Somalia

We Confess, Muslims Want to Serve America!

2009-10-19T16:47:00.006-05:00

Gentle Reader, here's my outrage of the month: a Muslim-American civil rights organizaion accused by four congressmen of "conspiring" to place young Muslim Americans as interns in Congressional offices. How embarrassing. How totally ridiculous. Yet I have no doubt that all too many gullible Americans will swallow it hook, line, and sinker. (I can't wait to get my copy of "Muslim Mafia"!)

Dear Capitol Hill: We Confess, Muslims Want to Serve America
by Salam Al-Marayati

This week, four Republican members of Congress (Sue Myrick [R-NC], John Shadegg [R-AZ], Paul Broun [R-GA] and Trent Franks [R-AZ]) called on the U.S. House of Representatives' Sergeant-at-Arms to investigate a national Muslim American civil rights organization, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), for encouraging young Muslim Americans to intern in Congressional offices. The accusation, based on an internal incriminating document, is that CAIR has a secret strategy of trying to plant "spies" into Congressional offices through, that's right, planting spies in congressional internships.

I confess. I've met with Presidents Clinton, Bush and advised them on counter-terrorism strategy. I've met with the FBI Director and discussed what helps partnerships with Muslim communities and what hurts. I've spoken before the Attorney General, the Secretary of Homeland Security and at the Secretary of State's Open Forum. I am guilty of civic engagement.

What's next? Muslims trying to infiltrate the Congress by scheduling lobby days, or by simply meeting with their members of Congress? It's a testament to how far some right-wing conspiracy theories have come that even the normal behavior of any advocacy group can be used as so-called evidence of a dangerous, seditious and destructive "plot".

In a bizarre McCarthy-era like press conference on Monday, the four lawmakers quoted from a yet-to-be released Islamophobic publication entitled, Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That's Conspiring to Islamize America. Published by right-wing conspiracy headquarters WorldNetDaily, the publication is co-authored by Dave Gaubatz, who has repeatedly accused members of Congress and the President of trying to implement sharia (Islamic law) in the United States.

The authors of this book and their four GOP stooges on Capitol Hill have one major characteristic in common with Al-Qaeda -- they all believe in conspiracy theories. They hope to repeat a lie aggressively until it becomes a fact in the public consciousness.

The Republican House leadership must follow in the footsteps of Rep. John Conyers, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and Rep. Loretta Sanchez to condemn this vicious and unfounded attack, and restore some sense of integrity in the U.S. Congress. In a clear statement yesterday, Rep. Conyers said:

"It shouldn't need to be said in 2009, and after the historic election of our first African-American president, but let me remind all my colleagues that patriotic Americans of all races, religions, and beliefs have the right -- and the responsibility -- to participate in our political process, including by volunteering to work in Congressional offices, Numerous Muslim-American interns have served the House ably and they deserve our appreciation and respect, not attacks on their character or patriotism."

What is more astounding is that this group of Islamophobes sent a spy (Chris Gaubatz, the son of Muslim Mafia co-author David Gaubatz) into CAIR's national headquarters to gather documents to accuse Muslims of spying on the Congress. Sounds fitting that conspiracy theorist neocons use the very tactics they accuse their "enemies" of.

But, don't feel sorry for Muslim Americans. We are not the victims in this absurd episode. The real victims are the sorry folks who promote this type of racist un-American propaganda and actually believe in it. They need therapy. They need our forgiveness for making America look so bad.

Follow Salam Al Marayati on Twitter: www.twitter.com/salampacker

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/salam-al-marayati/dear-capitol-hill-we-conf_b_324422.html

"How 'bout them Somali Pirates?"

2008-11-21T15:20:00.014-05:00

A good friend argued with me at lunch today that there was no way the U.S. Navy was going to be effective in suppressing piracy off the coast of Somalia. "Very simply," he said, "the Navy doesn't have enough ships to do the job."

I found that very hard to believe. "You mean to tell me," I demanded, "that with all the ships, subs, and planes in our Navy and all the communications and surveillance capabilities at their disposal, they can't track down and smash these little pests if they had a mind to do so?"

"Yes, exactly. You don't understand," he continued patiently, "what a huge expanse of ocean they have to hide in out there and how difficult it is to spot and track their tiny boats, never mind distinguishing them from the swarm of genuine fishing boats that dot the seas. And don't forget, these pirates aren't after loot they'd have to haul back into port on barges; they're after cash they can carry off in their speedboats.

