[A nice picture of historical and social complexity. One side point: In the US, we never think there might be any downside to shutting down Islamic charities. But in fact shutting down lots of innocent ones can generate exactly the political resentment we shouldn't want to foster.]
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December 2, 2002
Disparate Worlds Collided In Mombasa Terror Attack
Bin Laden Is a Hero in Mombasa Streets, But Some Villagers Miss 'Israeli Brothers'
By YAROSLAV TROFIMOV Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
MOMBASA, Kenya -- In his three years as the owner of an Israeli restaurant up the coast from this Muslim-majority city, Joseph Alon never felt unwelcome or unsafe. "People seemed so happy that we Israelis were there," he says.
A half-hour drive from Mr. Alon's restaurant, Mohammed Abram Swali, 27 years old, stood in Mombasa's bustling market quarter this weekend and said he wants "all Israelis to be killed because they are killing our people in Palestine." The unemployed former hotel worker added that he's a supporter of Osama bin Laden and that he hates the U.S.: "America wants to show that it's a superpower, but only God is a superpower."
These were the two disparate worlds that collided last Thursday, when presumed Muslim militants blew up the Israeli-owned Paradise Hotel north of Mombasa, killing 13 people, and barely missed an Israeli Arkia charter aircraft with surface-to-air missiles. Mr. Alon, who also helped run Paradise, says he enjoyed good relations with his Muslim neighbors and business associates. "I never thought we'd have problems," he says.
But the blast wasn't a surprise to many others in this sweltering coastal area, with its uniquely explosive mixture of increasingly militant Arab residents, a Christian-dominated central government and an influx of Israeli tourists and businesses more visible than anywhere else in the Muslim world.
While Kenya is majority Christian and has long been one of Israel's closest allies on the African continent, the coast was ruled by the Arab sultans of Oman until little more than a century ago. It maintains a Muslim majority and tight trade and family links with the wider Arab world. In the crumbling alleyways of Mombasa, resentment of central authority has combined with the pro- Palestinian feelings that have swept other Arab communities to provide a flow of support for groups such as al Qaeda.
"Young people here look at bin Laden like a hero -- especially those who are idle," says Najib Balala, the former mayor of Mombasa. A prominent tea merchant of Yemeni stock, he is running to represent Mombasa in elections to the Kenyan parliament later this month. The 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, which killed some 210 Kenyans and 12 Americans, was partially planned on the Kenyan coast by Arab operatives and local Kenyan Muslims, according to U.S. prosecutors.
William Langat, the head of the Kenyan team that is investigating the Paradise bombing jointly with Israel and the U.S., says that according to witnesses the three suicide bombers at the hotel and the men who fired the missiles at the Arkia jet were fair-skinned and looked like Arabs rather than Somalis or black Kenyans. But that doesn't give the team much to go on, he says, noting that "most people here [in Mombasa] are Arab-looking."
No Arrests
So far, no one has been charged in the case and the only claim of responsibility for the bombing has come from a previously unknown organization calling itself the Army of Palestine; Israeli and Kenyan officials have named al Qaeda as their chief suspect.
Fundamentalist Islam has been on the rise on the Kenyan coast since the 1980s, with local Islamic institutions and schools funded first by Libya and then by Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states. Most women in central Mombasa wear Saudi-style black veils that often cover the entire face. Sidewalk merchants do a brisk trade in religious tracts written in Arabic and Swahili, the east African mixture of Bantu, Arabic and English. Alcohol is not available in the old town around the imposing fort that was built by the Portuguese in 1593 and seized by the Omanis a century later.
The green-domed mosques around the city overflow with the faithful at prayer times. Once the Ramadan fast is broken at dusk, the tingling aroma of fried fish and meat mixes with the smell of the sea and the rotting trash that lines the roads; street vendors with machetes at the ready pick up coconuts from large piles and quickly open them to quench customers' thirst.
