Ethiopian tanks kills hundreds of civilians in Somali capital

[AYOUB]

Ethiopian tanks kills hundreds of civilians in Somali capital

· PM claims Islamists are routed, but attacks go on

· UN accuses all sides of committing war crimes

 

Chris McGreal, Africa correspondent

Friday April 27, 2007

The Guardian

 

The Somali capital Mogadishu suffered some of the heaviest bombardment in nine days of fighting yesterday, as Ethiopian tanks supporting the interim government shelled new areas of the city despite a claim by the Somali prime minister to have routed Islamist insurgents.

The Ethiopian assault has killed several hundred people, many of them civilians harmed by indiscriminate shelling that has destroyed homes and shops, and forced tens of thousands to flee the city as it spread to previously relatively peaceful parts of Mogadishu. Corpses lie scattered on the streets because it is too dangerous to collect them.

 

More than 1,000 people were killed in an earlier round of fighting last month. More than a third of the civilian population - some 340,000 people - have fled in the past three months.

The UN humanitarian affairs chief, Sir John Holmes, yesterday accused all those involved of war crimes.

 

"The rules of humanitarian law are being flouted by all sides ... all factions are equally guilty of indiscriminate violence in a civilian area," he said. "Civilians in Mogadishu are paying an intolerable price for the absence of political progress and dialogue and the failure of all parties to abide by the rules of warfare."

 

Refugees are camped on the outskirts of the city, with water, food and medicine growing scarcer. About 600 have died of cholera and other diseases.

 

"At least half the capital is deserted, slowly turning it into a ghost city," the UN refugee agency said.

 

The interim Somali government said the 20,000-strong Ethiopian force fighting on its behalf, with 5,000 Somali troops playing a lesser role, will keep up the offensive until fighters with the Council of Islamic Courts are defeated. The council ruled Mogadishu and much of southern Somalia for six months last year until overthrown by the Ethiopian army with US backing.

 

Somalia's prime minister, Ali Mohamed Gedi, yesterday claimed to have defeated the Islamist forces. "We have won the fighting against the insurgents," he told Associated Press. "Most of the fighting in Mogadishu is now over. The government has captured a lot of territory where the insurgents were."

 

But critics say Somalia has become a battleground for Ethiopia's foreign agenda and Washington's "war on terror" that will do little to bring long term stability.

 

The Islamic Courts government was popular in Mogadishu after bringing relative order and driving out clan warlords responsible for 16 years of death and mayhem. But the US believed it looked too much like the Taliban, with its ban on music and dancing and the qat narcotic, and that it was sympathetic to al-Qaida.

 

Washington encouraged the Ethiopian military - at the "invitation" of Somalia's interim national government which was so unpopular it was unable to remain in Mogadishu - to invade and oust the Islamic Courts administration. The new Somali government includes some of the warlords who previously caused so much destruction.

 

A report by the Royal Institute of International Affairs said that US and Ethiopian strategic interests in supporting a weak and factionalised government that is far less popular than the Islamic Courts administration are an obstacle, not a contribution, to rebuilding Somalia.

 

"In an uncomfortably familiar pattern, genuine multilateral concern to support the reconstruction and rehabilitation of Somalia has been hijacked by unilateral actors - especially Ethiopia and the United States," it said.

 

As always in Somalia, the conflict is also being driven by money through weapons smuggling and business interests.

 

Ethiopian forces were to have been replaced by African Union peacekeepers, but only 1,200 of the AU's promised 8,000 troops have arrived in Somalia.

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Massacre in Mogadishu—war crime made in the USA

By Bill Van Auken

April 29, 2007

 

The brutal military siege against the Somali capital of Mogadishu constitutes a war crime for which the US government bears the principal responsibility.

 

While the mass media in the US itself has largely averted its eyes from the carnage, Ethiopian military units, backed and advised by Washington, have unleashed an intense bombardment of Mogadishu’s crowded and impoverished urban neighborhoods, killing and wounding thousands and turning hundreds of thousands more into homeless refugees.

