Tragedies of the “War on Terror” comes close to home

[Xudeedi]

If I were to give an apt description of the personal but grieving story presented by our brother Faisal, I would just compare it to the grim history of the halacaust. The genocidal Ethiopian regime was reported to have cut off all the communication lines in the Somali region of Ethiopia, cordoned off the borders, and militarized the region to systematically slaughter innocent civilians. This regime views the civilians as the pipeline that supplies ONLF with the life support, thus clogging the pipeline to eliminate the support base is a noble national interest. In a recent article published at Chicago Tribune dubs it as an old American counterinsurgency tactic deployed in Vietnam. Here is what it reports,

 

The Ethiopian army has locked down immense swaths of the ******, blocking all roads and smuggling trails to commercial traffic, and thus triggering desperate food shortages in a desert already prone to famines. A teacher from the central ****** town of Kebredehar said most shops in that area had closed for lack of stocks. The prices of remaining foodstuffs such as rice, he said, had rocketed 400 percent -- far out of reach of ordinary ******is.

 

 

------------------------

 

Tragedies of the “War on Terror” comes

close to home

Faisal Roble

July 15, 2007

 

recent Chicago Tribune article ( Fallout from the war on Terror hits Ethiopia, July 9, 2007 ), and a call-in (town-hall style) program of the BBC Somali Section, which featured the Regional president of the Somali autonomous region, in Ethiopia, Abdullahi Hassan “Lug Buur” (July 13, 2007) are both troubling. The gory and inhumane way Somalis are treated (e.g., Nur Osman, 25, who was still “clamping a hand to his stitched up neck,” cut by the Ethiopian soldiers) is in a way a small part of the results of the “war on terror.”

 

As an American of Somali origin from that region my family and I have been deeply impacted by the story in the Chicago Tribune article.

 

Listening to the many call-ins, with harsh words for the government, I felt somewhat sad for my good friend and the president, especially the position he has found himself in. Abdullahi Hassan is basically a good man with a good heart (not to mention that he is as one caller said, a distant relative of Sayid Mohamed Abdulla Hassan), but he is in the middle of a storm that he/his government cannot do much about.

 

The Somali question in Ethiopia is old, and as complex as the conflict of the Palestinians & Israelis, and is very difficult for the outside world to comprehend; it’s human and personal tragedies have been often overlooked for many years.

 

It is only now with western reporters taking a good look at it that our conditions are humanly shocking to human eyes: Ethiopia treats us as sub-human; our largely reserved and private women are raped at will; our books of faith are burned or soaked in urine and in human waste by Ethiopian soldiers as part of their prison torture machine; family belongings (livestock, farms and anything else that we own) are looted, confiscated, or burned with impunity. Collective punishment is a mainstay in the Somali region, a reminiscent of “Zaraf Somali,” meaning “wipe out Somalis,” a favored slogan for Ethiopian soldiers while carrying their indiscriminate total scourge policy.

 

Different Ethiopian regimes have been doing to us similar things since the Paris Conference in1884 that placed our community under this excessively cruel feudal rule of ancient empire. This time, with the world becoming a "global village," small parts of our blight is being noticed, thanks to some American papers.

 

Some of us escaped the rape, torture and mayhem, often physical like that one imparted on Nur Osman. Although the Chicago Tribune witnessed the young man still “clamping to his stitched new neck,” the Minister of Information, Bereket Simon, a Tigre in ethnicity, who is a close advisor Meles Zeanawi, denied any culpability

 

But Nur, who may most likely get killed in the very hospital bed he is supposed to rest, told the western reporter that Ethiopian soldiers did it to him. The added tragedy of this story is that Nur may as well be the cousin of the president of the region, but they are both helpless in the hands of this government. And each would try to survive the best way they know.

 

I left Ethiopia while I was still in my teens for a temporary safe haven to Somalia en route to America. Just like my countrymen, the psychological scars that I sustained from the Ethiopian rule is complex, but the most immediate one for me involves the last leg of my father’s life, Abdi Roble.

 

I have been a naturalized US citizen, thankfully achieved the “American middle-class dream,” and always longed for the day my father comes here and plays with my sons in the backyard of my suburban home. In 1996, I secured an immigrant visa.

