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.
Democrat Barack Obama is building widening leads in battlegrounds Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania, in new polls released Wednesday in the trio of states that could be the key to victory on November 4.
The surveys reveal new momentum for the Illinois senator against Republican John McCain, as the rivals dash back to Washington to vote on a 700 billion dollar Wall Street bailout package.
The Quinnipiac University polls suggest Obama won Friday’s presidential debate and that McCain’s vice presidential running mate Sarah Palin is suffering from sliding popularity, after a stunning initial impact on the race.
They also find that voters trust Obama more to handle the financial crisis rocking the US economy, and he seems to be convincing Americans he is ready to be president.
“It is difficult to find a modern competitive presidential race that has swung so dramatically, so quickly and so sharply this late in the campaign,” said Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac polling institute.
The surveys show that in Pennsylvania, Obama leads McCain by a gaping 54 percent to 39 percent after the debate, compared to 49 percent to 43 percent before the debate.
He is up 51 percent to 43 percent in swing state Florida, compared to a 49 to 43 percent lead before Friday’s first of three high-stakes presidential debates.
And in Ohio, Obama is up eight points, 50 percent to 42 percent, after having led by 49 percent to 42 percent before the clash in Mississippi.
The trio of swing states — which have a history of going either Republican or Democrat and swinging presidential elections — are vital stepping stones to the White House.
Nationally, the Pew Research Center gave Obama a seven point lead Wednesday over McCain with 49 to 42 percent.
While a separate Washington Post/ABC national poll found Obama holds a slim lead around the country over McCain, drawing 50 percent support from likely voters against 46 percent for McCain.
With the economy the election’s dominant issue, Obama holds a large lead over McCain among the 51 percent of voters who prioritize economic issues, that survey found.
McCain, Obama and Democratic vice presidential pick Senator Joseph Biden are all due for an intriguing close encounter in the Senate when the vote on the bailout, originally rejected by the House of Representatives, goes ahead late Wednesday.
No candidate has won the presidency since 1960 without securing two of the three battlegrounds of Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania, amid repeated campaign visits from Obama and McCain five weeks from election day.
The surveys showed that more than 84 percent of voters in each state said the debate had not changed their mind — but by margins of 13 to 17 percent, they said Obama did a better job in the clash.
Crucially for the Illinois senator, 15 to 27 percent of prized independent voters in each state said he had won the debate against McCain.
“Senator John McCain has his work cut out for him if he is to win the presidency and there does not appear to be a role model for such a comeback in the last half century,” Brown said.
“Senator Obama clearly won the debate, voters say. Their opinion of Governor Sarah Palin has gone south and the Wall Street meltdown has been a dagger to McCain’s political heart,” he said.
Obama’s advance in Pennsylvania will hearten Democrats of the vote who fear that McCain and Palin could swing the state into their column on election day by wooing blue collar voters.
“Pennsylvania is back in its role as the most Democratic swing state in the 2008 election mainly because voters believe that Senator Obama will do a better job handling the economy,” said Clay Richards, also an assistant director of the Quinnipiac polling institute.
But with 34 days still to go any number of events could still rock the race, such as the impact of the economic crisis, hurricanes Ike and Gustav and the jobless figures on the campaign in recent weeks.
“If the next 34 is like the last 34, we’re in for quite a ride,” said NBC-Wall Street Journal co-pollster Neil Newhouse.
The Quinnipiac polls among likely voters in the three states were conducted in two groups, between September 22 and 26, and September 27 and 29. The maximum margin of error was 3.4 percent.
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.
If you never thought that one person can change the world, after meeting Dr. Mehret Mandefro, you will be convinced otherwise.
Mehret is a public health physician using oral histories to teach about health, a role she describes as an honor and a privilege. “I take it seriously but most of all, its fun to teach. This is the best part about my job and I love it.”
Having left her native land of Ethiopia at just one and a half years old, Mehret grew up in Northern Virginia. Northern Virginia is part of the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area and is home to the largest population of Ethiopians outside of Ethiopia. “We are over 100,000 there now. So, I grew up going to Amharic school at my dad’s church in addition to regular school.”
Mehret describes her childhood as being no different than most immigrants in America.
“My parents were pretty strict about speaking Amharic inside the house and drilling in that I was Ethiopian first.” She cited both her parents as important sources of inspiration. “My mother is the best definition of love that I have. The kind of love that leaves you changed forever, and my father is a constant reminder that there are some things worth fighting for that are much greater than you. Ethiopia is his first love and always will be.”…Read More
A Human Rights Watch report says that at least 10 foreign nationals detained more than a year ago on suspicion of involvement in terrorist activities in Somalia are still being held. The BBC’s Robert Walker investigates their fate.
Salim Awadh is talking to me from inside a cell somewhere in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa.
There are seven other prisoners kept in the same small, dark room, he starts to tell me.
Then he suddenly stops speaking. I can hear frantic whispering in the background. Then he says it is safe to carry on.
