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June
28, 2003
A Dispatch from Nairobi
on Terrorism
Bush and Kindergarten
By
C.Y. GOPINATH
My son, only 6, has been puzzled by the closure
of the US Embassy in Nairobi. It has reached him through the
kindergarten grapevine that American children are at risk of
being attacked by Kenyan children. The word 'terrorist' has been
mentioned by tongues that can barely pronounce the word.
Of course, none of the children know
who or what exactly terrorists are, but they suspect that they
are Bad Guys and probably fire guns at people, like they show
on TV. The US authorities have stated, with the same prescience
and cocksure certainty that marked their assertions of weapons
of mass destruction in Iraq, that there are terrorists
in Kenya, and that some of them are Kenyans.
For a while now Kenya has chafed under
these accusations. Britain and certain other European countries
have issued travel advisories, and suspended flights, which have
led to a sharp drop in tourism revenues, one of the few stable
sources of this country's income. There is a sense of somehow
being tainted, much like being infected by one's promiscuous
partner and then reviled by the same person for harboring a loathsome
sexually transmitted disease and doing nothing about it.
An editorial in The East African Standard
has put it thus:
America's fear of terrorists is making
Kenya look like the guilty party while it is indeed a victim
by its association with the US. It is a fact that America is
the target of terrorists. It is also a fact that the only reason
why terrorists would target Kenya is because we host Americans.
Were not the presence of Americans and Britons so heavy on our
soil, Kenya would not have anything to fear from terrorists.
. .[they are behaving] like the visitor who seeks refuge in a
house and then proceeds to warn other visitors, who have nothing
to fear, not to set foot there lest they be targeted together
with him.
Ignore the stridency for a moment, because
Nairobi does have its share of crime, and is certainly not the
safest of places. My compound has electrical fencing, and my
home has safe havens, motion detectors, and panic buttons.
But while petty theft, burglaries and
carjacking are common, killing is not the norm. Some of my friends
have been carjacked by polite and cheerful young unemployed men
of reasonable education, who have been at pains to explain the
dire circumstances that have forced them into such diversions.
There is another city where I was cautioned,
just a year ago, to exercise extreme caution, and it was Washington
DC. I was told that its crime rate was horrifying, and that I
should be specially careful not to venture into certain marginal
areas of the city, such as where the blacks and latinos live.
In Nairobi, you will be similarly warned not to move around in
Eastleigh and certain colonies in the industrial belt. I was
struck by another similarity with Nairobi - just as the US Embassy
in Nairobi was the target of an Al Qaeda terrorist attack in
1998 (in which mostly Kenyan bystanders perished), the Pentagon
in Washington DC was hit, on September 11, 2001, by an aircraft
manned by Al Qaeda terrorists.
I made enquiries to find out if there
was a travel advisory out against Washington DC, or against other
cities in the United States. I was told that Washington's gates
remained wide open to tourism (or any other ism). Indeed, it
transpired that there is no travel advisory out against any US
city at all, though reliable sources such as CNN and BBC routinely
report that people there live under constant threat of unexpected
attack by virus, microbe, Kalashnikov, snipers, serial killers,
shoe bombs, water supply poisoning, anthrax, truck bombs, nuclear
strikes, radiation leaks, surveillance, loss of civil liberties,
and so on.
In Nairobi, there is relatively small
fear of terrorists, though the malarial mosquito and the petty
thief are both dreaded.
Let me cut to the chase. When I look
at the facts, it seems to me that there should be a travel advisory
out against the entire world. All US Embassies should retreat
to safe cover - probably on another planet, for it is hard to
see where on earth they would be immune to attack. All Americans,
in and out of the US, should probably wear protective armor,
include bioterror suits, from an early age. Since consorting
with Americans can bring small impoverished countries under tremendous
pressure to conform to all sorts of standards, social contacts
should be reviewed.
The British High Commissioner in Nairobi,
Edward Clay, reacting to accusations that USA and UK are imposing
only mild warnings on countries where security is far worse than
Kenya, reacted with, "There is no direct threat to Saudi
Arabia, Morocco, and Israel." How precious of the High Commissioner.
