What a way for the Intelligence Shop (G-2) for AFRICOM to begin. The Concern and Scrutiny regarding the newest Mililtary Command of the United States may be overshadowed a tad by recent events off the coast of Somalia,
As the efforts to restore a functioning Centralized Government in Somalia continues to flounder there has been an increase in Piracy in one of the World’s busiest shipping regions. Several Nations including the United States have deployed both Naval and Special Forces Assets to the region in an effort to curtail the Criminal Activity.
One of the Vessels that was recently seized has several Intelligence Specialists concerned not only about the cargo but where the cargo was eventually headed to. After all this is one of the most violent regions in the whole world, The Faina is a container ship of Ukranian registry. It was captured within the last ten days. And part of its cargo was 33 T-72 Main Battle Tanks.
Now a guessing game has begun. The Pirates have demanded over $30 Million in Ransom. There are reports that the Tanks were headed to Mombasa, Kenya. The Kenyan Government has stated that they had purchased the Armor from Russia. There have been reports that the Government of South Sudan (GOSS) had acquired the weapons. US Intelligence believes that this is an effort to go around the Arms Embargo against Sudan.
Let us look at these three scenarios. First of all the Initial reaction regarding the Sudanese Government. This would not be the First Time the Russian Federation has attempted to break the Sanctions against Sudan. As a matter of fact the Russians have supported Sudan in the UN on more than one occasion. so this is plausible but i think that the Armor could have been unloaded at Port Sudan.
What about the claims of the Kenyan Government? Well the Armor was headed to a Kenyan Port. This could give the claims some form of legitimacy. There are still concerns regarding Abuse in the Mt. Elgon Region in the West of the Country but on the whole peace and stability are increasing in this country. Unless the Armor is meant to defend the Northern Border with Somalia and/or Ethiopia.
This brings us to the Government of Southern Sudan. This is an autonomous region of Sudan that fought a long protracted Insurgency against Khartoum. There is still a level of distrust towards Khartoum to this very day. Also in recent weeks there have been clashes with the LRA (Lord’s Resistance Army) which is a Ugandan Militia. The LRA was to have signed a Peace Deal with Kampala after GOSS negotiated a Peace Accord. When it came time to sign it the LRA did not show.
It is most likely that the Armor was most likely headed to either Nairobi or even Khartoum. But with the Armor being seized by the Pirates its possible that the Armor could end up being used in Somalia unless either the ransom is paid or the vessel is liberated by the Naval Elements that have the ship surrounded at this time.
Even though it does not have a forward deployment base or a permanent location this situation is still an interesting way for AFRICOM to start a new year. This is the US reacting to limit to spread of Piracy. Let us hope that AFRICOM is successful.
(The Author publishes Confused Eagle on the Internet. It can be found at morganrights.tripod.com)
ADDIS ABABA, Oct. 1 (Xinhua) — Ethiopia The Woyanne tribal dictatorship in Ethiopia and Norway on Wednesday agreed to restore their relations to the previous status following a meeting of their foreign ministers held on Sept. 25 in New York, Ethiopia’s Woyanne Foreign Ministry said.
“The two ministers reviewed the report of the joint technical committee established with a mandate to look into all aspects of the problems and misunderstandings that led to the regrettable turn of events in the relations between Ethiopia Woyanne and Norway,” said the ministry in a statement.
The ministers expressed satisfaction with the work of the technical committee, and agreed to restore relations between the two countries to their previous status, it said.
“The decision taken by the government of the Federal Democratic Republic of del datetime=”2008-10-02T03:09:51+00:00″>Ethiopia Woyanne in connection with the diplomatic representation of the Kingdom of Norway in Addis Ababa has been rescinded.”
The ministry expressed belief that cooperation between the two countries will continue to deepen in all areas, the statement said.
In August last year, Ethiopia deported six Norwegian diplomats, saying that they had interfered in Ethiopia’s internal affairs.
However, Ethiopia Woyanne was insisting it had not severed diplomatic relations with Norway but was unhappy with its dealings with Eritrea in particular.
The row was caused by Norway’s support for the next round of border talks with Eritrea to be held at UN headquarters in New York.
LANCASTER – A Lancaster man was sentenced this week to 3 years in federal prison and ordered to pay nearly $1 million in restitution for his role in a contraband cigarette trafficking ring that authorities said cheated the state out of more than $3 million in tax revenues.
Between 2002 and 2005, Daniel Araya, 43, distributed more than 1 million packs of cigarettes bearing counterfeit tax stamps. Some of the cigarettes were counterfeits that had been unlawfully smuggled into the United States from China, federal officials said.
Araya and other defendants evaded the California tax by affixing counterfeit tax stamps onto packs of cigarettes, which were then sold at smoke shops and other retail locations throughout the Southland. Araya was one of 13 people charged after a nearly three-year undercover probe, officials said.
NAIROBI (Reuters) – Nearly two years after being driven from Mogadishu, Islamists have re-taken swathes of south Somalia and may have their sights again on the capital.