 

This latest round of fighting has pitted the US-backed Ethiopian forces and, in a lesser role, forces loyal to the so-called Transitional Federal Government (TFG) of former warlord Abdullahi Yusuf against supporters of the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC), which had administered the city and much of southern Somalia before the US-backed Ethiopian invasion last December. The siege follows a similar Ethiopian offensive against Mogadishu three weeks ago in which more than 1,000 people were killed, the great majority of them—then as now—civilians.

 

Long-range artillery, tanks and helicopter gunship have conducted ceaseless and indiscriminate shelling of the city for nearly a week and a half. Much of the capital lies in ruins, while hospitals, schools and housing have not been spared.

 

On Wednesday, four Ethiopian rockets tore through the SOS Children’s Villages hospital in Mogadishu, one of them destroying a ward housing 20 people previously wounded in the attacks.

 

“We deplore the indiscriminate shelling of a medical facility,” UNICEF Representative in Somalia Christian Balslev-Olesen said in response to the attack. “It is an action that is totally unacceptable and one for which no justification can be given. Where is the accountability in this conflict? Every day thousands of displaced people—most of them women and children—are living a nightmare of violence.”

 

Reports from the city tell of rotting corpses littering the streets, with people unable to collect the dead for several days because of the constant threat from the shelling. Only on Friday, during a lull in the fighting that followed the apparent seizure of Mogadishu’s northern suburbs by the Ethiopian forces, could residents begin to retrieve the dead.

 

Meanwhile, at least 350,000 people—a number that could swell to more than half a million—have fled the fighting, many of them camping outside Mogadishu without adequate water, food or medicine. Relief officials warn that the outbreak of epidemics could claim many more lives. Reportedly, at least 600 have died already as a result of cholera and other diseases.

 

Ali Mohamed Gedi, the prime minister in the US-backed transitional government, claimed Friday, “We have won the fighting against the insurgents,” meaning that the Ethiopian forces that are the TFG’s central of pillar of support had conquered the city. Western diplomats and other observers were skeptical of this claim, predicting that fighting will continue as long as the Ethiopian troops remain.

 

Gedi claimed that Ethiopian and pro-government forces were now working to suppress “pockets of resistance” and vowed, “We will capture any remaining terrorists who have escaped.”

 

The TFG and its Ethiopian backers routinely refer to those resisting them as “terrorists” and elements of al-Qaeda, a claim that serves to justify the atrocities being carried out in Somalia as part of the US-led “global war on terror.”

 

In reality, the fighting has largely erupted along clan lines, with members of the ****** clan—the majority population in the capital—resisting the imposition of the TFG, dominated by the ***** clan of its president, Yusuf, by the army of his long-time ally, the repressive regime in Ethiopia.

 

The Islamic Courts administration had won wide popular support by restoring relative peace and security to the Somali capital after the sporadic violence that has dominated the country since the overthrow of the dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991. The courts had driven out the warlords responsible for much of the mayhem, and now they are returning with US and Ethiopian support.

 

Hostility to the Ethiopian forces runs deep, stemming from the brutal 1977 war between Somalia and Ethiopia over the disputed ****** region, which inflicted heavy casualties and turned millions into refugees.

 

Washington backed the Ethiopian invasion last December on the grounds that the Islamic Courts represented the spread of radical Islamist forces in the strategic Horn of Africa and were harboring al-Qaeda activists implicated in the 1998 US embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.

 

US warplanes carried out bombings in southern Somalia under the pretext of attacking “terrorists.” While these raids killed a number of civilians, there is no evidence that anyone linked to al-Qaeda was struck in the attacks.

 

US Special Forces troops were also sent into Somalia to direct Ethiopian operations. These American forces remain embedded within the Ethiopian military, making Washington directly and intimately responsible for the bloodbath that has been carried out over the past several weeks.

 

The French press agency AFP quoted Mogadishu residents reporting that joint patrols of Ethiopian troops and pro-TFG gunmen are sweeping through the northern neighborhoods of the city rounding up young men as suspected insurgents.

