The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2014

44 JULY-AUGUST 2014 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Suddenly no one felt safe anymore. Rich, poor, black, white: when jihad came knocking, everyone was a target. physical feature: a mountain or a stream or a statue that you see every day, and don’t look at twice because it is a fixture that never changes. Even in an Africa that is finally rising, with a middle class that is expanding, nothing is trickling down to those who have made the unfortunate mistake of being born poor. This, it would seem, is a tragedy much vaster and deeper than Westgate. Yet it isn’t treated with the urgency of a national disas- ter. Without downplaying the loss of life, I would suggest that the place where Kenyans responded with charity and togetherness is where we ought to go to bridge the gap between east and west of Moi Avenue. Unfortunately, that doesn’t look to be happening any time soon. Recent times have seen more attacks occur in churches and, even more often, against public service vehicles. With increasing public pressure and tourist numbers dwindling due to perennial travel advisories, the government’s remedy has been a police campaign based on racial profiling of Somalis, both Kenyan and refugee. A worrying trend has also been the assas- sination of radical Muslim clerics in the coastal city of Mombasa, which many claim to be the work of either the police or Kenyan intelligence agencies. A massive investment in the security apparatus has been promised as Kenyans desperately grasp at any sense of normalcy amid all the uncertainty. On the surface, though, nothing seems to have changed since the Westgate attack, and one is left with the sense that there is nothing to stop the next one. Meanwhile, the country continues to endure all the old problems that plagued it before the terror. The only difference is that words like “improvised explosive device” have been added to our vocabu- lary. Terrorism is not the biggest threat facing Kenya. Perhaps the bigger problem is the complacency of a system that is now fail- ing to combat it. Mobilizing the “Kenyan Spirit” to address terror won’t necessarily head off another Westgate. It may, however, be the wellspring that sets us on the path to positive change. n