"Even if the whole U.S. Navy were assigned to chase these guys down—which they won't be, given more critical situations elsewhere in the world—the pirates would still slip through their fingers."

I decided I needed to dig deeper into the problem in order to understand what we were up against. Among a lot of others, I came across an article that ran in the Economist.com some weeks ago that contained a helpful map as well as this sobering observation:

But the pirates’ biggest victim has been Somalia itself. Some 2.6m of the country’s 8m people depend on food aid that comes by sea. French, Danish and Dutch naval ships have escorted ships carrying food from Mombasa to Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital, for the UN’s World Food Programme, but it is a fragile supply line. In May, a Jordanian freighter, the Victoria, carrying sugar for displaced people, disappeared 56km (35 miles) off Mogadishu before being freed a week later. It is hard for the UN to find shipowners willing to take the risk without an armed escort.

You can find the full article here. It's worth reading and thinking about.

A glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel?

2008-11-21T09:12:00.014-05:00

Has Somalia reached bottom?
The big question in the U.S. these days is, When will our country’s economic recession ‘reach bottom’ and begin to turn around? I certainly can’t answer that question, but I have to believe that the fundamental richness of this country ensures that it’s not going to go bankrupt. There may be more hard times ahead as our economy readjusts fully to global realities, but with a brilliant new leadership team about to take office in Washington I’m hopeful we’ll begin to see signs of recovery before very long.

One might ask the same question about Somalia: After sixteen years on a bumpy and painful downward slide, is there a chance that the worst is over and that Somalia may be ready to bounce back?

There are at least a few clear signs of impending change: The Ethiopian occupation appears to be winding down. The hapless transitional government admits it has lost control of any significant part of the country and is on the verge of total collapse. The African Union’s peacekeeping mission seems to have thrown in the towel and is wanly hoping for relief by a more robust international force. And the United States government, along with its European allies, is too taken up with its own economic problems and its Middle East difficulties to think seriously about pursuing its War on Terror any further in Somalia’s deserts (chasing “pirates” off the coast is viewed as a preferable and less costly alternative with much more media appeal).

Granted that not all of these signs of change can be viewed as wholly positive. Indeed, some are likely to be cited as evidence that Somalia is plunging deeper into chaos. Certainly they do not offer any immediate hope for relieving the plight of the throngs of starving refugees that years of conflict have produced. Indeed, among those paying any attention at all these days to Somalia, there will be increasing concern over what to do to be helpful and how to go about doing it, in the face of such anarchy, and no easy answers spring to mind.

But some gloomy economists are predicting a deepening economic depression in America too, in the absence of costly government bail-outs.

I just don't buy that, either for Somalia or the U.S. Maybe it’s nothing but the intoxicating effect I’m feeling over the recent election outcome here, but I'd rather put a more positive spin on these developments and predict they bode well for Somalia’s future and our relations with that country. If the rest of us can find ways to be compassionate and supportive without being meddlesome and directive, perhaps Somalis themselves may at last have an opportunity—perhaps the right word is “obligation”—to take control of their country’s future. It just may be, as the poets say, that “the night is darkest just before dawn.”

"Yes we can!"

2008-11-16T10:02:00.004-05:00

I'll admit it: Barack Obama's election as president has filled me with hope, but it has also left me breathless and uneasy. Am I placing too much hope in this bright young man? Is there any chance that his election might somehow lead to genuine change in the way America views and deals with the rest of the world? After sixteen years of arrogance and bullying from Washington, could an Obama administration actually demonstrate how leadership can be earned through intelligent dialogue, honest cooperation, mutual respect, and serious negotiation with both foes and friends — not by simply dropping bunker-busting bombs on those who disagree with us?

No, that's probably too much to expect. But just posing the question to myself prompts me to resume tending my assorted blogs after months of inattention and (frankly) despair. (Could that possibly be a light I see at the end of the tunnel?)

"Washington's Disastrous Approach to Somalia"

2008-04-12T14:43:00.011-05:00

In a brilliant piece of analysis, one of America's leading experts on Somalia, Professor Michael Weinstein of the University of Purdue, has spotlighted how clumsy the United States has been in conducting its "war on terror" in that country and how damaging it has been to Somalis' own efforts to patch their country back together. Far from achieving its goal of defeating "radical Islamists" by supporting Ethiopia's brutal invasion and occupation of the country, the U.S. has built a fire under radicalism, greatly complicated the task of political reconciliation, and produced a groundswell of anti-American feeling. Meanwhile, worthy U.S. attempts to help alleviate the awful humanitarian crisis gripping the country have been hamstrung by the political chaos and social fragmentation that the invasion and its consequences have caused. The chief losers, of course, are the million or so Somalis who have fled their homes in the face of the fighting and are now huddled hopelessly in refugee camps.