The insurgents’ push is being led by Al Shabaab, or “Youth” in Arabic, the most militant in a wide array of groups opposed to the Somali government and military backers from Ethiopia, an ally in Washington’s “War on Terror”.
“Shabaab are winning. They have pursued a startlingly successful two-pronged strategy — chase all the internationals from the scene, and shift tactics from provocation to conquest,” said a veteran Somali analyst in the region. “Before it was ‘hit-and-run’ guerrilla warfare. Now it’s a case of ‘we’re here to stay’,” he added, noting Shabaab was “flooded with money” from foreign backers.
The Islamist insurgency since early 2007, the latest instalment in Somalia’s 17-year civil conflict, has worsened one of Africa’s worst humanitarian crises and fomented instability around the already chronically volatile Horn region.
Shabaab’s advances are galling to Washington, which says the group is linked to al Qaeda and has put it on its terrorism list. Western security services have long worried about Somalia becoming a haven for extremists, though critics — and the Islamists — say that threat has been fabricated to disguise U.S. aims to keep control, via Ethiopia Woyanne, in the region.
Some compare the Somali quagmire to Iraq in character, if not scale, given its appeal to jihadists, the involvement of foreign troops and the tactics used by the rebels.
In August, in its most significant grab of a gradual territorial encroachment, Shabaab spearheaded the takeover of Kismayu, a strategic port and south Somalia’s second city.
This month, its threats to shoot down planes have largely paralysed Mogadishu airport. And in recent days, its fighters have been targeting African peacekeepers. “The only question is ‘what next?” said a diplomat, predicting Shabaab would next seek to close Mogadishu port and take control of Baidoa town, the seat of parliament.
Analysts say Islamists or Islamist-allied groups now control most of south Somalia, with the exception of Mogadishu, Baidoa where parliament is protected by Ethiopian troops, and Baladwayne near the border where Addis Ababa garrisons soldiers.
That is a remarkable turnaround from the end of 2006, when allied Somali-Ethiopian Woyanne troops chased the Islamists out of Mogadishu after a six-month rule of south Somalia, scattering them to sea, remote hills and the Kenyan border.
The Islamists regrouped to begin an insurgency that has killed nearly 10,000 civilians. Military discipline, grassroots political work, youth recruitment and an anti-Ethiopian Woyanne rallying cry have underpinned their return, analysts say.
With the Islamists split into many rival factions, it is impossible to tell if an offensive against Mogadishu is imminent. Analysts say Shabaab and other Islamist militants may not want an all-out confrontation with Ethiopian troops, preferring to wait until Addis Ababa Woyanne withdraws forces.
WORLD “NUMB” TO SOMALIA
Ethiopian Prime Minister dictator Meles Zenawi is fed up with the human, political and financial cost of his Somalia intervention, but knows withdrawal could hasten the fall of Mogadishu.
The insurgents may also resist the temptation to launch an offensive on Mogadishu until their own ranks are united. “Opposition forces at the moment are internally debating whether or not it’s time for a major push,” the diplomat said.
Meanwhile, the rebels attack government and Ethiopian Woyanne targets in the city seemingly at will. Of late, they have also been hitting African Union (AU) peacekeepers, who number just 2,200, possibly to warn the world against more intervention.
Estimates vary but experts think Ethiopia Woyanne has about 10,000 soldiers in Somalia, the government about 10,000 police and soldiers. Islamist fighter numbers are fluid but may match that.
The Islamists’ growth in power has gone largely unnoticed outside Somalia by all but experts. For the wider world, Somalia’s daily news of bombs, assassinations, piracy and kidnappings has blurred into an impression of violence-as-usual.
Even this week’s horrors, including shells slicing up 30 civilians in a market, registered barely a blip outside. “The world has grown numb to Somalia’s seemingly endless crises,” said analyst Ken Menkhaus.
But “much is new this time, and it would be a dangerous error of judgement to brush off Somalia’s current crisis as more of the same,” he said. “Seismic political, social, and security changes are occurring in the country.”
The United Nations has been pushing a peace agreement in neighbouring Djibouti that would see a ceasefire, a pull-back of Ethiopian Woyanne troops — the insurgents’ main bone of contention — then some sort of power-sharing arrangement.
Diplomats see that as the main hope for stability, and moderates on both sides support it in principle. But Islamist fighters on the ground have rejected the process, and negotiators failed to agree on details last week.
A U.S. expert on Somalia, John Prendergast, said the world had taken its eyes off the conflict at its peril. “Somalia truly is the one place in Africa where you have a potential cauldron of recruitment and extremism that, left to its own devices, will only increase in terms of the danger it presents to the region, and to American and Western interests.”
One effect of the conflict impinging on the outside world is rampant piracy off Somalia. Gangs have captured some 30 boats this year, and still hold a dozen ships with 200 or so hostages.
The violence is also impeding relief groups from helping Somalia’s several million hungry. Foreign investors, interested in principle in Somalia’s hydrocarbon and fishing resources, barely give the place a second thought in the current climate.
