By Emmanuel Goujon
Ethiopian Woyanne troops must leave Somalia for the country’s ailing transitional institutions to garner any legitimacy and a political solution to emerge, leaders from Somalia’s top clan said Thursday.
The presence in Somalia of the US-backed Ethiopian Woyanne regime’s troops will continue fueling violence that has already killed thousands and displaced close to a million in recent months, Hawiye elders said.
On Thursday alone, 13 civilians were killed in Mogadishu, including 11 when two mortar shells smashed into a market area.
“The problem of Somalia can only be solved by Somalis, we have to meet with the TFG (transitional federal government), the group of Asmara (opposition) and find a solution the Somali way,” said Abdulaye Hassan, a Hawiye spokesman.
“That is possible only if the Ethiopians Woyannes leave,” he added.
The Hawiye clan is the largest in Somalia and is dominant in the capital Mogadishu, although some divisions exist amongst its numerous sub-clans.
Ethiopian Woyanne troops, with the United States’ blessing, came to the rescue of the transitional government’s embattled forces in late 2006 after an Islamist militia took control of large parts of the country.
The Islamists, accused by Washington of ties to Al-Qaeda, were swiftly defeated but have since reverted to guerrilla tactics, carrying out daily attacks in Mogadishu.
Hassan condemned what he said were systematic arrests of Hawiye clan members who speak out against the TFG.
“We are sleeping in a different house every night because the TFG is after us,” he said.
Sirraj Sheikh Hassan, another Hawiye representative, insisted his clan — frequently accused of supporting radical Islamic insurgents — was not seeking confrontation.
“We are not armed people but elders who are not happy with the Ethiopian presence. We are fighting them verbally,” he told AFP in Mogadishu.
“The main conflict is now between the group of Asmara and the TFG. It can only be solved if the Ethiopians leave. There is no other solution than negotiation,” he added.
The government and allied foreign mediators have so far not engaged in serious consultations with an opposition movement formed in Asmara in September.
The group, which calls itself the Alliance for the Re-Liberation of Somalia, is led by key political figures from the country’s short-lived Islamist rule and is hosted by Eritrea, which faces growing international isolation.
The Hawiye say they feel alienated from the country’s centre of power. Although the new prime minister, Nur Hassan Hussein, is one of theirs, the nation’s strongman remains more than ever President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed.
Yusuf is from the Darod clan, the country’s second-largest, and cracks have formed along clanic lines in the fragile government.
“The Ethiopians Woyannes have been invited by the legitimate government of Somalia, that is the TFG, to restore peace, law and order in Somalia. So no other authority can ask them to leave,” said Interior Minister Mohamed Mahmud Guled.
“The so-called Hawiye representatives don’t represent the Hawiye people and they are not in a position to stop the fighting because the Shebab (the Islamist movement’s armed wing) are not under their authority,” he added.
Addis Ababa has said it wants to pull out as soon as possible but argues that this cannot be done before a robust international peacekeeping force is deployed.
In the meantime, violence continues to make Mogadishu one of the most dangerous capitals in the world and aggravate an already dire humanitarian situation.
“The insurgents are standing against the new colonisation of Somalia by Ethiopians. Once the Ethiopians pull out, there will be no more fighting,” said Nur Jamah Karshe, another Hawiye elder.
By Emmanuel Goujon
Ethiopian Woyanne troops must leave Somalia for the country’s ailing transitional institutions to garner any legitimacy and a political solution to emerge, leaders from Somalia’s top clan said Thursday.
The presence in Somalia of the US-backed Ethiopian Woyanne regime’s troops will continue fueling violence that has already killed thousands and displaced close to a million in recent months, Hawiye elders said.
On Thursday alone, 13 civilians were killed in Mogadishu, including 11 when two mortar shells smashed into a market area.
“The problem of Somalia can only be solved by Somalis, we have to meet with the TFG (transitional federal government), the group of Asmara (opposition) and find a solution the Somali way,” said Abdulaye Hassan, a Hawiye spokesman.
“That is possible only if the Ethiopians Woyannes leave,” he added.
The Hawiye clan is the largest in Somalia and is dominant in the capital Mogadishu, although some divisions exist amongst its numerous sub-clans.
Ethiopian Woyanne troops, with the United States’ blessing, came to the rescue of the transitional government’s embattled forces in late 2006 after an Islamist militia took control of large parts of the country.
The Islamists, accused by Washington of ties to Al-Qaeda, were swiftly defeated but have since reverted to guerrilla tactics, carrying out daily attacks in Mogadishu.
Hassan condemned what he said were systematic arrests of Hawiye clan members who speak out against the TFG.
“We are sleeping in a different house every night because the TFG is after us,” he said.
