I gathered my children in the darkness that day, held tightly, and crawled out of the embassy through a scene of horror, fortunately to physical safety-at least for us. We lost many friends that day among the 224 people who died in the almost simultaneous attacks on our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. One of them, Louise Martin, was like me, a dependent. She had been a stellar diplomat for America, though she was never paid and never recognized for all that she did for our country and for the people of Kenya. She died that day. It could have been us. The perpetrators of that bomb did not know Louise, nor me or my children. They were trying to kill an image.
Dependents of American diplomats, the spouses and the children who accompany our Foreign Service officers to postings abroad, are representing the American people as much or more than the nation’s official diplomats. In this world, where terrorism is the new threat, we face risks that are as great, or greater than, our diplomatic corps. There are no safe places anymore. When I traveled around Europe at 20, I felt wonderful being an American. Many people wanted to talk with me and most said ours was a great country.
It is different today; most people do not love our country. When I accompanied my husband to our first posting in Beijing, we thought it was a wonderfully safe place to live with little crime and violence. But we ended up witnessing the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, a night of horror. In its aftermath, we experienced extreme official anti-Americanism. Despite the difficulties, I managed to organize a bilateral women’s conference, so that 300 Chinese and American women could share ideas.
When we first arrived in Kenya, it was the last place one would expect a political terrorist to strike. Those of us who accompany our diplomat spouses are not always privy to the intelligence information that might have warned us of the dangers we faced. We are not taken into consideration when important policy decisions are made, and we are not given much support for being on the front line. But we know there are risks, and still we go. While our spouses go off to work in their embassy offices, we are living and working in the host country. While the U.S. government tries to make its embassies safe and as similar to life in the U.S. as possible, the accompanying families are the ones who deal with the host nation in our daily lives. We interact with Kenyans, with Bosnians, with Chinese or the nationals of whichever country we are posted. We shop in the markets, employ people to work for us, deal with the phone companies, register our children in schools, find local jobs, cope with the bureaucracy, confront the robbers, make friends with the neighbors. We deal with the cultural differences, the crime, the shortage or absence of infrastructure, the everyday life of the local people and their attitudes toward Americans. We, too, are diplomats, and we come free with the package.
The State Department is cautious about sending families to areas that seem to have security threats. More and more single diplomats, and those without children, are filling posts that have security concerns. Embassies are being fortified with new security walls, alarms and procedures.
Diplomats, however, are the humans on the ground. Diplomats and their spouses, as well as American business people, are our knowledge bank about the people of the rest of the world. We are the eyes and ears who inform policy makers back home of reality in the host country. Without this reality check, all we would have are computer and radar screens with maps of Kosovo or East Timor or wherever the latest conflict arises, or newspaper articles about the latest problems in Africa.
Much of the world has only distant and distorted images of America from movies, television and the Internet. Right now, for many people, America means soldiers and bombs or else “Baywatch” and the latest Hollywood garbage. No wonder they want to bomb us.
When I was living in India, many people were surprised that I was nothing like the Caroline character in the “Bold and the Beautiful.” I was the first noncelluloid American many had met.
Equally amazed were the Kenyan people I met and worked with in the year after the embassy bombing. They were angry at what “America did to them.” They felt it was our fault that this happened to them. One 12-year-old boy, whose mother was left paralyzed by the blast, felt that if we had not been in their country, none of this would have happened to him. When I funded his mother’s rehabilitation and we shared our sadness and worked together to heal, his anger about America lessened. He learned we, too, were victims of the atrocity.
If we are truly moving toward a global village, then we need global citizens. We need those who understand other cultures and who recognize differences. We need the diplomatic ground forces. In my opinion, we need not only the professional diplomats, but we need the accompanying spouses and children. Now that I am back in America, I am amazed at how isolated most of my fellow citizens are from the rest of the world. They are busy going to Starbucks, buying new cars, studying the stock market. They are not concerned about their image abroad.
Now, more than ever, it is critical that Americans work to improve understanding. Those who run banks, work in development agencies, go to church, run community groups, or lead schools abroad, generally do so in accordance with our values of transparency, directness, democracy, environmental consciousness, gender equality and human rights. Just by example, they can effect change. The gain will be that more of our international neighbors will know “real” Americans and there will be less misunderstanding in our global village.
An interesting note about the bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam is that almost all of the American diplomats and their families opted not to leave immediately afterward. My family stayed in Kenya for another year, although the U.S. government offered everyone the option of early curtailment. We went to work to rebuild the embassy both emotionally and physically. We all were determined not to let the terrorists win. We helped each other and we helped Kenya. No long-distance assistance could possibly do what personal communication can do. The relations between our two nations remained strong after such a major calamity, because people stayed on the ground in Kenya.
It is more than two years later, and almost every American who was in that explosion has moved on to a new diplomatic post by now. These and thousands of other official and unofficial diplomats put their lives on the line in a way that is critical to international relations. They and their families must be there, out in the world, if we want to have international understanding. The U.S. government, however, has an obligation to support and protect them to the extent possible.
The State Department set up an accountability review board to investigate the embassy bombings. One of the board’s major recommendations was to augment the budget for security at American missions around the world. Unfortunately, this has not happened, and security continues to be in jeopardy. Compared to the increased budgets for military and intelligence, the amount of money recommended for diplomats is small. Investment in the people who are willing to be our emissaries around the world is critical. Terrorism should not stop the work of diplomacy. Terrorism can be combated by communication and understanding, but only if the diplomatic families are safe enough to do their work.
