Escalating violence, a bad drought and a shortage of food are taking Somalia to a horrible human tragedy.
WITH Somali resistance forces on the offensive in the capital Mogadishu, the Ethiopian occupation forces are increasingly resorting to mindless violence against civilians, who are caught in the crossfire.
On April 19, Ethiopian troops reportedly entered a mosque in Mogadishu and slaughtered civilians who had taken refuge there. Amnesty International has accused the Ethiopian forces of killing at least 21 people, seven of whom had their throats slit, inside the mosque. The troops were reacting to an ambush staged by the Islamist guerillas, which resulted in Ethiopian casualties.
In another, widely reported, incident in November last year, Ethiopian troops were ambushed by rebels and the bodies of Ethiopian soldiers were dragged around the streets of Mogadishu. In retaliation, according to Amnesty and other sources, the Ethiopian forces resorted to the execution of civilians.
Ethiopia admits that a significant number of its troops have been killed in recent months. Ethiopia despatched its troops to Somalia in December 2006 to remove the Union of Islamic Courts from power. The Islamic Courts had defeated the notorious warlords who held sway over the country after the United States peacekeepers were forced to withdraw in 1993. John Pendergast, who was an advisor to President Bill Clinton, said that the brief ascendancy of the Islamic Courts had seen the beginnings of governance after nearly two decades of civil war. For a brief period of time in more than a decade and a half, Mogadishu and much of Somalia enjoyed relative calm.
The George W. Bush administration did not dissuade the Ethiopian government from invading Somalia. Washington alleged that the Islamic Courts, a loose alliance of Islamists, had given sanctuary to Al Qaeda elements. The U.S., besides planning and financing the Ethiopian occupation, is now lending a helping hand to the beleaguered Ethiopian troops by launching cruise missiles from ships anchored off the Somali coast. Meles Zenawi, the Prime Minster of Ethiopia, has hailed Bush as the worlds leader in the fight against terrorism.
Zenawi, in his earlier avatar as a guerilla leader, was a self-proclaimed Marxist, whose hero was Anwar Hoxha, the former dictator of Albania. Zenawis misadventure in Somalia was also motivated by chauvinistic calculations. He thought that having a pliable government installed in Mogadishu would help neutralise the threat from the separatist movement in Ethiopias Ogaden province. Indications are that Somali insurgents and their counterparts in Ogaden, who are strongly bound together by religious and kinship ties, are coordinating their military activities. The Ogaden separatists pose a significant threat to the unity of Ethiopia.
Many of the missiles and bombs launched by the U.S. military from the air and the sea have hit civilian targets. Aden Hashi Ayro, a prominent leader of the al-Shabab resistance group, was killed after his house in the central Somali town of Dusamareeb was hit by U.S. bombs. The bombs also caused the death of 24 innocent civilians residing nearby. The killings occurred after the resistance groups had agreed to engage in United Nations-sponsored peace talks with the Somali government in Djibouti in the second week of May.
In early 2007, a U.S. Air Force AC-130 gunship attacked and killed Somali herders and their livestock. The U.S. justified its action by saying that the operation was part of a hunt for three terrorists responsible for the bombings of its embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam. Since September 11, 2001, the Bush administration has given priority to Somalia. Former Deputy Defence Secretary and neocon ideologue Paul Wolfowitz was quick to allege that Al Qaeda was using Somalia as a sanctuary and an escape route. Somalia has become another battleground for Bushs war on terror.
The recent developments have made the prospects for peace even more remote. Al-Shabab is the armed wing of the Islamic Courts. Washington has labelled it a terrorist organisation on specious grounds. The Islamists have repeatedly denied any connection with Al Qaeda. The spokesperson for the Alliance for Reconstruction and Liberation, an umbrella opposition group formed after the ouster of the Islamic Courts, said that they were now thinking of pulling out of the talks, after the killing of Ayro.
The Stenlis Council, a reputed United Kingdom think tank, in a recent report criticised strongly the Bush administrations abject policy failures in Somalia. U.S. policies, the report concluded, had strengthened groups such as al-Shabab while at the same time undermining reconciliation efforts. The Council, echoing the views of the international community, urged the Bush administration to end all bombing operations in Somalia, back a phased withdrawal of Ethiopian troops, and create a U.N. stabilisation force to neutralise the transitional federal government that has been propped up by Washington and Addis Ababa.
In the first week of May, Ethiopian troops fired on thousands of Somalis who were demonstrating against acute food shortages that have gripped the country. The last straw for many Mogadishu residents was the refusal of shopkeepers to accept local currency, demanding U.S. dollars instead. Traders blame the large number of counterfeit notes in circulation and rising inflation for the problem. The Somali shilling, which was trading at 15,000 to a dollar last year is now 31,500 to a dollar. Somalia has been without a central bank since the overthrow of President Siad Barre in 1991. Somali currency has not been printed legally since the early 1990s.
The poor, who constitute the vast majority of the Somali people, are the worst affected. More and more Somalis are fleeing the country. Already, there are more than a million internally displaced Somali refugees. Neighbouring countries have closed their borders since the Ethiopian invasion. Mogadishu, wracked by intense fighting, could soon become a ghost town. As many as 700,000 people fled Mogadishu last year in the wake of the Ethiopian occupation. Fewer than 10 per cent of the children in the capital attend school now.
A senior U.N. official said that Somalia had been hit by multiple disasters on the food security front. Rising prices have made basic necessities out of reach for the urban poor. To complicate matters further, there is a drought in the central and southern parts of Sudan. The U.N. has warned that Somalia is at risk of slipping into its worst humanitarian situation since 1991-92 when drought combined with civil war claimed the lives of more than hundreds of thousands of Somalis.
The U.N. estimates that around 2.5 million Somalis are in urgent need of assistance. Abdi Samatar, an expert on Somalia with several books on the country to his credit, told American radio programme Democracy Now that a calculated decision has been made somewhere in the world to starve and terrorise the Somalis until they submit to the whims of the American military and the Ethiopians who are acting on their behalf.
Amnesty International, in a report released in the first week of May, said that civilians were completely at the mercy of armed groups in Somalia. The report, titled Routinely Targeted: Attacks on Civilians in Somalia, said that the situation was especially dire in the central and southern parts of the country. It presents a heart-wrenching picture of a humanitarian disaster on a large scale, compounded by mindless terror against a hapless civilian populace.
The Amnesty report accused Ethiopian troops and local militias allied to them of carrying out killings, torture, rape, arbitrary detentions and forced disappearances. Ethiopian occupation troops have been blamed for the worst violations. Nothing justifies gang rape, slitting the throats of civilians, or disproportionate attacks, a spokesperson for Amnesty told the media. The Amnesty report was based on testimony from victims of atrocities.
Amnesty has called on the international community to investigate the U.S. role in Somalia. The New York Times reported that U.S. warships had been firing Tomahawk missiles into civilian neighbourhoods. The U.S. is guilty of breaching international laws by indulging in targeted assassinations inside Somalia. U.S. planes and warships have launched at least five air strikes since the beginning of 2007.
President Bush has not been authorised by the U.S. Congress to order air strikes against Somalia. U.S. troops have trained the Ethiopian occupation forces and supplied them with arms. Amnesty International has called for the setting up of an international commission of inquiry into the allegations of war crimes in Somalia.