As Prof. Weinstein makes clear, Somalia's plight is one that the "world's only superpower" seems incapable of alleviating, and its meddling has only made matters worse. "Washington has placed itself in the role of a negligent [prison] warden depending on abusive guards," says Professor Weinstein, referring to the Ethiopian troops and the feeble Transitional Government they are propping up. "It is not a pretty picture and it will not change until Somalis are released from captivity."

Washington's Disastrous Approach to Somalia

Michael A. Weinstein
Professor of Political Science, Purdue University

April 1, 2008

As the situation on the ground in Somalia has moved from crisis to what international and non-governmental humanitarian and human-rights agencies are calling a "catastrophe," Washington's policy towards that country has plunged from blunder to disaster.

What is Washington's policy towards Somalia? That question is difficult to answer, because there might not be a policy at all, but an incoherent set of tendencies instead. Disaster is a harsh, if not extreme word; it is used here analytically and with regard for precision. What else do we call the results when an actor with significant influence over events ends up not only failing to achieve its objectives, but with an outcome that approximates its worst-case scenario?

Washington, of course, does have an official policy for Somalia. Stung by criticism that it was solely focussed on anti-terrorism, the U.S. State Department issued a "Fact Sheet" in mid-March — coincident with its placing of the al-Shabaab jihadists on its list of foreign terrorist organizations — in which Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Jendayi Frazer insisted that fighting terrorism was not Washington's sole priority, but was part of a "comprehensive strategy" to reverse radicalization, encourage dialogue between Somalia's contending political forces, and improve governance, rule of law, democracy, human rights, and the country's economy. An essential component of the strategy, she concluded, is to "isolate" those who "refuse dialogue and insist on violence."

If those are, indeed, Washington's aims, rather than anti-terrorism packaged in pious platitudes, there could be no greater distance between aspiration and reality. Radicalization is on the rise in Somalia, with the primarily Islamist armed opposition seizing towns throughout the country for the first time since the Ethiopian occupation began at the end of 2006. There is no "governance" on a national level; power has devolved to regions and localities that are often split by competing factions. There is no functioning court system and Somalia's high court is inoperative. There has been no progress toward democracy; the transitional parliament has not begun work on a constitution that is essential if, as projected, elections are to be held in 2009 — indeed, the parliament has not acted at all since it approved the cabinet list of Somalia's new prime minister, Nur "Adde" Hassan Hussein, prompting its speaker, Adan Madobe, to threaten to resign. Human-rights organizations and journalists document human-rights abuses committed by Ethiopian and government forces on a regular basis.

Somalia's economy is declining, plagued by drought, hyper-inflation, internal displacement, continued impairment of commerce, and violent conflict. Dialogue between the transitional government and its political oppositions has failed to get off the ground, because the oppositions demand that Ethiopian occupation forces withdraw from Somalia before they enter negotiations, and the militant jihadis forswear discussions altogether. Far from being isolated, the militants of al-Shabaab collaborate with the other oppositions militarily against the occupiers, although they have not gained widespread support for their program of an Islamic state based on Shari'a law.

There are a number of possible reasons why such a yawning gap between rhetoric and reality has opened up. Perhaps Washington is serious about its professed goals and dedicated to achieving them, but the situation in Somalia is simply too intractable to allow for success. If so, far from being the world's only "super-power," the United States is powerless to begin to have its way, even in a poor and vulnerable country. Perhaps Washington could do more, but Somalia is low on its list of priorities and it is unwilling to expend the necessary resources. If so, then its goals are simply rhetorical and it has decided to live with its worst-case scenario. Perhaps Washington is cynical and has other goals than the ones that it proclaims officially. If so, what are those goals?

Anti-terrorism stripped out of its comprehensive cocoon is surely one of them.
Or is Washington also eager to protect the interests of its ally in Addis Ababa?
Perhaps, finally, Washington is confused and ambivalent, and has no coherent policy, rendering its action and inaction ineffectual and self-defeating. If so, it is not a credible actor that can be trusted by the other players.

