KENYA: Declan Walsh reports from Nairobi on the sense of injustice among Kenyan victims of terrorism directed at the US. A fund which helped survivors of the 1998 embassy bombing closes at the end of this month
Groping around his tin-wall house with a metal cane, Mr Pius Maina understands the pain of September 11th better than most.
Four years ago he too was caught up in an al-Qaeda attack - one that tore out his eyes and destroyed his life.
The bomb that levelled the US embassy in Nairobi showered him with fragments of metal and glass. Now instead of eyes he has two fleshy sockets, shards of glass are still embedded in his head and, worst for his family, he cannot work.
But although the US government refuses to compensate the 60-year-old printer - or Osama bin Laden's other Kenyan victims - it recently started to pay millions of dollars to September 11th victims. The blinded Mr Maina sees a great injustice.
"It is just discrimination. We are human beings like those other ones they are compensating," he said at his house in Kiserian, 25 kilometres south of Nairobi.
"But they see us as Africans, and Kenyans. They don't consider us like their own people."
At least 229 people died in the August 7th, 1998, attacks in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, of whom 207 were Kenyan, 12 were American and 10 Tanzanian.
But instead of paying compensation, the US has spent $37.5 million on "humanitarian assistance" to the Kenyan victims.
Roughly $13 million was allocated to survivors' medical bills and school fees for their children. Another one-third went to helping affected businesses and upgrading Kenya's emergency services, while the remainder was spent on reconstructing surrounding buildings destroyed by the blasts.
But the money is almost gone. Apart from some medical and school payments, the fund closes at the end of this month. The US says its obligation to Kenya's victims is over.
"We have done our duty as kind and generous neighbours and as foreigners in a foreign land. We have been as generous as we can be," said Ms Shannon Lovgren, bomb response unit co-ordinator at the US Agency for International Development in Nairobi.
However, September 11th has cast US claims that it cannot be responsible for terrorist acts in a different light.
A government fund is offering cash compensation to the victims on US soil.
So far the average payout - with just 52 claims processed - has been over $1.5 million.
The US says the pay outs are necessary to avoid a flood of claims against US airlines that could destroy the aviation industry. Kenyan victims say it is a double standard.
"Why are they paying their own people if they did not hurt them? It is discrimination of high calibre," said Mr Philip Gitahi of the Nairobi Bomb Blast Survivors Association.
Victims have also been angered by a recent initiative to make them pay 20 per cent of the cost of drugs they used to receive for free.
Cost-sharing was introduced because some victims were stockpiling drugs and selling them back on to the market, said Ms Lovgren.
The victims deny the charge. In the Blast Survivors Association office - which overlooks the site, now converted into a garden of remembrance - Mr John Chege held a prescription for psychological drugs written on August18th which had still not been issued.
"I'm not working any more so I can't afford this," he said.
After the 1998 bombings, more than 3,000 survivors received between $500 and $10,000 through a $3.6 million fund of private donations, mostly from Kenyans. But more recent efforts to leverage payment from the US have proved fruitless.
An attempt to sue the government failed last year. A judge ordered that the funds of the four al-Qaeda operatives convicted of the bombings should be handed to the victims, but the terrorists have no assets.
Now a San Francisco lawyer, Mr Gerald Sterns, is trying to get compensation through the Foreign Claims Act, which provides for compensation in "meritorious" cases where foreign civilians are injured as a result of US operations abroad.
But so far the claim has received a lukewarm response from the State and Defence departments.
In contrast, the dozen American victims of the Kenyan bomb blast are lobbying to have their cases included in the September 11th fund.
"The Kenyan victims are no different from those in New York, Washington or Pennsylvania," said Mr Sterns.
"But they are being cut out, probably because Kenya has no oil. And that's the bottom line."