User:Whoopsawa/June 1993 UN killings of Somali protestors

On 13 June 1993, an element of the Pakistani contingent of UNOSOM II opened fire with a machine gun onto a crowd of Somali protestors in Mogadishu for at least one full minute killing at least 14 Somalis, including women and children, and wounding than 50 others were wounded.

Much has been made over the June 5 ambush of Pakistani United Nations forces in Mogadishu. Some 24 Pakistani soldiers were killed by Aidid's gunmen.

Very little has been made, however, of what followed eight days later:

Pakistani soldiers opened fire with automatic weapons on a crowd of civilians in Mogadishu.

A 10-year-old boy had the top of his head blown off. A 2-year-old boy

was shot in the stomach by a high-velocity bullet. At least 20 civilians were slaughtered.

And then, as the survivors lay in the streets begging for help, the Pakistanis got in their U.N. vehicles and roared off.

"There was a man whose arm was almost severed," Paul Watson, a reporter for the Toronto Star, said. "He was basically mush from the hips down. The guy was still alive when the U.N. trucks passed by, but they just kept on going."

"I saw three trucks with Pakistani soldiers roll right past injured kids," Alexander Joe of Agence France-Presse said. "The injured kids looked up at the Pakistanis as if to say, 'Help,' but they didn't even look."

"This is an absolute disaster," a U.N. official said after the killings. "Before this, we had the moral high ground."

Remember how angry you were last week when you saw pictures of our slain soldiers in Somalia? So how do you think the Somalis felt when they saw pictures of their slain children?

Four days after the massacre, President Clinton held a news conference. He strongly criticized Aidid for his killing of U.N. soldiers, but spoke not a word against the slaughter of Somalian civilians by U.N. forces.

This did not go unnoticed in Mogadishu.

Mike McDonagh, head of an Irish charity group in Somalia, made an eerily accurate prediction: "Aidid can come out of this looking like a rose. [The Pakistani United Nations forces] are out of control. They'll never be able to regain control in Mogadishu. There'll be permanent sniping at them from now on. This thing can escalate and escalate and escalate. People will get angrier and angrier."