Word: somali
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...cliffs along the World Heritage-listed Bandiagara escarpment, have been looted. Ethiopia is struggling to protect its oldest silver Coptic Christian crosses and medieval manuscripts. Since 1970, illegal traders in Kenya and Tanzania have carted off hundreds of vigango, or Swahili wooden grave markers. When fighting erupted in the Somali capital of Mogadishu in 1991, one of the first casualties was the National Museum. Within weeks many of its prized exhibits, including ancient Egyptian pottery, were on sale to tourists in neighboring Kenya...
That way, at least, icky incidents like 19 dead servicemen being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu will be avoided—if only the boors had taken more care not to “offend the Somali people through their brazen disregard for cultural mores and practices”! Special sessions in which Gandhi is contemplated and the love-force imbibed are also in the works...
...where American soldiers were brought in to subdue the tribal warfare that had brought the country to the brink of famine. Not only did the American troops fail in their peacekeeping mission (to deliver food to civilians and stem the violence), but they also succeeded in offending the Somali people through their brazen disregard for cultural mores and practices...
...collapse of former dictator Siad Barre's regime in 1991, the country has become synonymous with violence and chaos, the archetypal "failed state" in United 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...
...destruction is not only physical. The whole concept of a state has been distorted. At the airport, militiamen charge landing fees and sell exit visas. Anyone with $30 can buy an official Somali passport in the central Bakara market, though few countries will recognize it. A few stalls away, moneychanger Bashir Moalim Mohamed opens a huge safe packed with $10,000 worth of Somalia shillings. "I am the central bank," he says, pulling out stacks of new notes recently imported by local businessmen from a printing company in Canada. What about protection? Mohamed plucks a rusty M-16 assault rifle...