Sirraj Sheikh Hassan, another Hawiye representative, insisted his clan — frequently accused of supporting radical Islamic insurgents — was not seeking confrontation.
“We are not armed people but elders who are not happy with the Ethiopian presence. We are fighting them verbally,” he told AFP in Mogadishu.
“The main conflict is now between the group of Asmara and the TFG. It can only be solved if the Ethiopians leave. There is no other solution than negotiation,” he added.
The government and allied foreign mediators have so far not engaged in serious consultations with an opposition movement formed in Asmara in September.
The group, which calls itself the Alliance for the Re-Liberation of Somalia, is led by key political figures from the country’s short-lived Islamist rule and is hosted by Eritrea, which faces growing international isolation.
The Hawiye say they feel alienated from the country’s centre of power. Although the new prime minister, Nur Hassan Hussein, is one of theirs, the nation’s strongman remains more than ever President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed.
Yusuf is from the Darod clan, the country’s second-largest, and cracks have formed along clanic lines in the fragile government.
“The Ethiopians Woyannes have been invited by the legitimate government of Somalia, that is the TFG, to restore peace, law and order in Somalia. So no other authority can ask them to leave,” said Interior Minister Mohamed Mahmud Guled.
“The so-called Hawiye representatives don’t represent the Hawiye people and they are not in a position to stop the fighting because the Shebab (the Islamist movement’s armed wing) are not under their authority,” he added.
Addis Ababa has said it wants to pull out as soon as possible but argues that this cannot be done before a robust international peacekeeping force is deployed.
In the meantime, violence continues to make Mogadishu one of the most dangerous capitals in the world and aggravate an already dire humanitarian situation.
“The insurgents are standing against the new colonisation of Somalia by Ethiopians. Once the Ethiopians pull out, there will be no more fighting,” said Nur Jamah Karshe, another Hawiye elder.
MOGADISHU (AFP) — Two Somali women were killed by crossfire in Mogadishu Friday, bringing the civilian death toll to 19 after two days of gun battles in the ravaged capital, a witness said.
Shelling in northern neighbourhoods continued early in the morning, only hours after the bodies of 17 civilians were hastily buried in improvised cemeteries on the edge of the war-battered city.
“Two women were selling mint and tried to cross a road” in the northern Arafat neighbourhood, said witness Muhubo Hersi. “They were caught in the crossfire and both died on the spot,” she said.
“There was a lot of shelling in our neighbourhood and three artillery shells landed on a house very close to mine,” Hersi went on. “Nobody was killed because nobody lived in this house, the people have fled.”
The Ethiopian information ministry said its troops, alongside Somali forces, have killed 75 insurgents, captured four others in the outskirts of Mogadishu on Thursday.
In a statement, whose claims could not be confirmed, it added that “a number of rebels managed to escape. Ethiopian casualties were minimal”.
The joint force captured five vehicles, including two trucks mounted with machine guns, and a third truck was destroyed.
Ethiopia also blamed the rebels for mortar attacks that killed 12 people in the capital’s Bakara market on Thursday, making it the bloodiest day in December.
Civilians have borne the brunt of the intense fighting that has plagued Mogadishu in recent months.
Although no accurate figures are available, thousands of people are believed to have died and more than 600,0000 have fled the city since February to find shelter with family elsewhere in Somalia or in camps for the displaced.
Six of the city’s 16 districts have been almost completely emptied but some civilians remained trapped in central Mogadishu, their movements impeded by hundreds of rogue checkpoints and with scarce access to food and sanitation.
With no political solution in sight, Ethiopian-backed government troops and Islamist insurgents continue to battle it out in the streets of the seaside capital.
Aid groups have warned that one of the world’s worst food crises is unfolding in Mogadishu and its surroundings and complained of utter disregard for basic humanitarian principles on the part of all the belligerents.
Violence in the lawless country has defied numerous initiatives aimed at restoring peace and stability in the Horn of Africa nation since the 1991 ouster of former dictator Mohamed Siad Barre.
Uganda has deployed 1,600 African Union peacekeepers to Somalia, but the contingent remains far short of the 8,000 troops pledged by the continental body and has failed to stem the bloodshed.
The AU’s new special representative to Somalia, Nicolas Bwakira, nevertheless announced Friday that the first battalion of Burundian soldiers would arrive by year’s end and more troops from Nigeria early next year.
Bwakira, who met new Prime Minister Nur Hassan Hussein, told reporters at Mogadishu airport that he had urged the government to negotiate with the opposition.
By Jeffrey Gettleman
NAIROBI: The Ethiopian Woyanne government, one of the United States’s top allies in Africa, is forcing untrained civilians — including doctors, teachers, office clerks and employees of development programs financed by the World Bank and United Nations — to fight rebels in the desolate Ogaden region, according to Western officials, refugees and Ethiopian administrators who recently defected to avoid being conscripted.