 

But days before he departed Jigjiga for Addis Ababa, he was taken from his home to the Jigjiga jail at the frail age of 86, and was instantly transferred to Harar where he remained until April, 2003. There he joined among other elders his long time friend Bashir Sheikh Abdi, the grandson of Sayid M. Abdulle Hassan. Unlike my Dad, Bashir could not withstand the dilapidating conditions of advanced diabetes and died there.

 

My Dad told me that dragging Bashir’s dead body represented the lowest point of his community. “Nobody threw a single stone,” became his post prison mantra.

 

Sooner I learned that he was out than I travelled to Jigjiga (in May of 2003), and spent time with him, sickly with a soul of 92-years-old that still wanted to visit America.

 

For the month that I was with him, we talked small talks. I once told him how old-age is a mitigating factor, even for hard criminals. He laughed at me, implying I was naive, and added: “son, you are telling me about the country where real human beings live; you know real freak animals live here (sow ma ogid in uu halkan dugaag cirfiid ahi ku nool yahay?).

He told me that it was his dream to visit America to see all his children and grandchildren (all together 29); and for once lay his eyes on this magically magnanimous country called America, which gave to his children the chance to seek education and succeed in life.

 

My father’s dream was denied and he could not travel to America because his health was failing by the time he was released. Exactly 30 days to the day I arrived in town, he saw me to the dusty airport in Jigjiga with a final and ultimate sojourn saying:

 

“Son, only Allah knows whether we will meet again, but go to your new and safe [adopted] home.”

 

Uncommon to Somali men, I felt tears streaming down on my cheeks uncontrollably, only to be countered by his fatherly gaiety and cheerful pronouncements: "son, be a man and be happy for me to leave this world for good and for the better place that we will all end up sooner or later."

 

I gave that man a huge and rare hug, holding his bony body tightly against mine for as long as I could, and quickly turned away to not look backward. I was sure I could not handle any more emotions. The last thing I wanted to see was tears streaming on those frail and fried cheeks. My Mom recently told me he indeed wept. I am glad I did not see that for going through that would have killed me! My Dad passed away five days after I got back in LA.

 

No body explained to me to this day why my Dad languished in that jail in Harar that they call "alam-baqay," meaning, I am finished with this world. I talked to many top officials (powerless ministers) in the region and everyone talks about my Dad as the great patriot that he was. I only surmise that they all are as helpless as their community under occupation is.

 

For a while I used to have nightmares of an American court, where my attorneys would grill Ethiopian officials on human rights abuses. Who knows what the future holds for us, especially that now a lot of us are US citizens, and live in places like San Diego, Minneapolis, Chicago, Columbus, Toronto where many conscientious lawyers are in abundance. In my consoling prayers I remind my late father to hang on!

 

As a tax payer, it angers me, though, that millions of our hard-earned dollars would go to this dictator to kill and torture relatives of our own US citizens –something of freak duplicity in American foreign policy that my late Dad could not understand.

 

Faisal A. Roble

E-Mail: fabroble@aol.com

 

Source: www.Wardheernews.com

[Xudeedi]

The name of the region is censored in this site. You should be able to read the plight of this region from this currentarticle featured today on NYtimes.

 

Ethiopia Is Said to Block Food to Rebel Region

 

July 22/07

 

Sunday NYtimes

 

 

Villagers in the ****** recently counted sacks of grain while rebel fighters watched. The government is accused of blocking food aid to the region.

 

NAIROBI, Kenya, July 21 — The Ethiopian government is blockading emergency food aid and choking off trade to large swaths of a remote region in the eastern part of the country that is home to a rebel force, putting hundreds of thousands of people at risk of starvation, Western diplomats and humanitarian officials say.

 

The Ethiopian military and its proxy militias have also been siphoning off millions of dollars in international food aid and using a United Nations polio eradication program to funnel money to their fighters, according to relief officials, former Ethiopian government administrators and a member of the Ethiopian Parliament who defected to Germany last month to protest the government’s actions.

 

The blockade takes aim at the heart of the Oggaden region, a vast desert on the Somali border where the government is struggling against a growing rebellion and where government soldiers have been accused by human rights groups of widespread brutality.

