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MOGADISHU (Thomson Financial) – Shells and machinegun fire pounded the Somali capital today, setting buildings ablaze, as Ethiopian [Woyanne] forces and Islamist guerrillas battled for the ninth day.
After a night of sporadic shelling, columns of Ethiopian [Woyanne] tanks ploughed into northern Mogadishu, firing mortars and rockets onto suspected rebel positions, as machinegun fire ricocheted across neighbourhoods.
Terrified civilians scrambled to escape stray bullets as buildings caught fire.
At least six civilians were killed in northern neighbourhoods, residents said.
“I have seen the bodies of three civilians killed by stray bullets in Tawfiq,” said witness Abdullahi Ali Mohamed, trapped in the area.
Three other civilians were killed when a shell hit a passenger van in Suuqahoola, said witness Idle Abdi.
Residents said fighting had spread to the northern Ex-Control, Huriwa and Suuqahoola areas, threatening to engulf part of the city so far spared from weeks of artillery duels.
“The heaviest fighting is raging this morning. They are exchanging everything they have, from bullets to anti-aircraft shells,” said Salah Doli, a resident of Jamhuriha area, also in the north.
“Mortars have hit shops and buildings, destroying them and setting others ablaze,” he added.
Ethiopia [Woyanne] rejected allegations from human rights groups that its troops were targeting civilians, saying they had “taken every possible precaution to avoid or minimize civilian loss of life and civilian casualties.”
“Ethiopian [Woyanne] troops have never deliberately or knowingly targeted civilians, despite the current operational difficulties,” the foreign ministry said in a statement.
Local human rights workers monitoring the toll say at least 329 people, mostly civilians and insurgents, have been killed in the latest clashes that come around three weeks after similar battles claimed at least 1,000 lives.
Dozens of corpses remain rotting in the streets as the fighting has prevented aid workers from collecting them.
Mogadishu doctors have appealed for medical supplies for the wounded from some of the heaviest clashes in Mogadishu since the 1991 ouster of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre.
The United Nations says that more than 321,000 people had fled the seaside capital, home to about a million people, since Feb 1.
Many of the displaced are camped in the capital’s outskirts, facing disease outbreaks and without sufficient water, food and medicine, according to aid workers.
Alarmed by the looming humanitarian disaster, the UN has pleaded for access to bring aid to the displaced.
Meanwhile, London-based foreign affairs think-tank Chatham House warned yesterday that the Islamic Courts Union rulers, ousted from south and central Somalia by government-backed Ethiopian forces in January, were likely to rise again.
ADDIS ABABA (Reuters) – Ethiopian rebels who killed 74 people and seized seven Chinese workers in a raid on an oilfield said on Thursday they had no plans to hold the hostages or to attack other foreign companies.
A London-based spokesman of the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) said the group had warned investors the area was a war zone and that it expected the conflict to escalate.
“We have no new plans to attack foreign companies at the moment,” Abdirahman Mohammed Mahdi told Reuters by telephone.
“But our general policy is that foreigners are not allowed to explore for oil or gas in the Ogaden. Any company which does that will be responsible for what happens.”
The separatist rebels, who have been fighting the government since 1984, stormed the oilfield in Ethiopia’s barren southeast region on Tuesday, killing 65 locals and 9 Chinese in one of the worst attacks yet on Beijing’s growing interests in Africa.
Mahdi said the ONLF was “terribly sorry” for the deaths of the Chinese, who he said were caught in the crossfire during a mission the guerrillas had planned for six months. And he said the group was trying to return the seven Chinese it had seized.
“We do not consider them hostages. We took them away for their own safety. We are trying to contact the appropriate authorities, the Red Cross or whoever, to return them,” he said.
ARMY THREATENED
He warned the military against launching a rescue mission.
“They will be responsible for any debacle that happens,” Mahdi said. “That would be a most foolish thing to do.”
The ONLF has repeatedly told energy companies they will not allow oil and gas exploration in the area as long as the Ogaden people are “denied their rights to self-determination”.
Last year it told a state-run Indian company vying for a gas concession to drop its plans.
Mahdi said the rebels had captured lots of weapons in recent operations against Ethiopian troops and he expected the fighting in Ogaden to intensify as the military retaliated.
“We control the countryside … Ethiopian army camps will be attacked wherever they are,” he said.