Ethiopia Woyanne has been struggling with the rebels for years. But with tens of thousands of its troops now enmeshed in a violent insurgency in Somalia and many thousands more massing on the border for a possible war with Eritrea, the government seems to be relying on civilians to do more of its fighting in the Ogaden, a bone-dry chunk of territory where Ethiopian Woyanne troops have been accused by human rights groups of widespread abuses.
In a recent report, government officials in the region called on elders, traders, women and civil servants to form local “security committees” and mobilize their clans to destroy the rebels and their bases of support. The government says that the rebels are terrorists who have carried out assassinations and bombings and that civilians have volunteered to fight them.
But by many accounts, the militias are hardly voluntary. One Western aid official said soldiers had barged into hospitals to draft recruits and threatened to jail health workers if they did not comply. In other cases, lists of names were posted on public bulletin boards, ordering government employees to report for duty, according to a current member of the regional parliament and two Ethiopian administrators who have fled the country. Many of those who refused were fired, jailed and in some cases tortured, the administrators and Parliament member said.
The civilians are serving as guides, porters, translators and foot soldiers, and they are sent into the bush with little or no training to confront hardened guerrilla fighters. In the ensuing battles, many civil servants have recently been killed, according to accounts corroborated by Western officials and aid workers.
“Anybody who works for the government – teachers, doctors, clerks, administrators – has to join a militia,” said Hassan Abdi Hees, who worked as the head accountant in a government office in the Ogaden and is now seeking asylum in Kenya. “I left because I didn’t want to die.”
Several Western officials say they are alarmed about this new strategy, especially when the first signs may be emerging of a humanitarian crisis that aid officials predicted over the summer.
This year, the Ethiopian Woyanne military sealed off large swaths of the Ogaden to choke off support for the rebels, preventing much of the commercial traffic and emergency food aid from entering. Western aid officials warned that this action could cause a famine.
The military has since relaxed some restrictions, but a survey by the aid group Save the Children U.K. found that child malnutrition rates in some areas have soared past emergency thresholds and are now higher than in the Sudanese region of Darfur or Somalia, widely considered the two most pressing crises in Africa.
In late November, John Holmes, the most senior humanitarian official at the United Nations, went to the Ogaden to assess the situation. While there, he said, he heard reports of civilian militias’ being formed and observed that it was increasingly difficult to find health workers, livestock workers and trained professionals to distribute much-needed aid in the region, which now faces a drought.
“There is not a catastrophe there, for the moment,” Holmes said. “But there is a lot of concern the Ogaden could become a serious humanitarian crisis.”
Ethiopian Woyanne officials deny this assessment. “Many media and international organizations have been exaggerating the problems,” said Nur Abdi Mohammed, a government spokesman. “There is no food aid problem. There is no malnutrition problem.”
As for militias, Mohammed said, “What is happening is that the local tribes are forming to fight against the ONLF,” the Ogaden National Liberation Front, the main rebel group in the area.
“The people want to protect their livelihood,” Mohammed added.
According to the recent government report, which was published by the regional authorities, rank-and-file civil servants are not the only ones called upon to fight the rebels. It also lists several employees who work for programs financed by international donors.
They include a pastoralist development project that receives millions of dollars from the World Bank and the Ethiopian government’s AIDS prevention office, which is supported, in part, by the United Nations and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. A second government document ordering civil servants to report for duty lists 10 employees from an AIDS office.
One government official said that his entire department, including white-collar professionals, clerks, watchmen and drivers, had been forced to go on reconnaissance patrols to hunt down the rebels. The official, who feared government reprisals if he were identified, said that the militia duty interrupted humanitarian programs supported by the United Nations and that several colleagues were killed while on patrol.
“We don’t know how to operate guns, but the government sent us to the front lines,” the official said.
Other civilians who served in the militias said they were not given camouflage, and even had to buy their own rifles.
“It’s terrifying,” said Ali Mahamoud, a Koranic teacher who said he was yanked out of Arabic class a few months ago and assigned to a militia. “You can’t see the rebels when they’re shooting at you. And the Ethiopians Woyannes will kill you if you try to run.”
The rebels said the civilians were easy targets.
“They don’t know the bush,” said Daous, a commander for the Ogaden National Liberation Front.
Some of the region’s best-trained professionals have chosen to flee, including Sadik Mohammed Hajinur, a Sudanese-trained doctor who used to work at a rural hospital. He said that Ethiopian Woyanne soldiers had demanded that he recruit militia members from his clan and that when he refused, they had beat him with rifle butts.
“I faced so many problems from the army,” said Sadik, who is now seeking asylum in Sweden.
