Aid, Civil Society and the State in Kenya

Abstract

The horrific bombings of the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam thrust East Africa to the centre of world concern over the threat of terrorism and presaged the events of September 11 and the declaration of the global War on Terror. Images of crumbled office blocks and the twisted wreckage of buses and vehicles on the streets of central Nairobi gave rise to public consciousness of Osama Bin Laden and a new brand of international terrorism. Following the attacks, then US President Bill Clinton ordered an air strike on a pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum that US intelligence sources indicated was a disguised weapons-making facility (Wright, 2006). Sudan remains on the US list of state sponsors of terror and for a time in the 1990s was official host to Bin Laden. Kenya has since been the theatre for further attacks targeting Israeli tourists and commercial interests. When the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) briefly governed southern Somalia in 2006, the US perceived this as a radical group with ties to international terrorists and engineered the invasion of Somalia using proxy Ethiopian troops. This drew Kenya deeper into the prosecution of the War on Terror.

The US can put up fifty schools in Northeastern Province but this doesn’t change local perceptions.

Kenyan Muslim leader and NGO head, January 2007