Safirka: An American EnvoyKent State University Press, 2000 - 241 pages Peter S. Bridges's service as an American ambassador to Somalia capped his three decades as a career officer in the American Foreign Service. Safirka, a frank description of his experiences in Somalia and elsewhere, offers pointed assessments of American foreign policy and policymakers. Bridges recounts his service in Panama during a time of turmoil over the Canal; in Moscow during the Cuban missile crisis; in Prague for bleak years after the Soviet invasion; in Rome when Italian terrorists first began to target Americans; and in key positions in three Washington agencies. In Somalia Bridges managed the largest American aid program in sub-Sahara Africa. He dealt with a postcolonial regime, hobbled both by traditional clan rivalries and by a leader who cared far less about Somalia's people and progress than about maintaining his control over that poverty-stricken, strategic - which soon erupted in civil war. |
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... coast of the Red Sea , then beyond the Strait of Bab el Mandeb along the coast of northern Somalia to the Cape of Spices ( the Horn of Africa ) , and down into the Erythraean Sea , the Indian Ocean . The writer gave detailed lists of ...
... coast and become fishermen . I had , how- ever , looked into what had happened after the previous drought , in 1974–75 , when many Somali nomads had been resettled in fishing and farming com- munities . Of the fifteen thousand whom the ...
... coast for millen- nia . At the little port of Brava , south of Mogadishu , the differences were still greater . Brava was a linguistic island , with a language close to the Swa- hili spoken hundreds of miles farther south on the coast ...
Contents
Scholar Soldier Someday Diplomat | 7 |
From Foggy Bottom to the Isthmus | 13 |
The Moscow Hand | 26 |
Copyright | |
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