China has condemned the killings of staff working for Zhongyuan Petroleum Exploration Bureau, part of the larger China Petroleum and Chemical Corp. (Sinopec).
In Beijing, Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said China had sent foreign and commerce ministry officials as well as Sinopec representatives to the Horn of Africa nation.
Chinese diplomats were also helping efforts to secure the release of the kidnapped staff, he said, adding that China was evaluating the safety of its workers overseas.
Ethiopia renewed its vow to hunt down the rebels it says are “terrorists” backed by its arch-foe and regional rival Eritrea.
Asmara denies the allegations and accuses Addis Ababa of trying to divert attention from the two nations’ border dispute.
“The defence forces are in hot pursuit to apprehend ONLF criminals who committed this heinous crime,” Ethiopian Foreign Affairs spokesman Ambassador Soloman Abebe told Reuters.
“We will bring them to justice.”
(Additional reporting by Chris Buckley in Beijing)
By Martin Fletcher in Mogadishu
The Times
April 26, 2007
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 [Woyanne] 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 [Woyanne’s] formidable [World Bank-financed] 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 [Woyanne] 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 [Woyannes] 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 [Woyanne] 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 [Woyanne] 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 [Woyanne] troops are battling against the insurgents — an alliance of Islamic Court fighters and elements of Mogadishu’s dominant Hawiye 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 [Woyannes]. “As long as the Ethiopians [Woyannes] 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 [Woyanne occupation forces] 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.
Source:
News24 (SA)
Addis Ababa – Dozens of students were injured on Thursday in clashes with each other and the police at Ethiopia’s largest university, said students.
One student said he saw another killed by demonstrators, and about 50 wounded in the clashes at Addis Ababa University.
Other students also reported dozens of injured.
But federal police spokesperson Demsash Hailu said no one had died, although there had been some injuries.
There are “no dead, peace has been restored in the area,” Demsash said, adding that police reinforcements had bought the situation under control.
Students and police said the riots began on campus on Wednesday evening, sparked by the alleged theft of the body organs of a dead student by a government hospital.
“The doctors took over some of his body parts without any authorisation from his family,” said a demonstrator, asking to remain anonymous.
“We asked the dean of the university to intervene but he refused. That is why we are demonstrating.”
Students also cited the poor quality of food served in the university canteen as a reason for the riots.
University officials were unavailable for comment on Thursday.
By Anita Powell in Addis Ababa
The Guardian
Rebels stormed a Chinese-run oilfield in eastern Ethiopia yesterday, killing 74 workers and destroying the facility, guerrillas and government officials said.
The Ogaden National Liberation Front, an ethnic Somali group that has fought alongside insurgents in Somalia, also kidnapped seven Chinese workers, said an Ethiopian government official, Bereket Simon. “This was a cold blooded killing,” Mr Bereket, a special adviser to the Ethiopian prime minister, Meles Zenawi, told Associated Press. “This was organised.”
The rebel group claimed responsibility for the attack in a statement sent to AP. It also warned all international oil companies not to operate in the region.
China’s official Xinhua News Agency identified the Chinese workers and Ethiopian guards as employees of the Zhongyuan Petroleum Exploration Bureau, a division of a huge state-run oil company.
Xu Shuang, the general manager of Zhongyuan, based in Addis Ababa, said nine of its Chinese oil workers were killed, seven Chinese workers were kidnapped and 65 Ethiopians were killed.
The attack took place early on Tuesday morning in Abole, a small town 75 miles from the Somali regional state’s capital Jijiga, close to the Somali border. Mr Bereket said several Ethiopian soldiers were wounded in the gunbattle. “The army is pursuing them. We will track them down dead or alive. We will make sure these people will be hunted and be brought to justice.”
He said the group was also linked to the Eritrean government, which Ethiopia has repeatedly accused of waging terror attacks. Eritrea denies the claims.
The countries fought a border war that ended in 2000 and are accused of backing rival sides in the Somali conflict.
China has increased its presence in Africa in recent years in the hunt for oil to fuel its rapidly growing economy. But forays into politically unstable areas have exposed Chinese workers to attacks.
The Ogaden National Liberation Front warned last year that it would not tolerate investment in the Ogaden area that also benefited the Ethiopian government.
