Word: mogadishu
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Somalia's seat of government is two modest Mogadishu hotels. The Prime Minister and most of the ministers have small, basic offices in the three-story Ramadan, where a coil of barbed wire stretches across the driveway and visitors are frisked for weapons at the door. "I haven't made new business cards yet," says Prime Minister Ali Khalif Galaydh, handing over a card identifying him as the chairman of a telephone company based in Dubai. "We have no furniture, no stationery, no buildings. We have nothing." Parliament met for the first time in a blue-and-orange-tiled hall...
...Mogadishu is safer and livelier than it has been in years. But safe is a relative term in Somalia. Visitors must travel in convoys with half a dozen Kalashnikov-toting young men riding shotgun. Power has shifted from the warlords to business leaders, who support and bankroll the new government, and to the Islamic courts. Most Somalis despise the warlords, or faction leaders, as they like to be called, and the militias the warlords feed and arm are increasingly loyal to whoever can pay them, not necessarily their fellow clansmen. Still, the warlords remain strong enough to be spoilers...
...government ignores such threats in the hope that its increasing strength will render the warlords irrelevant. It has enticed some 5,000 of the estimated 20,000 militiamen around Mogadishu into five "demobilization" camps where they will be retrained as the new national army. "Some of them have good discipline," says Colonel Ali Hashi, head of demobilization in the city. Hashi says the government controls 180 of the 300-odd "technicals"--trucks and pickups with rear-mounted antiaircraft and antitank guns--in the city. Afrah, however, scoffs at the notion that warlord power is slipping. "This is our business...
...northwest has its own government, police force and currency. Together with Puntland in the northeast, it offers its citizens stability and peace. Like the warlords, both ministates boycotted the Djibouti peace conference and challenge the new President's claim to represent the entire country. The government in Mogadishu says it will not force the northerners into the nation but will lure them back by building a federal system that allows each region a measure of autonomy--a kind of political balance they hope will appeal to leaders used to self-determination. "Somaliland will continue but in another form," says Foreign...
...decade of fighting has left Mogadishu in ruins. Gangs steal power lines, telephone cables and streetlights. Like vultures picking at the bones of a dead animal, men have dug up the pipelines at the old oil refinery, carrying them away to sell. Electricity now comes from small generators; water comes from household tanks if you are rich or donkey-drawn carts if you are poor. People survive on money sent by relatives abroad...