Word: somali
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Mahdi made their tentative peace, neither called on his followers to surrender their weapons. A U.S. senior official said that "Aidid has parked his heavy weapons in Ethiopia." Meanwhile, the gung-ho attempt of some of the vanguard troops to seize weapons slowed perceptibly. French troops initially searched Somali cars for weapons; by week's end they were searching only for the heavy guns that used to be carried on technicals. "It would be inconceivable to disarm Mogadishu," said a senior French army officer...
...seize any weapons in their zone of security. Four soldiers, drawn by gunfire to a gutted six-story building down the block from the U.S. embassy, discovered a large arms cache that included boxes of ammunition, heavy machine guns and a howitzer. They prepared to confiscate it when a Somali man stepped forward to argue that the building belonged to an Aidid ally. He demanded to speak to someone higher up. When Corporal Robert Parrish reached his platoon commander by radio, he was instructed, "Get in your vehicles, and leave the area." The astonished Marines left; the weapons stayed...
From the start, the relationship between the foreign troops and Somalis has been ill defined, leaving ample room for misunderstanding. When a group of heavily armed Marines disgorged from an amphibious assault vehicle stenciled with the name BRAT PACK and tried to secure an airfield hangar, they baffled non-English-speaking Somalis with orders to "Get down on your knees!" and "Spread your arms!" At least one Somali found the treatment inexplicably rude, given that the men were unarmed. "If you are a human being, it's not good for you to be lying on the ground," he said...
...getting up and operating is proving a problem -- and it will take at least until sometime after the new year for the full force to be actively engaged -- getting back out promises to be worse. There is pronounced Somali resistance to turning the mission over to U.N. peacekeepers. Somalis feel that the U.N. team already in the country has been neither impartial nor adequate. They also nurse ill feelings toward U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros- Ghali, who once had dealings with the ousted dictator Mohammed Siad Barre. "They practiced deceit, secrecy, deception and outright bribery," charges Mohammed Awale, an adviser...
...order to create a "secure environment." The U.S. ducked that tricky question in writing its vague rules of engagement, which leave it up to local commanders to decide how much disarming to do. Now the Secretary-General is demanding that before going home American troops not only seize the Somali clans' arsenals but also remove the mines that have been laid in the north of the country and set up a military police force to preserve order...