Posted on 03/03/2003 8:22:01 PM PST by yonif
NAIROBI, Kenya - A brand-new airy but heavily fortified US Embassy was inuagurated Monday, 4 1/2 years after a terrorist bomb ripped through the former chancery in the heart of Nairobi, killing 231 people, including 12 Americans.
The new embassy, designed by the US firm Hellmuth Obata & Kassabaum, is the first US mission to be built from scratch since Congress authorized funds to upgrade diplomatic missions around the world after the Aug. 7. 1998
A second new embassy was to be dedicated Tuesday in Dar es Salaam in neighboring Tanzania where a nearly simultaneous attack on the old mission there killed 12 people and injured 80.
Both attacks have been blamed on Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network. A US federal court has convicted four men for their roles in the attacks and sentenced them to life in prison.
In a brief ceremony, US Under Secretary for Management Grant Green told Kenyans the United States had not given in to terrorists by scaling back its presence in their country. The embassy remains the largest in sub-Saharan Africa in terms of personnel and regional operations.
"From this new embassy today, we reaffirm our commitment to your democracy, security and struggle for economic betterment," Green said on a small plaza in front of the four-story building sheathed in white stone with grayish trim.
Earlier, Green joined Ambassador Johnnie Carson and US Assistant Secretary for Africa Walter Kansteiner in laying wreaths at a small obelisk bearing the names of the 46 people, 44 of them staff members, who perished in the embassy itself.
At least 5,000 Kenyans were injured in the 1998 attack, and the US government spent more than $US 40 million to rescue and treat injured Kenyans, bury the dead, educate their children and revive damaged businesses and property.
But the United States will not make monetary compensation to Kenyans because Washington says it is not liable for the deaths and injuries.
A US district court judge in Washington has thrown out two separate suits by US attorneys representing more than 3,000 Kenyans and Tanzanians, ruling that they failed to demonstrate sufficiently why the US government should be held liable for the deaths and injuries in the terrorist attacks.
Bill Prior, the State Department construction manager for the project, said the 11,250-sq.-meter (125,000 sq.-foot) structure built at a cost of $68 million, meets or exceeds all congressional requirements put in place after the bombings. The building sits towards the middle of a 6.6-hectare (16.5-acre) plot and is more than 100 meters (yards) from a secondary road leading to the United Nations complex in an upmarket residential area northwest of the city center.
The old embassy, a dark three-story hulk about half the size of the new one, sat directly on the corner of two major thoroughfares in the city center. The ruined building was razed, and the site has been turned into a memorial park. The US mission has been operating out of temporary quarters since September 1998.
Prior acknowledged that businesses and residents had expressed "a certain amount of concern" about being near the new embassy, but he said all efforts were being made to reassure them.
Under new congressional security upgrade guidelines, six new US diplomatic missions in Africa are planned for Abidjan, Ivory Coast; Conakry, Guinea; Yaounde, Cameroon; Luanda, Angola; Abuja, Nigeria and Capetown, South Africa.
Work on a new US Embassy in Kampala, Uganda had been started before the 1998 bombings and was completed several years later.
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