Osama Bin Laden: Curtain Falls on the Man who Lived by the Gun

By Eunice Kilonzo

May 2 2011 will forever remain etched in many people’s memories. This is the day the world’s most wanted man met his waterloo at the hands of the US military. Osama bin Laden, who has been responsible for the world’s worst terror atrocities, is synonymous with pain, hurt and fatalities. His death brings healing to old wounds the huge scars notwithstanding. Members of the US elite Naval Seal invaded a mansion in Abbottabad and shot him, ending his anarchy. Osama died as he had predicted he would wish to exit the world in the hands of the Americans who he gleefully called infidels.

East Africa (Kenya and Tanzania) faced the brunt of Osama bin Laden through his terror attacks on one chilly morning, the 7th of August 1998. Two bombs exploded simultaneously in American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and in Dar es Salaam in Tanzania killing over 200 people. Yet another blow to Kenya came on the 28 November 2002 where two suicide bombers blew themselves up inside Paradise Hotel in Mombasa, Kenya; while missiles were fired on an Israeli plane. 15 people were killed and more than 80 others injured. The damage from these attacks was mental, psychological and even spiritual.

Douglas Sidialo a victim of Kenya’s terrorist attack of the 7th of August 1998 yesterday visited the Bomb Blast Memorial Park. Tears flowed freely from his eyeless sockets when he heard of Osama’s death. He lost his eyesight due to the impact of the attack. At the memorial park he touched the plaque erected engraving the names of those killed during the attack. On one side of the plaque hang a post of a Kenyan proverb that read: “Peace is costly, but it is worth the expense.”

Speaking after the news on Osama had been announced by President Obama, President Kibaki echoed that “the killing of Osama in Pakistan brought justice for the Kenyan victims of al Qaeda”. Thus the death of Osama becomes a catharsis that purges the world and most especially the bereaved or maimed by the terror attacks. Although his death may not reverse what happened on the 7th of August 1998 or the 11th of September attacks; the death brings some kind of justice and hope for a safer society.

“Bin laden spread his ideology not by word but by acts of violence and we must be vigilant against propaganda strikes by the lieutenants he trained and left behind,” Kenya’s Prime Minister Raila Odinga said.

The death of Osama bin Laden at the hands of U.S. special operations forces may help to start some healing, said Christian and Muslim religious leaders, relatives of victims, and a generation who grew in the shadow of the various global terror attacks such as the infamous 9/11 in the United States of America as well as those in Africa and the rest of the world. He lived by the gun and died by it.