Word: somali
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Americans did not see pictures of the Somali casualties, though. What they did see were ghastly photos of a white body, naked except for green underwear -- apparently the corpse of a downed helicopter crewman -- being dragged through the street while Somalis kicked and stamped at him, plus TV footage of a terrified helicopter pilot, Michael Durant, being questioned by Somali captors. Late in the week the Somalis allowed a Red Cross worker and two journalists to visit Durant as he lay, naked except for a piece of cloth stretched across his hips, on a wooden bed in a darkened room...
...Sept. 20 with a tough letter from Secretary of State Warren Christopher to Boutros-Ghali protesting the military emphasis. On Saturday, less than 24 hours before the fateful helicopter raid started, Christopher called Boutros-Ghali to urge a stepped-up effort to bring about a political settlement among various Somali factions, only to be told blandly, "We are already doing all that...
...exact mix of motives that prompted George Bush to launch the Somali intervention is still not altogether clear. The immediate causes were, of course, ghastly TV pictures of famine in that country and U.N. Secretary- General Boutros Boutros-Ghali's pleas for help to get food past the guns of armed gangs into the hands of the starving in a country that had no real government and practically no order of any sort. In addition, Bush no doubt wanted to go out in a blaze of glory as a world statesman, and subordinates were glad that the move served...
...that Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger told Boutros-Ghali "that we were going to do something very precise and limited and then get out," in the words of a senior aide to Eagleburger. Boutros- Ghali accepted but then "moved the goalposts," says the official, demanding that the Americans disarm Somali gangs, venture into the countryside and the north of the country, away from the Mogadishu area, and stay for an unlimited period. The tale heard in U.N. corridors is very different: it is of the Americans waffling over whether to disarm the Somalis and whether to move into the north...
...fact that Russian instability -- or Somali anarchy or Bosnian carnage -- keeps ringing at odd hours, and often on weekends, shows that turmoil has no respect for civilized comfort. More fundamentally, the alarms amount to further proof that the world is far from being a tidier place without Soviet- American antagonism to kick it around. If the Kremlin no longer helps to orchestrate conflicts in remote countries, it presides over a veritable Mongolian hot pot of disorder at home. At the same time, impoverished lands like Somalia, with a scant sense of nationhood, remain just as prey to pandemonium as they...