All along the coast in recent years, there have been regular bouts of deadly violence between local Muslims and migrant Christians from inland Kenya known as "wabara," who often get the best jobs in the tourist business. And after the 1998 bombing, the Christian-dominated Kenyan government came down especially hard on the coastal Muslim community. Officials closed many Saudi-run charities saying they may have been fronts for terrorism activities and hauled off for lengthy interrogations many local Muslim leaders. That crackdown -- and the highly visible Federal Bureau of Investigation role in the 1998 inquiry -- have fueled local resentment against both the central government in Nairobi and the West.
"Harassment and intimidation [by the government] have always been there for us. Now we are already branded as second-class citizens because we are Muslims and Arabs," says Mr. Balala, the former mayor, as he greets a visitor in his oceanside mansion decorated with Omani daggers and portraits of himself in traditional Arab dress.
Paradise, one of several Israeli-run establishments on the Kenyan coast, was a brash symbol of the Israeli presence that mushroomed here since the mid-1990s. Seeking respite from violence at home, Israelis flocked to these tropical shores of white sand and striking palm trees just a few hours from Tel Aviv on a weekly direct flight.
Unlike the urban dwellers of Mombasa, the often illiterate villagers along the coast -- most of them Muslim -- were far more interested in making a living from the tourist trade than in supporting the remote Palestinian cause.
Villagers in predominantly Muslim Musumareni, which surrounds the Paradise complex, relied on the Israelis for their livelihood. The dirt road that divides the remains of the kosher Paradise resort from a satellite Israeli-owned hotel, Calypso, is lined with African souvenir shops that sport Hebrew-only signs above the now-shattered windows. According to Nicholas Maweu John, the Kenyan manager of the Calypso, "most of the Israeli guests have been going to the [hotel] discos -- as late as 2.30 a.m. -- and even though they had to go through the bush, there were never any incidents."
Now, as the villagers -- some of them relatives of the blast's victims -- gloomily spend their days standing bewildered by the bombing's site, many wear second-hand t-shirts with the logos of the Israeli Navy and of the Likud, Israel's right-wing governing party.
'Like Brothers'
"The Israelis were like brothers to us. We welcomed them here, we took them into the village on horses and donkey," says Janji Bosko, a local villager who helped decorate the resort. "Now, we all can go fishing only. There is nothing else to do here. We want Israelis to come back."
For the attackers, this isolated complex must have seemed like an ideal target. Paradise can only be reached via a bumpy dirt road that crosses the forest and villages full of Somali refugees; there was no police presence to deter an attack.
Many Muslims here agree that Thursday's attack had to be mounted with local support. After all, outsiders would hardly even know how to find the remote Paradise. "Don't tell me that someone can come from Kuwait or Pakistan and will know where to attack. They planted agents here who have deep roots," says Sheikh Khalid Balala, a popular Mombasa Islamic preacher who once led the Islamist movement in the area and was jailed by Kenyan authorities until last year. Sheikh Balala, who is not related to the former mayor, became a moderate after his release and has fiercely condemned the attack.
Moderate leaders such as him are fighting an uphill battle to contain Islamic radicalism, which also showed itself in spontaneous celebrations after the Sept. 11 attacks. Abubakr Awadh, treasurer of the Mombasa branch of the Supreme Council of Kenyan Muslims, a Muslim community organization, says he deplores the loss of Kenyan lives, but if the perpetrators of the attack had managed to kill only Israeli tourists, or to down the Israeli plane without causing Kenyan casualties, "this would have been a good thing."
According to Mr. Awadh, who is also running for Parliament, American officials, business leaders and other policy makers should be targeted for assassination as well, because of Muslim suffering in places such as Afghanistan or Iraq. "They kill us so we can kill them," Mr. Awadh says. "Islam is rising up in east Africa, and it is a threat to the way the Americans and the Israelis want the world to be."
Write to Yaroslav Trofimov at yaroslav.trofimov at wsj.com