I'm not going to go through this in great detail, I'm not going to pretend that I'm a East African specialist. that's a little bit of a cheat but given the laudable job that Mark Bowden has done in dealing with this issue, I'm directing you to the website as I've just mentioned I would like you to go through the narrative that Bowden's gives you in background. I'm going to touch on one or two key points in the context of this lecture, and get you to think about what is actually happening at the time, in a, leading up immediately to the events of Black Hawk Down. Now, we find in I think January 1991, that Mohammad Siad Barre is overthrown as the leader of Somalia, and what results is a period of clan warfare across Somalia as a whole. Now most prominent of the war lords who emerged from that particular process is Mohamed Farrah Aidid who I mentioned before. he headed up I think it was the United Somalian Congress or USC. Now, the nature of the clan warfare. Was such that, by April of 1992. A major international relief effort was needed. such was the disruption. To the normal activity of the country that you had thousands, hundreds of thousands, starving to death. Again I mentioned the issues of Ethiopian relief in the 1980s, that was a natural disaster. I think when dealing with Somalia we need to mix it up with the propensity of human beings to go to war with each other which Isn't the deliberate theme of this course but seems to be lying underneath many of the things we're doing. So, the United Nations in revolution, United Nations revolution would be very interesting actually but the United Nations Resolution, 751. involved the deployment of 550 military personnel, principally from Pakistan and were there to help distribute about 20 million dollars US of food aid. So there was a two stage process. Firstly, the nature of the, the warfare saw relief efforts being hampered as the various competing clans were stealing the food that was provided. Followed up in, in this case, with the United Nations trying to provide armed guards to ensure that the Somalian's who needed the aid were actually getting them as opposed to filling the bellies of the militia men who were participating in warfare at the time. By December of 1992 events had escalated to the degree. That George Bush Senior committed 25,000, had committed 25,000 troops to the U.N. support for Somalia. to the relief of poverty and famine in this particular war strewn environment. And that particular episode is known, or the operation is known, as Restore Hope. Now I'm just going to take you through a timeline provided by the public, broadcasting service in America, and you can follow that up in, in your own time. But I just want to draw your attention to this now. To give you a more detailed chronology, I think it's worth you go into this previous website. It gives you very concise and detailed information about the long view of what was happening in Somalia, the principle events that we're going to be dealing with in detail As part of today's lecture are actually covered by two relatively brief paragraphs. So we have to put into context what happens with the battle of Mogadishu in 1993 within a longer period of hostilities and bloodshed in the Horn of Africa. And just remember that the focus on this is the loss of American lives. Which draws attention to it in the American media. Now there is one part of the peace keeping operation this is a relief operation that took place on June of 1993 that gave an indication of the willingness of the warlords and the militia men to resist external interference. 24 Pakistani troops were massacred ambushed and killed. In early June of 1993. I'll only take a just a quick pause here and go to a newspaper report of what was going on during the media aftermath of that. Now, I'm referencing this back to The Independent newspaper. this comes I think from the 8th of June in 1993 online. Again you'll have this url to go and look at yourself. the most polite way that I can describe what happened to the Pakistani troops was that they were massacred And then mutilated. We're going to be dealing with some instances of quite disturbing images that came out of the battle of Mogadishu. But I'm not even going to attempt to describe in detail, nor show you what happened to these Pakistan servicemen. Who were trying to aid relief under the auspices of the UN. It gives you an idea from the reporting et cetera of some of the discretion that was shown at the time in the western media more generally. What was shown, what was reported. the horrific defilement of these troops is one way of putting it and to a certain degree was a rather horrible forbearance. Of what was going to happen with the Battle of Mogadishu or, rather, what was going to happen if Mohamed Farrah Aidid could actually isolate a group of UN or American forces. And unfortunately that's what happened on the 3rd and 4th of October of 1993. Just to give you a general view of where we are in the world with Somalia. This is a UN map that you can download, again I'll give you the URLs in the course for this. We have Ethiopia, Kenya, most of the major activity around here is Mogadishu and the airport, and most of what we're going to be fo, focusing on for the Blackhawk down segment specifically is going to be around there. And just to give you a more general positioning of this, of course I can't ope, operate a mouse in the right direction. here is just a little globe highlighting where Somalia is within Africa more generally. So it gives you a reasonable idea of the environs and the area of the world we're working with. But quite importantly from the media reporting, events are happening many hours in advance of Eastern Standard Time in the United States.