 

Jeffrey Gettleman/The New York Times

Jemal Dirie Kalif, above, in Germany, was a member of Ethiopia’s Parliament who defected to protest the government actions.

 

Humanitarian officials say the ban on aid convoys and commercial traffic, intended to squeeze the rebels and dry up their bases of support, has sent food prices skyrocketing and disrupted trade routes, preventing the nomads who live there from selling their livestock. Hundreds of thousands of people are now sealed off in a desiccated, unforgiving landscape that is difficult to survive in even in the best of times.

 

“Food cannot get in,” said Mohammed Diab, the director of the United Nations World Food Program in Ethiopia.

 

Hundreds of thousands of people may face famine in the ******.

 

The Ethiopian government says the blockade covers only strategic locations, and is meant to prevent guns and matériel from reaching the ****** National Liberation Front, the rebel force that the government considers a terrorist group. In April, the rebels killed more than 60 Ethiopian guards and Chinese workers at a Chinese-run oil field in the ******.

 

“This is not a government which punishes its people,” said Nur Abdi Mohammed, a government spokesman.

 

But Western diplomats have been urging Ethiopian officials to lift the blockade, arguing that the many people in the area are running out of time. “It’s a starve-out-the-population strategy,” said one Western humanitarian official, who did not want to be quoted by name because he feared reprisals against aid workers. “If something isn’t done on the diplomatic front soon, we’re going to have a government-caused famine on our hands.”

 

The blockade, which involves soldiers and military trucks cutting off the few roads into the central ******, comes as Congress is increasingly concerned about Ethiopia’s human rights record.

 

Ethiopia is a close American ally and a key partner in America’s counterterrorism efforts in the Horn of Africa, a region that has become a breeding ground for Islamic militants, many of whom have threatened to wage a holy war against Ethiopia.

 

The country receives nearly half a billion dollars in American aid each year, but this week, a House subcommittee passed a bill that would put strict conditions on some of that aid and ban Ethiopian officials linked to rights abuses from entering the United States. The House also recently passed an amendment, sponsored by J. Randy Forbes, a Virginia Republican, that stripped Ethiopia of $3 million in assistance to “send a strong message that if they don’t wake up and pay attention, more money will be cut,” Mr. Forbes said.

 

Ethiopia’s pardon on Friday of 30 political prisoners who had been sentenced to life in prison could ease some criticism. But Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, is pushing ahead with measures to more closely vet assistance to the Ethiopian military. According to human rights groups and firsthand accounts, government troops have gang raped women, burned down huts and killed civilians.

 

American officials in Ethiopia said they were trying to investigate the situation but that the ****** was too dangerous right now for a fact-finding mission. American officials said they had heard persistent reports of burned villages and that the blockade was putting the area on the cusp of a crisis.

 

Villagers say that anyone who criticizes the government risks getting killed. According to ****** Online, a Canadian-based news service that has been highly critical of the Ethiopian government and covers the region through a network of reporters and contributors, some equipped with satellite phones, four young men who were videotaped by The New York Times at a community meeting in an ****** village in May were later tortured and executed.

 

The claim could not be fully verified independently, but their identities may have been discovered by Ethiopian soldiers who had arrested three journalists for The Times in the ****** and confiscated their notebooks, cameras and computers.

 

“The army is out of control,” said Jemal Dirie Kalif, the member of Parliament who defected.

 

The blockade has been in place since early June, and thousands of people have already fled on foot and by camel. Two weeks ago, Abdullahi Mohammed, a 17-year-old student, walked from his village deep in the ****** to the nearest town with a bus station. He carried with him a few pieces of bread. He said that when he stopped to ask villagers in the ****** for food, they asked him for some instead. “They had nothing,” he said.

 

Though good rains this year have fed the few crops in the area and provided a little cushion, “The most these people can last without facing serious problems is one month, maybe two,” said David Throp, country director for Save the Children UK.

 

Even if relief trucks are allowed in to all the critical areas, the food might not reach the people who need it. According to humanitarian workers and several former Ethiopian officials, including Mr. Kalif, food aid is embezzled in two stages. First, soldiers skim sacks of grain, tins of vegetable oil and bricks of high-energy biscuits from food warehouses to sell at local markets.

 

“The cash is distributed among security officers and regional officers,” a former government administrator from the ****** region said in a recent telephone interview on condition of anonymity because he still works with government officials.

