WASHINGTON — Riz Khaliq and Doreen Oport were both working at the American Embassy in Nairobi on Aug. 7, 1998, when a truck bomb tore through the compound. Both were bloodied. Mr. Khaliq was knocked unconscious and Ms. Oport trapped beneath fallen rubble.
Decades later, both periodically pick shreds of glass and metal from their bodies as embedded debris from the blast continues to work its way to the skin.
Both are also naturalized U.S. citizens. There, the similarities end.
Because Mr. Khaliq was already an American citizen at the time of the attack, he is eligible for at least $3 million in compensation as part of a tentative State Department settlement with the government of Sudan.
Ms. Oport was then a citizen of Kenya, so she stands to receive $400,000 from Sudan, which had harbored Qaeda militants who bombed the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in near-simultaneous strikes.
Mr. Khaliq and Ms. Oport are among hundreds of victims and family members at the center of a yearslong process to remove Sudan from a U.S. government list of state sponsors of terrorism. Doing so will open the way for the East African country to move toward economic stability, and potentially greater democracy, after a generation of oppression.
Yet the payment disparity between victims who were Americans at the time of the bombings and those who were not has delayed — and could derail — the deal. It has divided Congress and created a rift between the victims and their lawyers as the United States grapples with how to correct unequal or discriminatory standards in its legal system.
“It’s cold — why would they even think of compensating the Kenyans at a lesser percentage than the Americans?” said Ms. Oport, who worked at the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, for 15 years before she immigrated to the United States in 2002 and became a citizen in 2010.
“I can only say it’s discrimination,” she added.
She called the international employees at American embassies abroad the “backbone” of the missions by keeping operations running and recounted returning to work a few days after the blasts to pick through the rubble for documents that would have been lost. “The recognition of equality is very important,” she said.
For Mr. Khaliq, the settlement serves a broader purpose. Not only would it be the first time that Sudan’s government has acknowledged responsibility for the bombings, but it could also help raise nearly half of the country’s 45 million citizens out of poverty by making available international assistance — and, potentially, keep it from being a breeding ground for terrorism.
“Will this make up for all the pain and suffering, and all the pain that I put my family through, with my PTSD?” Mr. Khaliq asked. “No, it doesn’t. But I also feel like it at least gets to some level of resolution.”
Just as important is “to help these countries understand that supporting terror activity, or harboring terrorism, is not a nameless crime,” said Mr. Khaliq, who was in a meeting with the American ambassador to Kenya, Prudence Bushnell, when the bomb exploded. “And I would hate to see the potential agreement fall apart or crumble, because it’s not exactly perfect.”
Of the 224 people who were killed in the 1998 bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, 54 were embassy employees or contractors, including 12 Americans, according to the State Department. Thousands more were injured, including 139 embassy employees and contractors.
Under its authoritarian president at the time, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, Sudan was added to the State Department’s list of nations abetting terrorism in 1993 for supporting Hezbollah and Palestinian militant groups. American courts ruled that Sudan was a vital participant in the embassy bombings that took place five years later, having provided passports, unrestricted border travel and shelter to the Qaeda militants before they attacked.
Only three other nations — Iran, North Korea and Syria — are currently on the State Department list that restricts assistance from the United States and, effectively, from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
But in 2016, Sudan cut its diplomatic ties with Iran and joined Saudi Arabia in its fight against rebel Houthis in nearby Yemen. (Both moves hew to policies supported by the U.S. government, although many of the Sudanese soldiers who were sent to fight in Yemen were children from the impoverished Darfur region.) And in the final days of the Obama administration, after years of negotiations, the United States began easing sanctions against Sudan to reward its government’s cooperation on fighting terrorism and ending military attacks on its people.
The effort was picked up by the Trump administration, and gathered momentum after Mr. al-Bashir was ousted from power in April 2019 in a coup. That gave the United States a new opening for normalizing diplomatic relations with Sudan and to help stabilize the Horn of Africa, one of the world’s most strategic and volatile regions.
Saudi Arabia and Israel are among the American allies that are pressing for a diplomatic thaw, mostly to counter Iran. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel met in February with Sudan’s de facto leader, Lt. Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan. Days later, Sudan began allowing Israeli commercial planes to fly in its airspace.
