was trying to figure out what had happened, searching franti- cally for my children, Owhali was running away as fast as he could from the building he had helped destroy and the people he had helped kill. While I crawled through the rubble in the darkened embassy holding tightly to my chil- dren’s little hands, desperately searching for a way through the chaos, down the long basement corridor and an escape from the devastated embassy, he passed hun- dreds of shocked people, many injured, all looking in hor- ror at the burning building. As he ran past Kenyans whose lives had been thrown into turmoil, did it occur to him that he had helped kill many of them? Of the dead, 212 were Kenyans and 12 were Americans. In the days that followed, while I helped orga- nize the American Women’s Association Relief Fund and worked with many Kenyan victims of the bombing, Owhali was cowering in hiding. Though he had hoped to destroy us, we — Americans and Kenyans — took care of each other, re-established a functioning embassy, set up blood banks, located bodies in morgues, attended memo- rial services, and buried our friends and family members. Even before he was arrested in Nairobi, we were already mobilizing funds for the rehabilitation of Kenyans injured in the bombing and getting to know them as friends unit- ed in grief. I met Owhali again two years later, but only briefly. Kenyan authorities had turned him over to America to be tried for the bombing. In March 2001, I was invited, as a victim, to witness the trial — United States v. Osama bin Laden , et al. , held at the U. S. Department of Justice building in the Southern District of New York City. Owhali had not only admitted his guilt, but had boasted about driving the truck into the embassy compound. I sat in the gallery with Sue Bartley, who had lost both her husband, Julian, and her 19-year-old son, Jay, in the bombing, and with other victims and their families. We watched as the four men charged with bombing the embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam filed into the courtroom. Owhali looked right at me, but only for a second. His gaze was blank. I remember thinking what slight, pas- sive-looking little men they all were. How could they hate so vehemently and indiscriminately? As we listened to the testimony connecting Osama bin Laden to terrorist incidents going back to the 1993 bomb- ing of the World Trade Center, Owhali sat comfortably, enjoying the full benefits of the American legal system. That evening, when I went to stay in the Marriott Hotel on the lower floors of the World Trade Center, he went back to his cell. Six months later, in September, during the week the World Trade Center was obliterated, he would be sen- tenced to life in prison. When Owhali went to jail, was he laughing, as I and other Americans lit candles and mourned our dead? Ten years after the bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, what have we learned? Although he had been ready to die as a martyr, Owhali sits in a maximum-secu- rity prison for life, while my family is serving at yet anoth- er overseas diplomatic post. Does Owhali feel any remorse for the horror he created, or would he do it again? As the families that lived through the bombings try to heal and forget, do we have any understanding of why it happened? Has there been any progress toward a peaceful solution? Has there been productive dialogue between leaders and diplomats from our respective cul- tures, or are we stuck in a “clash of civilizations” and a spi- raling of endless violence? Ironic and frightening as it may seem, our only hope is many more honest, nonviolent meetings between cul- tures — not accidental, but purposeful encounters between human beings who see and hear one another and try to understand, although our perspectives may be as different as night and day. Otherwise, this insanity will continue. The African bombings will be nothing more than two more horrific incidents among hundreds of oth- ers, and the suffering in Kenya and Tanzania will have been for naught. F O C U S 34 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / M A Y 2 0 0 8 Ten years after the bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, what have we learned?