 

“They are moving from house to house arresting people,” said Ibrahim Sheikh Mao, a resident of the Suuqahoola area where much of the fighting took place. “I imagine they have arrested hundreds of people because they started the operation early in the morning.” Shamso Nur, a woman in the al-Kamin area added, “All the men are fleeing the houses because Ethiopian forces are arresting them. I have seen three men near my house being taken by Ethiopian forces. I do not know if they were fighters, but they looked like civilians.” AFP said that its reporter in Mogadishu had seen 20 Somali men being herded into an Ethiopian military truck.

 

Clearly, there is an immediate threat of bloody reprisals against Mogadishu’s inhabitants.

 

Hundreds of those detained so far in the conflict have been shipped to the Ethiopian capital of Addis Abba. As the Washington Post reported Thursday, “More than 200 FBI and CIA agents have set up camp in the Sheraton Hotel here in Ethiopia’s capital and have been interrogating dozens of detainees—including a US citizen—picked up in Somalia and held without charge and without attorneys in a secret prison somewhere in this city....” Human rights groups have described the operation as a kind of “decentralized Guantanamo” in the Horn of Africa, and undoubtedly the same kind of abuses and torture used elsewhere in the “war on terrorism” are taking place there as well.

 

The bloody events in Mogadishu—which have provoked little if any controversy in Washington—are another warning that the war in Iraq is only one front in a global eruption of US militarism, as the American government employs armed force to seize control of strategic resources and regions.

 

The recklessness and brutality of this campaign threatens to ignite a far wider regional war, which could well draw in US combat troops. Already, the State Department has fingered the government of Eritrea—which is in a tense border dispute with Ethiopia—as a supposed “state sponsor” of those resisting the Ethiopian occupation of Somalia. Fighting within Somalia itself has spread to Kismayo, where rival clans have battled for control of the city.

 

Some 160,000 refugees have poured into Kenya, further destabilizing the situation there. And, on Tuesday, Somali minority rebels carried out a deadly attack on an oil installation in the Ethiopian-controlled ****** region, killing 74 people, including 9 Chinese.

The government of Ethiopia has claimed that it wants to withdraw its 20,000 troops and hand over security operations to a multinational force organized by the African Union. The AU, however, has proven incapable of mobilizing more than a handful of troops, and few African governments appear willing to send their armies into this dubious US-instigated conflict.

 

- Asian Tribune -

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Watch Martin Fletcher's Report from Mogadishu

 

Said Muhammad Abukar, a mere 40 days old, lay grey and trembling on an operating table in Madina hospital. His tiny stomach was slit down the middle. Doctors were searching for shrapnel in his abdomen. There was a large hole in his lower back.

Muhammad Abukar Ahmed, Said’s distraught father, told The Times that eight members of his family had been about to flee from war-torn Mogadishu when a shell hit their house in the residential area of Mahad Alab. The building was destroyed. It took Mr Ahmed, 25, a teacher of the Koran, 15 minutes to dig himself out of the rubble. “I didn’t know if I was going to live, let alone my son,” he said.

In the past month Ethiopian troops supporting Somalia’s deeply unpopular Government have pounded residential areas controlled by insurgents. The civilian death toll has reached four figures. Thousands more have been maimed and injured. An estimated 320,000 inhabitants — nearly a third of Mogadishu’s population — have fled in terror.

 

In five days spent in and around a city reverberating with the constant thud of mortars and bursts of gunfire, The Times saw burnt-out slums, huge refugee encampments, hospitals overflowing with the sick and injured, and enough misery to last a lifetime.

It is hard to overstate the suffering of this forgotten country. Last year Somalia tasted peace for the first time in 15 years of bloody civil war when the Islamic Courts movement drove out the warlords who had made their country a byword for anarchy and mayhem. But Washington saw the Courts as a new Taleban sympathetic to al-Qaeda, so it conspired with neighbouring Ethiopia to remove them as part of its War on Terror.

In December Ethiopia’s formidable army routed the Courts, and installed a Somalian “transitional federal government” that includes some of the very warlords the Courts had ousted, and depends for its survival on thousands of soldiers provided by Somalia’s oldest and most bitter enemy. The new Government is now battling against a growing insurgency, and legions of petrified Somalis are caught in the crossfire.

On our first afternoon in Mogadishu we were interviewing doctors at the Madina hospital when we heard explosions. Minutes later a convoy of cars, minibuses and trucks began delivering men, women and children — all civilians — with blood pouring from shrapnel wounds.

