Word: mogadishu
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International law has prohibited some practices of the past. It would sadly be considered bad form today to leave the bodies of pirate captains hanging in chains from a gibbet at the Mogadishu dock until the maggots ate out their eyes--as was done in the Caribbean long ago. But we might as well be honest: if we are to combat the scourge of modern piracy, then force must be used against force. When Tripoli demanded tribute from the U.S. in return for not capturing Americans at sea, Thomas Jefferson noted, "The style of the demand admitted but one answer...
...just another long weekend of mayhem. Shortly after midnight on Friday, Nov. 7, pirates seized a Danish cargo ship in the Gulf of Aden; on Saturday night an aid worker was shot and killed as he walked home from evening prayers in a village 270 miles (435 km) from Mogadishu; on Sunday, fighting between insurgents and African Union peacekeepers left at least seven dead in the capital, and a senior government official was killed in the south of the country; and in the early hours of Monday, bandits crossed the border into Kenya, where they kidnapped two Italian nuns. Somalia...
...been killed this year. As a result, "the humanitarian space is effectively closed," says Ken Menkhaus, the U.S.'s leading expert on Somalia and a professor of political science at Davidson College in North Carolina. The 3,000 African Union peacekeepers don't stray far beyond their base in Mogadishu for fear of being slaughtered by insurgents--remember Black Hawk Down? (See pictures of Somalia's Pirates...
...speaks his mind, keeps several steps ahead of his superiors and violates just about every other rule of the road for diplomats in the U.S. foreign service. Yet within four days of his arrival in Mogadishu last week, Robert Oakley had succeeded in shrugging off America's preoccupation with capturing clan leader Mohammed Farrah Aidid, arranged for the release of two hostages and hammered out a tentative cease-fire. Not a bad week for a man who, if the State Department handed out speeding tickets to freebooting statesmen, would have spent much of his 34-year-career in traffic court...
...Andrew Purvis, our correspondent in Mogadishu, mornings come early after uneasy nights broken by the clattering of combat helicopters on patrol. Just after dawn, Somali drivers gun their engines outside the Hotel Sahafi, signaling to Andrew that it's time to begin another day covering this demanding and often dangerous story. There was water in the taps, and electricity most of the time last week, and some cotton towels for a change, so things were looking up. More important, the fighting that had claimed 18 American soldiers the week before had subsided. There were tentative signs of peace...