Would the Israelis, speaking this very minute of wiping out Hamas,
agree? Would the Palestinians, killing themselves to end the
killing, agree? Would CNN agree?
I wonder if my son would agree. His kindergarten
has children of all nationalities, and they are all affectionate
friends. Though they may occasionally sense that all is not so
well in the vicious world outside, they hang on to their smiles,
and a sense that life is not so bad after all. But the other
night, reading to him from his Biblical scriptures text, I was
startled by yet another intrusion of unwelcome reality: he was
already acquiring the mild suspicion that Palestinians were not
very Good People.
We are not Christians in my family, nor
indeed Hindus really, but instead strive to somehow create in
our children a sense of a supreme divinity. This divinity, we
tell them, is kind, not vindictive, omniscient, and yet unobtrusive.
He is a watcher, and his eyes keenly follow how his children
exercise the judgment and minds he gave them to make choices
that bring them nearer to him. He tolerates mistakes, and is
endlessly generous in giving each of us opportunities to make
choices. We hope that he will learn that we are made - or unmade
- by the choices we make in life, but also that one of those
is not a choice of which God to subscribe to. Though school teaches
him about Bush's God, we make up the deficit at home. His mind
already has room for a larger, kinder intelligence.
The story I found myself preparing my
son to tell at his Scriptures test was of Samson and Delilah.
"God chose Samson to deliver the Israelis from the Philistines.
But Samson fell in love with Delilah. The Philistines bribed
Delilah to discover the secret of Samson's strength. He told
her that the longer his hair, the stronger he was. One night,
when he was asleep, the Philistines came and cut off his locks
and gouged out his eyes, leaving him powerless. The evil Philistines
captured Samson. One night, when the Philistines were celebrating,
they brought out Samson, and tied him to the pillars of their
temple, and abused him and threw rocks at him. Samson prayed
to God to give him his strength one last time, and God did. Samson
pushed at the pillars until they fell, and brought down the temple,
killing all the Philistines. He himself also died."
Are there still any Philistines and Israelis,
my son asked? Indeed there are, I replied, and they are still
killing each other. The Philistines are now called Palestinians,
that's the only difference.
He had a flood of questions: Are Palestinians
evil? Why does God hate Palestinians?
Did God make Palestinians? Why does God
help the Israelis but not the Palestinians? If he is on the Israelis'
side, why haven't they won the war yet? Do the Palestinians have
a different God? Doesn't he help them?
How to explain to a child a God who speaks
like Bush: If you are not with me, then you are against me. Here
is a God who kills like Bush: he arms his followers with secret
strength, he decimates his out-of-favour children by the thousands.
Here is a God who punishes, hates, segregates, strikes terror,
and is relentless. You must live in fear of him, or not live
at all.
This is not the God who made my son,
or me, or little orphan Abdul with neither arms left nor future.
Let Bush return to kindergarten. He may learn that while he is
bulldozing the world towards his dreadful peace with hamburgers,
Coca Cola and freedom fries, he is leading our children into
a hellish tomorrow.
C.Y. Gopinath
works for an international health NGO in Nairobi, Kenya and can
be reached at: cygopi@yahoo.com
Weekend
Edition Features
Alexander
Cockburn
My Life as a Rabbi
William
A. Cook
The Scourge of Hopelessness
Standard
Schaefer
The Wages of Terror: an Interview with R.T. Naylor
Ron Jacobs
US Prisons as Strategic Hamlets
Harry
Browne
The Pitstop Ploughshares
Lawrence
Magnuson
WMD: The Most Dangerous Game
Harold
Gould
Saddam and the WMD Mystery
David Krieger
10 Reasons to Abolish Nuclear Weapons
Avia
Pasternak
The Unholy Alliance in the Occupied Territories
CounterPunch
Summer Reading:
Our Favorite Novels
Todd Chretien
Return to Sender: Todd Gitlin, the Duke of Condescension
Maria
Tomchick
Danny Goldberg's Imaginary Kids
Adam Engel
The Fat Man in Little Boy
Poets'
Basement
Guthrie, Albert & Hamod
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