US, Sympathisers Mark 9/11 Attack
By Paul Ohia with agency report
Americans rang church bells, remembered the nearly 3,000 dead and gathered to pray to mark the third anniversary of the devastating September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.
At the site of the fallen World Trade Centre towers in New York yesterday, parents and grandparents of the victims solemnly read the names of victims before a large crowd, adding personal comments or blowing kisses skyward.
"We love you more today than yesterday, and we will love you more tomorrow than today," one mother said. Musicians played softly as the names were read.
The ceremonies were smaller and more subdued than those of the first two years since the attacks, and some speakers used the day, within two months of the November 2 presidential election, to make political points.
In Washington, President George W. Bush led a national moment of silence and then used his weekly radio address to mark the day.
In Nigeria, civil society groups commemorated the ocassion with the Centre for United Action Against Terrorism and Sectarian Violence (CUATSEV) organising a lecture in cojunction with Actor Guild of Nigeria on the issue.
The President of CUATSEV Evangelist Edmund Anozie described the incidence as a watershed in the annals of global terrorism in all dimensions.
His words: "Five thousand innocent men, women and children of more than eighty nationalities perished in most taking, and bizarre manner in a peace time tragedy which is revolting to human conscience.
Lamenting the ignorance exhibited by Nigerians in understanding the gory phenomenon the Chairman of Lagos State Branch of the Actors Guild of Nigeria, Chief Remi Ohajianya said that the National Orientation Agency (NOA) and the Ministry of Information should help the guild in the production of films that are educative along that line. He said that such films may not be profit oriented but should aim at letting the masses and the government understand certain austere situations that could lead individuals to become security threats to others like total neglect of citizens welfare.
An author of a book on terrorism , Mr Frank Oshanugor who was the chairman of the lecture said the attack left no one in doubt that nothing could be taken for granted in the issue of human security. According to him, time has come for Nige-rians to join hands in combating terrorism at domestic levels.
Elsewhere in Boston, Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, the Democratic nominee seeking to replace Bush in the White House, called for Americans to come together to fight terrorism.
"While September 11 was the worst day we have ever seen, it brought out the best in all of us," he said. "And we must always remember that we will only defeat those who sought to destroy us by standing together as one America."
Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld discussed the al Qaeda hijackers and praised the United States and Bush at a September 11 memorial ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery that included a moment of silence at 9:37 a.m. when American Airlines Flight 77 struck the Pentagon three years ago.
"They wanted America to retreat from the world, so that they could impose their ideology of oppression and of hatred. They thought they could strike us with impunity and that we would acquiesce," he said. "But the enemies have underestimated our country, they failed to understand the character of our people, and they misread our commander-in-chief."
Tom Ridge, Secretary of Homeland Security, spoke at a ceremony in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, southeast of Pittsburgh, where church bells rang to mark the anniversary of the moment the fourth plane crashed.
In New York, Mayor Michael Bloomberg remembered the individuals. "Each person was someone's son or daughter," he said in an opening address. "There is no name for a parent who loses a child," he said, "for there are no words to describe this pain."
The reading of victims' names at the World Trade Centre has become a tradition. At last year's ceremony to mark the second anniversary, children of victims read out the long list of names. On the first anniversary, they were read by relatives, local politicians and other public figures.
Many in the crowd carried photographs and flowers as they descended into "Ground Zero," the World Trade Centre site, from which the remains of many victims have never been recovered.
They cried and hugged one another as they floated blossoms in two small reflecting pools designed to symbolise the footprints of the two fallen 110-story towers.
But in a sign of the amount of time that has passed since the attacks, a new office building was under construction at one side of the site, replacing one of several destroyed three years ago. Plans for a memorial in downtown Manhattan are mired in legal wrangling and dissension among victims' relatives over what would be appropriate.
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