Beyond Black Hawk Down: Papal Diplomacy and the Lessons of Somalia
Bernard O'Connor Monday, 1 March 2004
On January 29, 2004, representatives from 42 Somali factions signed an agreement for a five-year transitional government. This accord (the success of which is by no means certain) has been a very long time coming. Indeed Somalia, an impoverished Muslim nation of some 8 million, has not had a stable government since the January 1991 ouster of the Siad Barre regime.
The severe humanitarian crises that this instability created in the early 1990s led to one of the most pivotal episodes in the post-Cold War history of United Nations and United States interventionism. Popular opinion of what happened in that effort has been shaped indelibly by the movie Black Hawk Down, released early in 2002. It vividly depicts the October 3, 1993 Battle of Mogadishu, a bloody urban raid by U.S. Rangers on clan forces of Somali warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid. Although, strictly speaking, the military objective of the U.S. operation (to capture two leaders in Aidid's clan) was successful, the loss of a U.S. helicopter and death of 18 troops (their bodies dragged through the streets) led most of the general public to regard the incident as an unmitigated fiasco.
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