Word: baidoa
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More than 18 months after U.S. forces relinquished Somalia to its entrenched warlords, the country is "moving toward all-out war," reports Nairobi bureau chief Andrew Purvis. Sunday, General Mohammed Farrah Aidid, the warlord whose fighters had attacked U.N. peacekeepers during their failed operation to feed starving Somalis, assaulted Baidoa, a city of 300,000 people northwest of the capitol of Mogadishu. At least 10 people were reportedly killed, and Aidid is now holding 20 foreign aid workers against their will. Baidoa is controlled by a rival warlord, Ali Mahdi Mohamed. "It could just have been a looting...
Aden Abdulrahman Mohammed believed the worst was over when the U.S. Marines arrived a year ago in his village just north of Baidoa. He had managed to reap a good harvest of sorghum, set up a water pump and construct a small chicken farm. Then suddenly in November, the bad old days returned. A dispute about two stolen camels between rival subclans quickly escalated into a hit-and-run war. When the shooting stopped, 15 villages, including Asha Farto, lay in smoking ruins. All the sorghum stored by the farmers had been looted or torched, and when the seasonal rains...
...absence of adequate U.N. protection, most aid agencies have gone back to their old methods of self-preservation. In Baidoa, the site of three separate bomb blasts since Christmas, relief workers have begun fortifying their compounds with razor wire, sandbagged guard posts and well-armed local gunmen. For many Somalis, the echoes of 1991 and early 1992, when the world stood by while the country slipped into famine, are disturbing. "Everyone will have to leave this place," says Aden Abdulrahman Mohammed in Asha Farto. That may be possible for a fortunate few. For the majority of Somalis, there will...
...together & with their uniformed escorts, have taken sides, wittingly and unwittingly, in these fragmented, fratricidal wars. In Somalia, "relief workers tend to become identified with different subclans," says Lance Salisbury, assistant country representative for Catholic Relief Services. "And the leaders attempt to draw you into larger conflicts." In Baidoa, where Salisbury is based, most of his staff is from the Lyssan subclan, which prompted attacks from an opposing subclan...
...grim: a kind of permanent U.N. protectorate over Somalia, as in Cyprus, where U.N. troops still patrol almost 30 years after going in to preserve a truce; or Somalia's relapse into chaos, anarchy, famine and mass death. Says Patrick Vercammen, the U.N. humanitarian official in the town of Baidoa: "The Americans could have done 10 times more than they have done. Fifty times. They thump on their chests, but the biggest part of the job has yet to be done...