Word: somalia
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...unfinished, in some cases unstarted, tasks the Americans are handing over are staggering. Somalia's underlying problems -- the absence of any central government, the lack of basic security, the clan warfare and banditry, the destruction of the country's infrastructure -- have not significantly improved. Charged with broad responsibility for national repair and reconciliation, the U.N. troops will have much more to do than the U.S.-led force. They will be more lightly armed, deploying weapons such as mortars but no tanks or heavy artillery, and they will be stretched over the whole of Somalia, not just the southern and central...
...forces are supposed to complete the disarming of Somalia's warlord gangs and free-lance bandits and create a police force capable of maintaining law and order, two tasks the U.S.-led contingent barely began. The warlords who have spilled so much Somali blood have in fact gained undeserved authority because the Americans felt compelled to negotiate with them to head off clashes between their fighters and U.S. troops...
...supposed to tame these warlords enough to make possible the formation of some sort of national government. The alternatives are grim: a kind of permanent U.N. protectorate over Somalia, as in Cyprus, where U.N. troops still patrol almost 30 years after going in to preserve a truce; or Somalia's relapse into chaos, anarchy, famine and mass death. Says Patrick Vercammen, the U.N. humanitarian official in the town of Baidoa: "The Americans could have done 10 times more than they have done. Fifty times. They thump on their chests, but the biggest part...
...leaving the longer-range jobs of pacification and nation building to the U.N. Says Robert Oakley, the U.S. special envoy who oversaw the political side of the operation: "I compare our mission to taking someone with hysterics and slapping him out of it. There will be violence in Somalia for a long time, but it will be low-level violence. The cycle ((of anarchy and starvation)) has been broken...
Somalis jamming into the towns where foreign troops are stationed have found protection as well as food. But security in Somalia is a very, very relative term. The U.S.-led troops have generally stayed inside the main towns rather than venturing into the countryside, and they have negotiated pacts with local warlords rather than trying to disarm their followers. That policy certainly helped avoid casualties: eight U.S. servicemen have been killed in Somalia in five months, no more than would have lost their lives in training accidents if they had stayed home...