WASHINGTON DC – At least 10 victims of the 2007 Horn of Africa rendition program still languish in Ethiopian jails and the whereabouts of several others is unknown, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. Several of the detained men were interrogated by US officials in Addis Ababa soon after they were secretly transferred from Kenya to Somalia, and then to Ethiopia in early 2007. The 54-page report, “‘Why Am I Still Here?’: The Horn of Africa Renditions and the Fate of the Missing,” examines the 2007 rendition operation, during which at least 90 men, women, and children fleeing the armed conflict in Somalia were unlawfully rendered from Kenya to Somalia, and then on to Ethiopia. The report documents the treatment of several men still in Ethiopian custody, as well as the previously unreported experiences of recently released detainees, several of whom described being brutally tortured.
“The dozens of people caught up in the secret Horn of Africa renditions in 2007 have suffered in silence too long,” said Jennifer Daskal, senior counterterrorism counsel at Human Rights Watch and author of the report. “Those governments involved – Ethiopia, Kenya and the US – need to reverse course, renounce unlawful renditions, and account for the missing.”
In late 2006, the Bush administration backed an Ethiopian military offensive that ousted the Islamist authorities from the Somali capital Mogadishu. The fighting caused thousands to flee across the border into Kenya, including some who were suspected of terrorist links.
Kenyan authorities arrested at least 150 men, women, and children from more than 18 countries – including the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada – in operations near the Somali border and held them for weeks without charge in Nairobi. In January and February 2007, the Kenyan government then rendered dozens of them – with no notice to families, lawyers or the detainees themselves – on flights to Somalia, where they were handed over to the Ethiopian military. Ethiopian forces also arrested an unknown number of people in Somalia.
Those rendered were later transported to detention centers in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa and other Ethiopian towns, where they effectively disappeared. Denied access to their embassies, their families, and international humanitarian organizations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, the detainees were even denied phone calls home. Several have said that they were housed in solitary cells, some as small as two meters by two meters, with their hands cuffed in painful positions behind their backs and their feet bound together.
A number of prisoners were questioned by US Central Intelligence Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation agents in Addis Ababa. From February to May 2007, Ethiopian security officers daily transported detainees – including several pregnant women – to a villa where US officials interrogated them about suspected terrorist links. At night, the Ethiopian officers returned the detainees to their cells.
“The United States says that they were investigating past and current threats of terrorism,” Daskal said. “But the repeated interrogation of rendition victims who were being held incommunicado makes Washington complicit in the abuse.”
For the most part, detainees were sent home soon after their interrogation by US agents ended. Of those known to have been interrogated by US officials, just eight Kenyans remain. (A ninth Kenyan in Addis Ababa was rendered to Ethiopia in July/August 2007, after US interrogations reportedly stopped.) These men, who have not been subjected to any interrogation since May 2007, would likely have been repatriated long ago but for the Kenyan government’s longstanding refusal to acknowledge their claims to Kenyan citizenship or to take steps to secure their release.
Human Rights Watch recently spoke by telephone to several of the Kenyans in detention in Ethiopia, many of whom complained of physical ailments and begged for someone to help get them home. Although Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga made a campaign pledge to help repatriate these detainees, little progress has been made to date. In mid-August 2008, Kenyan authorities visited these men for the first time. The officials reportedly told the detainees they would be home within a few weeks, but more than a month and a half has now passed.
“The previous Kenyan government deported its own citizens and then left them to rot in Ethiopian jails,” Daskal said. “The new Kenyan government should reverse course, bring these men home, and show that it is not following the same shameful path as the old.”
The Ethiopian government also used the rendition program for its own purposes. For years, the Ethiopian military has been trying to quell domestic Ogadeni and Oromo insurgencies that receive support from neighboring countries, such as Ethiopia’s archrival, Eritrea. The Ethiopian intervention in Somalia and the multinational rendition program provided them a convenient means to gain custody over people whom they could interrogate for suspected insurgent links. Once these individuals were in detention, Ethiopian military interrogators and guards reportedly subjected them to brutal beatings and torture.
Detainees said Ethiopian interrogators pulled out their toenails, held loaded guns to their heads, crushed their genitals, and forced them to crawl on their elbows and knees through gravel. Several reported being beaten to the point of unconsciousness.
The Human Rights Watch report calls upon the Ethiopian government to immediately release the rendition victims still in its custody or prosecute them in a court that meets basic fair trial standards. It also urges the Kenyan government to take immediate steps to secure the repatriation of Kenyan nationals still in Ethiopian custody, and the US government to withhold counterterrorism assistance from both governments until they provide a full accounting of all the missing detainees.
WASHINGTON (AP) – Washington police have identified the Virginia man who shot another man during an argument at an Adams Morgan restaurant then fatally shot himself.
It happened around 11 p.m. Sunday at the Meskerem Ethiopian Restaurant in the 2400 block of 18th Street northwest.
Police say 50-year-old Tessaye Yemane of Potomac Falls, Virginia, shot the other man, then turned the gun on himself.
Both men were taken to Washington Hospital Center, where Yemane died. Police say the other man, whom they identified only as a 47-year-old man from Alexandria, Va., was admitted in stable condition.
Councilman Jim Graham issued a statement saying that the two men had known each other for years. Police did not reveal the nature of the argument.