Except for the first possibility — that Washington is doing everything that it could do for Somalia (which was only posed to show its absurdity) — the others are in some measure compatible. Somalia is low on Washington's agenda, given a looming recession at home, panicky financial markets, entanglements in Iraq and Afghanistan, a reported resurgence of al-Qaeda in Pakistan, nuclear issues with Iran and North Korea, the rise of left populism in Latin America and efforts to mediate the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Washington is also probably disingenuous about its "comprehensive" strategy, and is placing its major emphasis on anti-terrorism and is unwilling to discipline Ethiopia, which prefers a divided Somalia to a unified one that would not be its satellite.

Most of all, however, Washington is confused and ambivalent; it does not know what to do with a catastrophe that it has in great part created and for which it refuses to bear any responsibility.

The root of Washington's failure to act constructively in Somalia and, instead, to undermine its own proclaimed interests and the interests of the Somali people is a tension between a focus on anti-terrorism and a supposed commitment to nation building, which encapsulates its other official goals. Curbing terrorism and nurturing stable institutions are not, in principle, contradictory aims, but they have become increasingly so in the particular circumstances of contemporary Somalia.

From the moment that Washington gave its blessings to and assisted the Ethiopian invasion and occupation of Somalia in the name of anti-terrorism, it both excluded itself from being a partner in nation building and insured that it would create the very "terrorist" movement that it was pledged to prevent. That judgment is not made from hindsight, but was expressed by a host of political leaders, journalists, analysts and Somali intellectuals from the outset, including the present writer. It was obvious that using an occupation force from a rival state to prop up a weak and divided transitional government that lacked legitimacy would cause Somalia to fragment politically and would spawn a liberation movement with an Islamic revolutionary component — just as happened in Iraq after the United States invaded and occupied that country.

By backing Addis Ababa, Washington could not play the role of honest broker and has since then simply dithered, allowing a catastrophe to unfold under the watchful eyes of the surveillance aircraft that it constantly flies over Somalia, one of which crashed at the end of March, documenting the practice conclusively. (The plane went down in the Lower Shabelle region, where Ethiopian forces were conducting search operations for "terrorist bases" — they failed to find any.)

A grim scenario of ineptitude and confusion. A brief sketch of Washington's reported actions during March shows a scenario, which — were it not so grim — could pass for a comedy of blunders:

At the beginning of March, U.S. forces fired a missile into a house in the town of Dhobley in the Lower Jubba region targeting one or more "terrorists." According to different reports, three women were killed and/or injured in the attack, along with livestock, but no terrorists were hit. U.S. Defense Department spokesman, Bryan Whitman, announced: "As we have repeatedly said, we will continue to pursue terrorist activities and their operations wherever we may find them." Opposition spokesman Sheikh Mukhtar Robow replied: "Americans bombed the town and hit civilians thinking that they were Islamist hideouts." Even United Nations Secretary-General Ban ki-Moon, who normally follows Washington's lead, criticized the raid, saying that it might lead to an escalation of hostilities.
In mid-March, Washington placed the national-liberation and Islamic revolutionary al-Shabaab movement on its list of foreign terrorist organizations, allowing the U.S. to freeze the assets of any individual or group supporting the jihadists. Analysts agreed that the designation would have no material effect, because al-Shabaab receives little, if any, backing from U.S. citizens; but that — as Steve Bloomfield of the British newspaper The Independent put it — it will "derail any hope of a negotiated solution." Robow responded to the terrorist listing by welcoming it and warned: "We were not terrorists. But now [that] we've been designated, we have been forced to speak out and unite with any Muslims on the list against the United States." Frazer was reduced to saying that many Somalis with a "nationalist agenda" are "not aware of how strong the al-Shabaab links with al-Qaeda are." Her remarks were nuanced by former diplomat and now professor, David Shinn, who characterized al- Shabaab to Voice of America as "the point of the spear," but not the whole insurgency, adding that some of its members have ties to al-Qaeda, but "certainly not all of them." Shinn concluded: "But there's just enough of a connection there ... that I think this was the element that caused the United States to put al-Shabaab on this list."
Towards the end of March, Washington's ambassador to the U.N., Zalmy Khalilzad, announced that it was too early to contemplate sending a U.N. peacekeeping force into Somalia to replace the under-staffed and ill-equipped African Union mission, and to allow for an Ethiopian withdrawal. Rumors flew that Washington was negotiating on peace talks with the political opposition, the Alliance for the Re-Liberation of Somalia, in Nairobi. Rumors also flew that the State Department had sent a team to assess an airstrip in the self-declared Republic of Somaliland for possible military use, and that Frazer was working to persuade African states to recognize Somaliland's independence. Somaliland's president, Dahir Riyale Kahin, was quoted as saying: "If the U.S. wishes to have a presence in Somaliland, we will welcome them and accept them."