They were carried, wailing and moaning, into the casualty centre on trolleys, in people’s arms, in crude stretchers fashioned from blankets. They were laid on tables and the lino floor, soaked in their own blood and vomit. The doctors and nurses were soon struggling to cope, sweat coursing down their faces as they bandaged wounds and rigged up intravenous drips in the intense heat. But still the injured came — 30, 40, 50 of them. Amid the pandemonium a man with a stick fought to restrain a mob of frantic relatives.

Survivors said Ethiopian troops had fired three shells into a market in a neighbourhood called al-Barakah packed with women buying fresh milk. A dozen were killed outright.

The Government says the Ethiopians are responding to insurgent attacks, and that it has warned civilians to leave the insurgent-held areas of Mogadishu. But such horrors have become commonplace, and some European diplomats believe the Government and its Ethiopian backers could be committing war crimes.

In the past few days Ethiopian shells have hit a mosque, a minibus, a hospital and HornAfric, Somalia’s leading independent radio station. One night alone 73 people were killed in northern Mogadishu, and in three days last weekend the Madina treated 245 wounded civilians.

The casualties fill its foetid wards, corridors and overflow tents, and lie under trees outside. They are people like Ruqio Muse, a 22-year-old mother of three young children who said her thigh was shattered by an Ethiopian sniper’s bullet as she retrieved goods from her clothing stall in one of the city’s battlegrounds. Next to her lie two semi-comatose girls — 16-year-old cousins — whose skin was burnt from their faces by a landmine explosion. Ahmed, 14, has had a leg amputated.

Saida Ali Muhammad, 40, had fled Mogadishu with her children but returned to sell milk when she was hit by shrapnel in both legs. “This is shameful,” said her uncle, Farah Rage, as he tried to cool her with a fan. “We are in the middle of two crazy groups, one calling themselves insurgents and the other saying they’re the Government. Both are in concrete buildings so it’s the civilians who die.” Hussein Dhere, the hospital’s despairing deputy director, said his staff were working round the clock and “if this lasts another ten or twenty days we can’t cope. I feel very sorry. Sometimes I’m angry. Our people are dying.”

We had first visited Mogadishu early last December, five months after the Courts ousted the warlords, and found a city still rejoicing. Gone were the ubiquitous checkpoints where the warlords’ militias killed, extorted and stole. Gone were their “technicals” — Jeeps with heavy machineguns mounted in the back. Hundreds of Somalis were returning from foreign exile, businesses were reopening, and for the first time in a generation people could walk around safely amid the ruins of their once-fine capital, even at night.

The Courts’ leadership undoubtedly contained Islamic extremists with dangerous connections and intentions. They banned the narcotic qat, cinemas, Western music and dancing. But the Courts also achieved the almost impossible task of imposing order on one of the world’s most dangerous cities, and for that most Somalis were content to accept their strict Islamic codes.

Today Mogadishu is a warzone once again. The crowds and traffic have melted from the streets. Schools, businesses, roadside stalls and even orphanages have closed. We were the only whites and foreign journalists in the capital, and the first guests in our hotel for three weeks. We had just nine fellow passengers on the only air-line that still dares to fly into the city, and beside the runway stood the wreck of a military transport plane hit by an insurgent rocket.

An estimated 20,000 Ethiopian troops are battling against the insurgents — an alliance of Islamic Court fighters and elements of Mogadishu’s dominant ****** clan who control much of the outer city. The Government’s own army consists of barely 5,000 “soldiers” — former members of the warlords’ militias who inspire fear, not confidence. They man checkpoints and stand on corners in central Mogadishu, flaunting their semi-automatics. Many chew qat. Some steal and extort (we twice had to pay bribes at checkpoints).

Terrified of insurgent attacks, they remove women’s niqabs — Islamic head coverings — so they can see who is underneath.