“The conditions are really bad: we don’t have enough food, we don’t have enough access to medicine. The cell is wet,” he says.
“We sleep on the floor rather than the sodden mattresses. One of the other prisoners was beaten so badly he’s had his leg broken.”
Salim is able to speak to me because he has bribed a guard and got access to a mobile phone.
For weeks I have been trying to find out information about him and other detainees in what has been called “Africa’s Guantanamo”. It is a story the governments involved do not want to talk about: The first mass rendition of terrorist suspects in Africa.
In January 2007, Ethiopian troops TPLF had taken control of Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, ousting the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC), an Islamist movement which had controlled much of southern Somalia for the previous six months.
Members of the UIC, militia fighters and civilians were all fleeing towards Kenya. Among them were Salim Awadh, a Kenyan, and his Tanzanian wife, Fatma Chande. Both of them were arrested as they crossed the border.
“I was kept in a cell with other women. Then the Kenyan anti-terrorist police questioned me – they asked me why we went to Somalia,” Fatma says.
I meet Fatma in her small two-room house in Moshi, northern Tanzania. She is quietly spoken and her voice falters as she explains what happened next.
“I told them my husband got a job repairing mobile phones in Somalia. But they tried to force me to admit that my husband was a terrorist. They said I had to tell them the truth or they would strangle me.”
Border worries
Kenya’s government – and its Western allies – had long seen Somalia as a haven for terrorists linked to al-Qaeda, including those responsible for 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
With the UIC in retreat, they feared that extremists might try to slip across the border.
In the first weeks of early 2007, news began to filter out that several hundred people – including children – had been arrested trying to enter Kenya.
Al Amin Kimathi, the head of Kenya’s Muslim Human Rights Forum, sent volunteers to police stations across the capital, Nairobi, trying to collect information.
“Some very frustrated senior police officers told us point blank: it’s not our operation, go and ask the Americans, just call the American embassy. We even saw the Americans bring in detainees and take them out of certain police stations in Nairobi,” he said.
Before Kenyan lawyers’ applications for their release could be considered, the authorities took an extraordinary step.
“It was a Saturday, the police called us in the middle of the night. We were taken to the airport. My husband was made to kneel down on the tarmac,” says Fatima.
“We had our hands tied behind our backs with plastic cuffs. There were men, women, children. We were blindfolded. People were crying. The police were telling them to keep quiet.”
Two hours later, Fatma and Salim found themselves on the tarmac of Mogadishu airport.
The Kenyan government sent two other planeloads of prisoners to Somalia. According to the passenger manifests at least 85 prisoners were on board. Most of them were soon picked from Somali prison cells and taken to Ethiopia.
“A week after we arrived we were interrogated by whites – Americans, British, I was interrogated for weeks,” Salim says.
“They had a file which was said to implicate me in the Kenyan bombings. So I was taken away and was placed in isolation for two months – both my hands and legs were shackled.
“The interrogations went on for five months. Always the same questions about the Nairobi bombings.”
Threats
Former detainees have also told the BBC they were questioned by US agents. One said he was beaten by Americans.
Two others said they were threatened and told that if they did not co-operate they could face ill treatment at the hands of Ethiopian guards Woyane Thughs.
All said they believed it was the Americans and not the Ethiopians TPLF controlling their detention and interrogation.
Human rights groups in the region say this was a new form of extraordinary rendition.
The US did not play an overt role in the transportation or detention of suspects as it has in the rendition of other suspected terrorists, but it nevertheless controlled their interrogation and treatment.
Al Amin Kimathi believes Ethiopia was seen as the ideal destination.
“It was the most natural place to take anyone looking for a site to go and torture and to extract confessions. Ethiopia Woyane allows torture of detainees. And that is the modus operandi in renditions.”
In April last year, Ethiopia TPLF acknowledged that it was holding 41 people from 17 countries, describing them as “suspected terrorists”.
Most of the detainees were released after a few months, among them Fatma Chande, apparently as their interrogations were completed or under pressure from their home governments.
The Ethiopian government TPLF acknowledges up to 10 foreign suspects are still being detained.
“I’m not sure whether they have appeared before a court. The investigation continues,” Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Tekede Alemu told the BBC.
“These are people who were engaged in causing harm to the national interest, the security interest… These are not innocent people.”
The minister A Woyane official rejected claims the detainees have been mistreated. He also denied US agents had been allowed to control the interrogations of foreign prisoners.
More than a year and a half after the renditions, the US government still refuses to respond to questions on the alleged US role.
“I have no knowledge of it nor as official policy can I comment on such matters,” US Assistant Secretary of State for Africa Jendayi Frazer told the BBC.
The Kenyan police say no Kenyans were amongs those flown by the Kenyan government to Somalia.
Meanwhile Fatma is still waiting anxiously for news of her husband.
After Salim got access to a mobile phone, he was able to speak to her from his cell for the first time in more than a year.
Now the phone has stopped working, Salim has disappeared once again.
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.