The opportunity for détente could be short-lived. So far this year, Sudan’s festering political instability has been fueled by the coronavirus outbreak and a recent assassination attempt against the transitional government’s prime minister, Abdalla Hamdok.
“The next few months may be one of our only opportunities to support Sudan’s progress,” said Senator Chris Coons, Democrat of Delaware and an Africa expert.
He called it a “once-in-a generation opportunity to improve our relationship with Sudan and support the new government’s efforts to transition toward democracy and a more inclusive society.”
The State Department insists that Sudan compensate the embassy bombing victims before it is taken off the list of state sponsors of terrorism. The tentative settlement would pay victims, or their surviving families, a total of about $335 million — all but $100 million would go to those who were American citizens at the time of the attacks.
Before it will pay, however, Sudan has demanded that it receive immunity from future lawsuits related to the bombings and other attacks while on the terrorism list. That must be approved by Congress, which has stalled over whether the embassies’ international employees are being unjustly undercompensated.
“I would not want foreign nationals who worked in our embassies to be treated as second-class citizens,” said Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the chairman of the Homeland Security Committee.
He said the State Department appeared unwilling to try to do more for those employees. “Everybody should be treated in a fair and equitable manner,” Mr. Thompson said.
State Department officials said that given its financial fragility, Sudan could not afford to pay more than $335 million, and that the United States was not required to compensate the international victims. They said even the lower payments provided some recognition to those who were killed or wounded simply because they worked for the American government.
The amount given to each victim is loosely based on a $2.7 billion settlement that the Libyan government, under Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, agreed to pay to the families of each person who died in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Libya offered the payments — $10 million for each victim who was killed, no matter the country of origin — in 2002 as Colonel el-Qaddafi sought removal from the State Department’s terrorism list, which took effect in 2006.
In settling the cases of the 1998 embassy bombings, Sudan would pay $10 million to families of Americans who died; U.S. victims who were injured but survived would receive at least $3 million. By contrast, the families of slain foreign citizens who worked at the embassies would be entitled to $800,000, and the victims who were wounded would receive $400,000.
State Department officials said that the Lockerbie settlement was reached in a private lawsuit that the families of the Flight 103 victims — not the United States government — brought against Libya. They also said the difference in compensation mirrored the differences in salaries and other employment benefits between American diplomats and international employees at U.S. embassies, which is largely based on local standards of living in host nations.
In a June letter to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the spouses of three Tanzanian guards who died confronting the truck bomb at the U.S. Embassy in Dar es Salaam called the settlement with Sudan “a very small portion of what it owes.” But they also said the compensation was a “very significant sum in Tanzania and will do much good for our families and our community.”
“It would be unfortunate if we lost the opportunity to recover anything from Sudan simply because some individuals are demanding more compensation,” wrote the spouses, Hanuni Shamte Ndange, Judith Mwila, and Shabani Mtulya.
Many of the victims of the embassy bombings, and their families, are already being compensated from a separate fund that the Justice Department administers.
By the end of the year, it is estimated that they will have received a combined $605 million from the U.S. Victims of State Sponsored Terrorism Fund, which pays Americans and international citizens alike after a judge decides compensation. The fund is supported by payments made by banks and companies that have violated terrorism-related U.S. sanctions against Iran.
Congressional officials said lawmakers were considering extending the payouts to the embassy bombing victims for additional years as a way to break the impasse over the disparate compensation levels in the State Department’s settlement with Sudan. That way, the officials said, the international employees and their survivors would be assured more money.
In the years after the deaths of her father and brother at the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, Edith Bartley pushed Congress to ensure survivors’ benefits for all employees of diplomatic missions targeted in terrorist attacks, going back to 1983. She also had lobbied lawmakers before they enacted the victims’ compensation fund that is run by the Justice Department.
She said it was what her father — Julian L. Bartley, a career U.S. diplomat and the first African-American consul general in Kenya — would have wanted her to do.
But she predicted “grave consequences” to national security if the settlement with Sudan fell apart.
“Sudan wants to turn themselves around. They’ve taken great steps to do that,” Ms. Bartley said. “That should not be taken lightly.”
July 25, 2020 at 04:00PM
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Compensation for Embassy Bombing Victims Could Imperil Thaw With Sudan - The New York Times
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