WORLD SOCIALIST WEB SITE
Many press accounts reported the indifference of US military and government officials towards the largely Kenyan victims of the tragedy. The BBC reported that US investigators sealed off the embassy, even refusing entry to Kenyan President Daniel arap Moi.
The Financial Times, the leading British business daily, cited complaints that US marines had rejected requests for picks and shovels when hundreds of rescue workers were frantically digging into the Ufundi House wreckage with their bare hands. A Kenyan police captain told the newspaper, “The French are here, the Israelis are here, the Red Cross are helping and the Hindis are giving us food. Where are our American brothers?” An ambulance worker said, “The Americans have behaved like [obscenity] from day one.”
Several US and Israeli sources, including ABC News and the Tel Aviv newspaper Ha’aretz, reported Wednesday that a US informant in Kenya had warned the American government two weeks before the blast that the Nairobi embassy had been targeted for a bomb attack.
The informant was a contact of Israel’s Mossad intelligence service, but when American officials checked with Mossad about the reliability of the source, they were advised to treat the report with skepticism. No special security measures were taken at the embassy.
The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu refused to comment on the Ha’aretz article. But the Israeli government’s dismissal of this advance warning may account for its extraordinary effort to supply bomb experts and rescue teams in the wake of the bombing, for reasons which have not otherwise been explained.
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50 years ago: South Korean opposition leader kidnapped by regime
On August 8, 1973, armed agents of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA) attacked, drugged, and abducted Kim Dae-jung from the Hotel Grand Palace in Tokyo. Kim was the head of the New Democratic Party, the leading opposition party in South Korea at the time. In the 1971 South Korean presidential election Kim ran against the sitting president, Park Chung Hee. Kim took over 45 percent of the vote losing to Park but by a far narrower margin than was anticipated.
Following the election Park began implementing his plans to maintain his one-man rule in South Korea, behind a façade of democratic elections. He imposed a new constitution that allowed him to serve as president for life and made the activities of opposition political parties illegal.
Kim, who had received five million votes, and his New Democratic Party were a major target of Park’s repressions. One month after the 1971 election, Kim fled Korea for Japan after a failed assassination attempt. In Japan, Kim continued his political activity as the exiled leader of his party. He regularly issued statements criticizing Park’s dictatorship especially following imposition of the new Yushin Constitution in October 1972.
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75 years ago: Pakistani state violently attacks Pashtun opposition group
On August 12, 1948, soldiers and police of the newly formed Pakistani state violently attacked an opposition protest in the rugged North-West Frontier Province of the country, largely populated by the Pashtun minority which is also the largest ethnic group in neighboring Afghanistan. The toll of the attack, which involved live-fire, remains contested. Proponents of the Pashtun organization that was targeted have claimed that at least 150 protesters were killed, but the Pakistani government asserts 15 died and another 40 were injured.
The attack, dubbed the Babrra massacre after the field in which it was perpetrated, took place in the context of the recent partition of the Indian subcontinent. Faced with a mass anti-colonial movement, and emerging from World War II greatly weakened, British imperialism had agreed to formally relinquish its chief colonial possession of India. In a final onslaught on the masses, it conspired with the native ruling elites to divide the country into a Muslim-based Pakistan in the northwest and east and a predominately Hindu India.
The August 1947 partition claimed up to two million lives and displaced as many as 20 million. It led to ongoing fighting between Pakistani and Indian armed forces, as well as intense conflicts inside the newly formed states.
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