 

Then the remaining food is hauled out to rural areas where the soldiers divert part of it to local gunmen and informers as a reward for helping them fight the rebels. The former administrator said he also knew of specific cases in which army officers stole food from warehouses and gave it to the families of women whom their soldiers had raped, as compensation.

 

Several Western humanitarian officials estimated that 20 to 30 percent of the donor countries’ food aid to the ****** — aid that last year was valued at more than $70 million — routinely disappears this way. To cover their tracks, the soldiers and the government administrators who work with them tell the aid agencies that the food has spoiled, or has been stolen or hijacked by the rebels, humanitarian officials said.

 

Relief workers in Ethiopia have known about these problems for several years, a humanitarian official said, and have tried to set up committees of local elders to oversee distribution. But that did not work either, and aid officials eventually concluded that as long as the majority of the food was getting through, they would not stop the shipments.

 

When informed about these allegations, Mr. Diab of the World Food Program said, “This is the first I’ve heard of them.”

 

Mr. Mohammed, the government spokesman, denied that Ethiopian troops were pilfering or mishandling foreign aid. “We don’t do that,” he said.

 

As the food crisis looms, Western diplomats are also concerned about a separate plan by the regional government in the ****** to divert a share of its own budget for development projects — like schools and farming — to the Ethiopian military.

 

This seems to be part of the Ethiopian government’s strategy to do whatever it takes to crush the rebels, who have deep popular support and, according to the government, are getting arms and training from neighboring Eritrea, Ethiopia’s bitter enemy.

 

The people of the ****** are mostly Somalis and ethnically distinct from the highland Ethiopians who have ruled the country for centuries, and the long battle over the region has been steadily escalating this year. The country director of one Western aid agency, who recently returned from a field visit there, said he saw two villages that had been burned to the ground and several schools that had been converted into military bases, with foxholes.

 

Humanitarian officials say the military is building up militias and setting the stage for clan-based bloodshed. The rank and file of the ****** National Liberation Front tend to be members of the ****** clan, and so the government has turned to other clans to form anti-rebel militias. In the past few weeks, thousands of men have been armed.

 

“Those Ethiopians are smart,” Mr. Kalif, 32, said. “They know Somalis are more loyal to clans than anything else.” Tactics like these, he said, drove him to defect June 20 while attending a conference in Wiesbaden, Germany. He was affiliated with the ruling party, and had been representing an area in the eastern ****** for the past seven years.

 

He described a scheme with a United Nations polio program, which was corroborated by two former administrators in the Ethiopian government and a Western humanitarian official, in which military commanders gave prized jobs as vaccinators to militia fighters, and in the end, much of the polio vaccine was never distributed.

 

“Army commanders are using the polio money to pay their people, who don’t pass out the vaccines, so the disease continues and the payments continue,” said Mr. Kalif. “It’s the perfect system.” United Nations officials in Geneva said they did not know whether that was happening, but that they would investigate.

 

When asked how he knew about the polio scheme, Mr. Kalif said: “Everybody out there knows. They’re just too scared to talk.”

 

“If I don’t get asylum and they send me back to my country, I’m dead,” he added. “But I was sick of being a parrot. I have no regrets.”

 

Will Connors contributed reporting from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

[Baashi]

Tragic indeed. Ciil oo way oo hadana ciil oo way!

 

That's what happens when one ethnic group gets the upper hand and the other group loses all the help and protection it has from its friends. Somalia that once existed used to provide the political representation the people of region are in need of today.

[Allamagan]

Very sad indeed! This process of starving western Somalia people to death and also choping up somalia into 5 to 6 different weak mini states called Puntland, Somaliland, Jubbaland, Galmudug was part of a plan Ethiopia always dreaming of to execute ever since H Selase and they now got the chance by getting their stooges Geedi & Yeey in power. Forget about the Western Somalia, look at what is going on there in Somalia, in south! What happened to Somaliland? why they no longer bark out load there? when was the last time we heard about them talking about colonial territory and talking about wage war against puntland? is the crisis there solved now? no!, then who silenced them all? in south Can Geedi or Yeey make decision on their own without Gebre's approval first? no? walee gun baa lawada noqday.