All of the events of March betoken ineptitude and confusion. Far from isolating the "terrorists," Washington succeeded in increasing their prestige and damaging its own credibility. If, indeed, Washington is making overtures to Somaliland, following earlier official diplomatic exchanges, it is undermining the transitional institutions, which are based on the principle of a unified post-colonial Somalia, and alienating Somali nationalists. Washington might also be giving false hope to Somaliland, but, then again, it might genuinely be changing its strategy. Without taking sides for or against Somaliland's international recognition, it is clear that Washington's current equivocations are a sign of a dangerous indecisiveness. As for negotiating with the opposition, Washington is unlikely to make any headway as long as it fails to come up with a commitment to Ethiopian withdrawal. A U.S. journalist who – for good reason – must remain anonymous, has told this writer that State Department officials complain that they talk to opposition leaders who make encouraging promises and then fail to follow through. That would only make sense in light of Washington's ambivalent disposition.

It becomes increasingly apparent that Washington's blunder was to bless the Ethiopian occupation and to fail to negotiate seriously with the Islamic Courts movement when it controlled most of south-central Somalia. Disaster in Somalia and for U.S. interests in stabilizing the Horn of Africa proceeds from continuing to back the occupation, which has been brutal and unpopular. If Washington is to salvage anything from this disaster, it must arrange for an Ethiopian withdrawal, whether or not Addis Ababa's forces are replaced by an adequate international security force, and it must stop its own meddling in Somalia's conflicts. Its concentration should be on helping in the provision of humanitarian aid, and it should give Somalis breathing space to work through their incredibly complex web of conflicts.

Are Washington and the Western powers that have fallen into following its lead capable of resolving those conflicts or are they inhibiting conflict resolution by their interference? Can they really contribute to solving the question of Somaliland's status? Do they have a coherent position on what is to become of Puntland? Are they willing to give Nur "Adde" the material and diplomatic support that he needs to achieve the "open reconciliation" that they have insisted that he pursue? Do they have a plan for what should happen if the transitional institutions fail to write a constitution, as will likely be the case, voiding the possibility of elections in 2009? Will they arrange yet another conference to create yet another transitional government? Do they have any power or will to aid in overcoming Somalia's severe regional and local fragmentation? Can they curb al-Shabaab by "isolating" it?

Simply to pose those questions shows how little power the external actors have as long as they treat Somalis as wards of the "international community." Washington has placed itself in the role of a negligent warden depending on abusive guards. It is not a pretty picture and it will not change until Somalis are released from captivity.

In mid-March, Shinn appeared before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where he remarked that in the absence of a "national unity" government in Somalia, an Ethiopian withdrawal "would result in even more chaos in Mogadishu than exists now." Can we be sure of that? How much more "chaos" can there be? If the jihadis are to be "isolated," might that not be more likely to happen if they cannot march under the banner of national liberation? How much worse could the humanitarian catastrophe become if a brutal occupation that has been instrumental in causing it is removed? Somalia has already returned to its pre-Courts condition of devolution, but now it is also under an occupation that has sparked an insurgency with an Islamic revolutionary component; would it really be more chaotic if the occupation was removed?

If Somalis were given some breathing space, they might at least find out the relative strength of the political forces in their fractured society and then they might be able to settle on the structure of a political community or several political communities. It is unlikely that al-Shabaab would come out on top in such a process.

It is also unlikely that external actors will give Somalis breathing space. They are addicted to trying to exert control half-heartedly; they are guilty of gross negligence, especially so the "world's only super-power," which plays the part of the proverbial "gang that can't shoot straight."