In December we could move freely around the city, but not now. This time we avoided main roads, used vehicles with tinted windows, and travelled with several bodyguards. Like most inhabitants of Mogadishu, we retreated behind our hotel’s steel gates well before dark. But one day we slipped into the insurgent stronghold of north Mogadishu through the sort of labyrinth of muddy back alleys that thwarted the US rescue effort when two Black Hawk helicopters were shot down over Mogadishu in 1993.

Beyond the green line the streets were almost deserted except for young fighters bristling with guns, technicals carrying rocket-launchers, and men left behind to guard the homes of families that have fled.

On Industrial Road, a major thoroughfare, we were shown trenches and barricades built to obstruct Ethiopian tanks, burnt-out Ethiopian vehicles, and the charred remains of both a charcoal market and a camp for 1,200 homeless families shelled by the Ethiopians.

More than 50 died as fire raged through the camp’s rickety shelters made of wood and plastic sheeting. All that remains is an expanse of ash littered with the blackened remains of cooking pots, lamps and corrugated iron. “My family fled to the countryside,” said Hussain Ibrahim Yusef, a young boy standing alone in the devastation. “We were separated. I don’t know where to follow them.”

Another day we drove south from Mogadishu towards Afgoye. The refugee camps started about ten miles out and went on and on — thousands upon thousands of families who are living out in the bush beneath orange tarpaulins or in the open, sheltered from the blazing sun and torrential rainstorms only by trees.

These people fled with little more than sleeping mats and the clothes they wore. Food is scarce. Vendors charge extortionate prices for water, so some refugees are drinking from dirty rivers. There is no sanitation, and relief efforts are hampered by the lack of security, poor infrastructure and harassment by government soldiers.

We found 1,865 families — perhaps 10,000 people — packed into the 59-acre (24-hectare) grounds of the Lafole Hospital alone. Hawa Abdi, 60, the doctor who runs the hospital with her daughter, said children there were suffering from dysentery.

One adult and four children had died. Pregnant women were suffering miscarriages. Supplies were running out. “We need peace. We need help,” she beseeched.

We also found the new makeshift premises — a few corrugated iron shacks — of the Hayat hospital and nursing school which we had visited in Mogadishu last December. Abdirahman Figi, the hospital chief, said the Ethiopians had shelled it, stolen its money and medicines, then commandeered it for barracks. He said thousands of refugees were at risk from the onset of the rainy season and then winter. “The Islamic Courts brought peace and we were happy,” he said. The new Government was “worse than the warlords”.

In five days we spoke to scores of ordinary Somalis. Overwhelmingly they loathed a government they consider a puppet of the hated Ethiopians. “As long as the Ethiopians are on Somali soil the insurgents will get support,” said Muhammad Ibrahim, a gardener now living with his wife and three children at the Lafole hospital. “In the six months the Islamic Courts were here, less than 20 people lost their lives through violence. Now that many die in ten minutes,” said Hussein Adow, a businessman waiting outside the Madina hospital.

The Ethiopians had closed the main road back to Mogadishu, so we took a deeply rutted dirt track through the bush. We saw columns of black smoke rising above the distant city, and passed countless vehicles struggling southwards with yet more refugees.

Back in the capital we visited another hospital, the Benadir, and saw some of the most harrowing scenes of all. There were no beds. In one bare room after another the concrete floors were covered with emaciated children lying on filthy rugs, tended by desperate mothers. There were 700 of them, most under 5, all suffering from dysentery and cholera contracted in the refugee camps. Nowhere in Somalia is safe any more.

Rise and fall of the Islamic Courts

Mid-1990s Union of Islamic Courts (UIC), a group of local courts, gained popular support by beating corruption and bringing order

March-May 2006 Worst violence in almost a decade between rival militias

June UIC militias seize Mogadishu from warlords. US fears region could fall under the sway of al-Qaeda

September UIC and Government begin peace talks in Khartoum

December From its base in Baidoa the Government, backed by Ethiopia, fights with Islamists and drives them from Mogadishu

 

January 2007 attacks suspected al-Qaeda positions in southern Somalia. Islamists abandon last stronghold, port town of Kismayo

March African Union peacekeepers arrive

 

April 320,000 Somalis have fled Mogadishu since February , UN says

Source: Times archives

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And those rersponsible for the carnage and their supporters are keen in moving on as if nothing happened.