MOGADISHU, 22 September 2003 — More than 3,000 Somalis staged a rare anti-war demonstration yesterday in Mogadishu, the city that helped bury Washington’s post-Cold War enthusiasm for international peace operations a decade ago.
After the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in famine and war and the failure of a string of peace conferences, Somalia is now cited by US officials as an ideal location for “terrorists” wishing to operate outside world scrutiny.
The Mogadishu protest took the form of separate rallies by students and women’s groups in the safety of a handful of schoolyards to minimize security risks in a city infested by an estimated 60,000 militiamen.
At one point, several hundred students ventured into shell-pocked streets and walked to a central junction in protest at 12 years of militia anarchy in the Horn of Africa state.
It was the largest in a handful of recent anti-war protests in the city that have marked a new activism by civic-minded teachers and doctors appalled by deepening poverty and crime.
“Only someone who doesn’t have peace knows its true value,” said vegetable vendor Yusuf Ali. The country disintegrated into anarchy after former dictator Mohammed Siad Barre was toppled in 1991 as clans pressured by famine and political turmoil launched battles for territory.
US military involvement in Somalia ended in humiliation on Oct. 3, 1993 when 18 US personnel in a UN peace force called UNOSOM were killed in a battle in Mogadishu recalled in a recent Hollywood film called “Black Hawk Down”.
