LONDON: In the search for an enemy with a name, the Americans are pointing to al-Ittihad al-Islamiya as the culprits in the bombing of the Paradise Hotel in Mombasa on Thursday. That seems unlikely. Al-Ittihad is a Somali group which emerged after the collapse of the Somali state in 1991 and tried to create a Somali Muslim identity to overcome the clan politics that had torn the country to pieces. It held a little territory for a while, set up Sharia courts and used Saudi money to set up feeding and health programmes and religious schools. It was not very successful.

Somali politics remained clan based. Al-Ittihad was chased out of several areas and though it opposed the American intervention in 1992, it was not prominent in driving the Americans out the following year.

Yet because it had the word Islam in its title, it caught American attention after September 11. The Americans sent surveillance teams to Somalia last year where every clan militia promptly denounced their local rivals as ‘terrorists’ in the hope of making the Americans their allies. Even now some analysts are quick to announce that the failed Somali state must be a ‘safe haven’ or ‘breeding ground’ for terrorism.

Somalia is probably less safe for foreign activists than Kenya. Every inch of Somalia is disputed by local clans and nobody moves without the knowledge of the local warlord. Strangers, especially rich ones, are invariably kidnapped and ransomed for cash. Osama bin Laden would be an especially rich prize.

Somalis with an age-old reputation for banditry have poured out of southern Somalia into Kenya and Ethiopia in the past 10 years making Britain’s asylum-seekers look like a tiny trickle. They are everyone’s scapegoats. The Americans are informed about al-Ittihad by the Ethiopians, their ally in the region. Ethiopia has blamed al-Ittihad for bomb attacks in Addis Ababa and crossed the border into Somalia on several occasions to attack its camps. Kenyans too blame their high rates of crime on Somalis so it was no surprise that several were arrested after the hotel bombing.

Al-Ittihad is an unlikely candidate. Mombasa is not unlike Bali, an interface between the rich holiday-makers and the poor unemployed. The port is full of bars and nightclubs filled with partying young Westerners. It would have been easy to repeat the Bali attack. Nor would it have been difficult to attack American and European servicemen whose naval vessels frequently put dock in Mombasa. Bars and brothels on the streets of Mombasa at night would have been far easier targets than the ones they chose.

The carefully planned attacks on the hotel and the plane were aimed precisely at Israelis. The Paradise Hotel is Israeli-owned and it is an open secret among tour operators on the coast that it is used only by Israelis. The plane that was fired on was owned by an Israeli charter company. Whoever carried out the attack was attacking Israel not America and al-Ittihad has far more motive for attacking America than attacking Israel.

The attackers are unlikely to have been Kenyan. Once again their country is the battleground. In 1980 the prestigious Norfolk Hotel in Nairobi, then Jewish-owned, was bombed by Palestinians. In 1998, in what is now seen as Al Qaeda’s first major attack, the American embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam where bombed. Some 260 were killed. This time it was Mombasa, home of Kenya’s small Arabic-speaking Muslim community.

About 7 per cent of the population, Kenya’s Muslims have been too embroiled in internal political struggles to become involved in global issues. The coastal trading community is embattled, swamped economically by international capital, much of it Israeli, and by Kenya’s wealthy business politicians. In the last election they formed the Islamic Party of Kenya to fend off the ruling party, the Kenyan African National Union (Kanu). It was banned because it was religious-based, not because it was extremist.

Sheikh Ali Shee, Chairman of the Council of Imams and Preachers for Kenya, said on Saturday that he condemned all attacks on civilians but demanded that the government expel all American and Israeli companies from Kenya because they endanger the lives of Kenyans. He is also unwilling to condemn Osama bin Laden out of hand. In such an atmosphere it is easy to imagine an Al Qaeda cell coming into Kenya and operating on the Kenyan coast. It could blend in without difficulty.

And if Kenya’s government, in the hope of much-needed aid, has leapt to the side of America in its ‘war against terrorism’, many other Kenyans remain skeptical. International news coverage has made great play of the white foreign victims with names and photographs of the Israelis and their families and the Israeli survivors, adding the fact that 13 Kenyans died almost as an add-on. It was the same in 1998 when 12 Americans and more than 220 Kenyans died in the US embassy bombing in Nairobi. This confirms to Kenyans that their lives are worth far less than those of Americans and Europeans. They do not condone atrocities like that in Mombasa last week, but nor are they gung-ho in the defence of ‘Western civilization’. It has brought them neither security, prosperity nor equality.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.