Albright In Kenya: I'm So Sorry

U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright on Tuesday offered Kenyans sympathy in their own language for the devastation caused by a car bomb attack on the U.S. embassy in Nairobi.

"Pole sana," she said in Kiswahili, the lingua franca of East Africa. "I'm so sorry."

She told Kenyans there was no reason that their nation was singled out for such tragedy. "Terror is not about reason," she said. "It's about hate."

Albright toured the burnt-out shell of the U.S. embassy and stared almost in disbelief at the rubble where an office block once stood next door.

"It's a war...that's what it looks like," she said. "As someone who actually saw bombs in London during the war, that's what it looks like."

Albright and her family fled her native Czechoslovakia during World War II and lived in London during the Nazi blitz.

She pledged that the United States will find and punish terrorists who bombed two U.S. embassies in East Africa.

Albright said she had come to Kenya to deliver a message of sympathy from the American people, and said the deadly attack must not hurt relations between the two nations.

"The terrorists would like nothing better than to drive us apart," she said. "We must not let them. We will not let them."

Twelve Americans died in the blast, but the vast majority - at least 235 - were Kenyans Many Kenyans complained that the U.S. cared more about the few Americans victims than the many African victims.

"I cannot say we acted perfectly, "Albright said, "but allegations of callousness are wrong."

Her one-day tour of Dar es Salaam and Nairobi was aimed at showing support for East Africans devastated by the terrorists attacks and to demonstrate resolve in the face of terrorism.

Albright's trip to Nairobi was delayed by two hours today after an engine on her military jet overheated. She and her entourage transferred to smaller planes for the trip from Dar es Salaam.

Albright pledged to ask Congress to approve a still-undetermined amount of emergency funding to pay for re-establishing embassy operations in Tanzania and Kenya and to compensate families who "suffered irreparable harm."