Sadik and other refugees described the militia program as another example of the extremes to which the government will go to control the Ogaden region, which lies on the border of Somalia and is home to mostly ethnic Somalis, who speak a different language and have a different culture than the highland Ethiopians who rule the country.
Several UN officials and Western diplomats said that they were discussing the militia program in private meetings but contended that they could not comment publicly for fear of provoking the ire of the Ethiopian government, resulting in a possible suspension of humanitarian efforts in the region.
“We are walking a very thin line, and we need to concentrate on saving lives right now,” a UN official said.
Ethiopian authorities have already expelled the Red Cross from the Ogaden, accusing aid workers of being spies.
The Bush administration considers Ethiopia Woyanne its No. 1 ally in combating terrorism in the Horn of Africa, and the American government provides it with roughly $500 million in annual aid. Last winter, American commanders gave Ethiopia Woyanne prized intelligence to oust an Islamic movement that had controlled much of Somalia.
But Human Rights Watch says it has documented dozens of cases of severe abuse by Ethiopian Woyanne troops in the Ogaden, including gang rapes, burned villages and what it calls “demonstration killings,” like hangings and beheadings, meant to terrorize the population.
“This is a mini-Darfur,” said Steve Crawshaw, the UN advocacy director for Human Rights Watch.
The Ethiopian Woyanne government’s response to such criticism is often one word: Eritrea. Ethiopian Woyanne leaders have accused their tiny neighbor of arming insurgents in Somalia and the Ogaden. Eritrea denies this accusation, but a UN report concluded that the country had indeed shipped planeloads of weapons into Somalia. Ethiopia Woyanne also blames Eritrea for failing to compromise on the border issue, which has led to a major military buildup on both sides.
As for human rights, Ethiopia’s Woyanne prime minister, Meles Zenawi, said at a recent news conference, “There have been no widespread human rights violations in the Ogaden, not only because we believe in the respect for human rights, but because we know how to fight the insurgency.”
But several soldiers who have recently defected said they had participated in brutal killings. Ahmed Mohammed, 24, said he was born in the Ogaden and served two years in the national army. In August, he said, his platoon was blockading a road and caught a truck trying to sneak through. The soldiers dragged the driver out and Ahmed said he watched his commander saw off the driver’s head with a hunting knife.
“We left the body by the road,” said Ahmed, who is now a refugee in Kenya. His account could not be independently verified but was consistent with those of other soldiers who had defected.
Mohammed, the government spokesman, dismissed the account, saying: “There is not a single soldier who is abusing human rights. The Ethiopian military is very disciplined and would not abuse its own people.”
Recent refugees said the military was trying to starve them out and the blockade had been like a noose on some parts of the region, cutting off food supplies.
In October, Save the Children U.K. surveyed more than 600 Ogadeni children and found that 21 percent were acutely malnourished, compared with UN surveys that found malnutrition rates of 19 percent in an area of Somalia and 13 percent in Darfur. The United Nations considers 15 percent the emergency threshold.
“We’ve crossed the line into a humanitarian crisis,” said a Western diplomat who asked not to be identified because he was afraid of reprisals from the government.
Western officials said the Ethiopian Woyanne government has begun to respond by loosening the restrictions on commercial traffic and food and allowing the United Nations to open field offices in the Ogaden.
“There have been positive developments in the last three weeks,” said Marc Rubin, emergency director for Unicef in Ethiopia.
But there is a lot of catching up to do. The amount of emergency food that the United Nations World Food Program has dispatched to the Ogaden this year is a small fraction of what it was last year, 19,475 tons, compared with 155,249 tons.
Several refugees said they had been reduced to eating grass. Habsa Ghaffir, who arrived at a camp in Kenya four weeks ago, said that after Ethiopian Woyanne troops burned her fields and shot her husband, her 4-year-old son starved to death.
“I remember him saying to me, ‘Mom, bring me food, Mom, bring me tea, Mom bring me water,”‘ Habsa said.
But she had none.
“It is like they are trying to wipe us out,” she said, nervously snapping twigs between her fingers as she spoke outside her hut. “Even here, we’re not safe.”
UN officials said Ethiopian Woyanne intelligence agents had infiltrated Kenya, and on Nov. 2, there was a mysterious attack that only added to these fears.
According to the Kenyan police, masked men burst into an apartment building in a Nairobi slum and shot five Ethiopian refugees. Two died, along with a guard outside who was shot in the head.
Nothing was taken. Witnesses said the killers went straight to the Ethiopians’ room. The Ethiopian victims had been student leaders in their country, and the Kenyan police said some of them had previously asked for protection.
A Kenyan police commander, Joseph Maina Migwi, said he could not say whether Ethiopian security agents were involved. “But whoever did it,” he said, “were definitely paid professionals.”
