Word: mogadishu
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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General Yusuf Talan was sipping coffee at a popular Mogadishu cafe last fall when the four gunmen approached him. They demanded he get in their waiting car, and when he refused, one of the men raised a G-3 assault rifle to his shoulder and pumped nine bullets into the general's head and chest. Talan had recently been given the job of disarming the thousands of militiamen who still control large swaths of this Horn of Africa country. The bullets that killed him were a blunt message from the warlords to Somalia's new government: You control nothing; take...
Normally in Somalia such a shooting would trigger a series of revenge attacks. Violent clashes have torn Mogadishu for years. But this killing sparked something different: a government commission of inquiry and surprising peace on the streets of Mogadishu. The city looked, to some eyes, almost civilized. And it may foreshadow a similar change in the country as a whole. "We want reconciliation with them," President Abdiqasim Salad Hassan says of the country's still violent warlords, "and to make peace in our country...
...Nations-speak. But 10 years on, Somalia is finally and slowly beginning again. In August a peace conference in neighboring Djibouti elected a Somali parliament that then chose Hassan, 58, a long-serving minister in the Barre regime, as President. In October, he and the new M.P.s arrived in Mogadishu, the capital, to begin re-creating their country from scratch. Last month the U.N. said it will begin looking for ways to help out. "The people are anxious to get on with things," says President Hassan. In that case, here's what they have...
...Before the team left Mogadishu, the country's new president, Sadiqassim Salad Hassan, told Addo, "I'm just elected. I have nothing, I can give you nothing but I wish you all the best." The Somalis, and all the other tiny teams, deserve at least that much...
...reference to what GOP heavyweights see as the administration's inconsistent and misguided policy of "humanitarian intervention." Valid criticism, perhaps, although it's also worth remembering that the defining humanitarian debacle of the '90s - the death of 18 U.S. soldiers during a botched raid on a Somali warlord in Mogadishu -occurred in the course of a mission bequeathed by the Bush administration...