How Kenya plays with terrorist fire

Militants

Al-Shabaab militants train in the outskirts of Mogadishu. 

Photo credit: File

Where people are increasingly aware that America's martial activities abroad are totally selfish, any poor state willingly lending itself as a conduit is playing with fire.

Kenya adduces no evidence that the US has coerced it into its servile readiness to allow the US to use its soil to ravage Afghanistan. Is it because Kenya is genuinely committed to helping put paid to political terror? It's on the cards.

For terrorism really terrifies Kenyans. We have only recently lost scores of citizens to lethal contraptions hurled by desperadoes. But everybody now knows that although the US is marketing its invasion as a chase after terrorists, It is only a wild-goose chase. 

For the US, being the taproot of all world terrorism, simply cannot uproot terrorism.

You cannot annihilate terrorism by terrorising one country and sponsoring terrorism everywhere else. Throughout the 20th century, the US was involved in most cases of world terror. The list is long: Guatemala, Chile, EI Salvador, Honduras, Guyana, Cuba, Nicaragua, Panama, Grenada, Japan (Hiroshima), Korea, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

The US sponsored Portugal in Angola, Mozambique and Bissau, apartheid in Namibia and South Africa, Ian Smith's white supremacism in Southern Rhodesia, French, Italian and British colonial atrocities, Mobutu's Zaire, Idi Amin's Uganda, Somalia.

It had a heavy hand in England's Ireland, Franco's Spain, Salazar's Portugal and the ethnic cleansings of Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo. It was the éminence grise in Zionism's dismemberment of
Palestine, the Suez Crisis, Turkey's slaughter of the Kurds, Israel's rape of Lebanon, Shah Reza Pahlavi's mortgage of Iran, Zia ul-Haq's emasculation of Pakistan, the starvation of millions
of Iraqi children.

As Anthony Sampson shows in, for example, The Sovereign State of ITT, the US rides roughshod over these peoples with only one determination: to secure their wealth for the maws of US industry - Arab oil, for example, for the domestic and overseas Robber Barons of Detroit.

Thus what the US calls terrorists - like Uruguay's Tupamaros, Italy's Red Brigades, Germany's Baader-Meinhof Gang, "Indo-China's" "Vietcong", Kenya's Mau Mau, the PLO - all did, of course, employ reprehensible terror. But only a colonial diehard like Massey-Bloemfield will deny that Mau Mau terror was a direct result of protracted, obdurate and much more inhuman colonial terror.

Terrorist fury invariably stems from a deepening sense of helplessness under injustices camouflaged in insidious propaganda ("democracy", "freedom", "civilisation", "the free world). Thus the bitterness which the US is busy sowing in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Palestine can only spawn other much more ferocious forms of terrorism.

Anybody can see this from the fact that the US was what created both Al Qaeda and the Talibans to serve terroristic needs against Moscow. They were the equivalent of today's Northern Alliance and turned anti-America only when, at the Soviet collapse, America reneged - as it always does - on its pledges.

Thus, after Mr Bin Laden and Mullan Omar have fallen, the Northern Alliance will have outlived its usefulness and be dropped like a viper. Its bitterness will be so profound it will readily turn
anti-America with weapons much more devastating than Osama's on American targets.

George Bush and Tony Blair - Neil Kinnock would have called him "Mr Clinton's poodle" - will then declare another "war on terrorism" using new Afghani proxies. But it will thus only be
raising that scourge to a new level.

Terrorism, then, is just another name for "Coca-colonisation", the neo-colonisation drive that forces America into trying to police the world to make it safe for "democratic fleecing". Any Third World State which lends its soil as part of that scheme is an imperialist agent and exposes its own people to the same irrational anger that this necessarily provokes the Osama bin Ladens.

Kenya should know that the Nairobi bombing came from a bitterness which can be allayed only if the West relaxes the yoke of darkness and death under which it keeps humanity. But that's a tall order. Imperialism cannot be expected to commit suicide. 

In that case, terrorism - because it is always concomitant with official injustice - is here to stay. And, far from helping annihilate it, Kenya's open support for terrorism's prime mitlator, the US, only risks a terrorist boomerang more terrible than 1998's.

This article is part of the “Fifth Columnist Files” series that republishes Philip Ochieng’s long-running Sunday Nation column