Somali Diaspora: "Ethiopian brutality continues, UN and US complicit"

2007-12-26T10:52:00.000-05:00

While many of us are celebrating holidays of peace and good will, the Somali Diaspora Network reminds us that thousands of Somalis are still suffering and dying as a consequence of Ethiopia's US-backed invasion of their country. Its latest press release charges that the world is guilty of ignoring the tragedy and calls upon the international community, including the United Nations, the European Union, the Arab League, the Africa Union, and the United States, to:

Intervene immediately to stop the bloodshed, the displacement of civilians, and further destruction

Put pressure on the Ethiopian government to immediately withdraw all its forces from Somalia without precondition or delay

Facilitate all inclusive dialogue among warring groups and the formation of unity government followed by free and fair elections

Bring to justice those who ordered or implemented the massacre and the forced displacement of civilians

NOTE: To read more about the Somali Diaspora Network, the newly established "Somali Cause" coalition of which it is a part, and the two-day conference in December at which it was formed, click here.

U.N. Unwilling to Condemn Renewed Ethiopian Military Atrocities in Somalia

Fairfax, Virginia, USA, 24 December 2007: Once again, the Ethiopian military and militias loyal to the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) have intensified their campaign of indiscriminate shelling, systematic killings, detainments, and utter destruction resulting in the deaths, injuries, and maiming of many civilians, mainly women and children and renewed forced exodus of Mogadishu civilians.

According to the United Nations, the increased violence of the past weeks has caused the forced exodus of an estimated additional 100,000 civilians, mainly women and children, as such adding another layer of complexity to the alarming humanitarian crises already underway as an estimated over one million internally displaced Somalis are suffering from lack of basic services essential to their survival.

On October 30, 2007, 40 international NGOs have released a joint statement ominously warning against a gathering cloud of humanitarian catastrophe in Somalia urging the international community to respond to this man-made calamity as the Ethiopian forces and militias loyal to the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) callously prevent the delivery of food aid, and bluntly stating that “there is an unfolding humanitarian catastrophe in South Central Somalia”. The United Nations’ Humanitarian Coordinator for Somalia, Eric Laroche, noted trucks carrying relief supplies to southern and central Somalia are often
faced with up to 200 different roadblocks. [Source: VOA 10/26/2007]

Ethiopia’s invasion and occupation of Somalia is a flagrant violation of the provisions of Resolutions 1725 (2006) and 1744 (2007)). Ethiopia also willfully violated the UN Charter, Article 2 (1) that describes the UN as being an institution “based on the principle of sovereign equality of all its members.” Furthermore, Article 2 (7) clarifies that nothing in the UN Charter authorizes intervention in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state.

The brutality of the occupation has been described as the worst atrocity of the Somali civil war: According to The Hague Conventions, Article 23: “It is a war crime to launch an indiscriminate attack affecting the civilian population in the knowledge that such an attack will cause an excessive loss of life or injury to civilians”. Moreover, the Geneva Conventions are part of U.S. law- being ratified by Congress and by the President. Therefore Ethiopian leaders and their Somali counterparts could be found guilty of war crimes under the War Crimes Act of 1996 which carries the death penalty for grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions.

The Ethiopian occupation forces have been committing gross human rights violations, indiscriminate shelling and targeting of civilians, targeted assassinations of those opposing the occupation, and rape thus creating poisonous environment where perpetual war in the Horn is not unfathomable. These gross human rights violations have created the humanitarian tragedy currently unfolding in Somalia. The complacency of the international community at large and the United States and the UN Security Council in particular have resulted in failure to bring this calamity to the forefront, let alone prevent its continuation. A disaster Alex Perry of Time magazine describes as being “on a par, in numbers and acuteness, with Darfur. The U.N. says 1.5 million people need assistance, of which a mere 60,000 are getting it.” [Source: Time Monday, Nov. 12, 2007].

It is within that backdrop that the Somali Diaspora Network (SDN) condemns the global complicity that made it possible for Ethiopia to invade in the first place and the lack of action and outrage from the UN and the larger the international community. We regard this silence tantamount to support of the atrocities committed by the Ethiopia’s occupying force. It is particularly egregious since the United Nations and Unites States provide financial and diplomatic support to the TFG in whose name these atrocities are being committed. SDN calls upon the international community, including the United Nations, the European Union, the Arab League, the Africa Union, and the United States to:
• Intervene immediately to stop the bloodshed, the displacement of civilians, and further destruction
• Put pressure on the Ethiopian government to immediately withdraw all its forces from Somalia without precondition or delay
• Facilitate all inclusive dialogue among warring groups and the formation of unity government followed by free and fair elections
• Bring to justice those who ordered or implemented the massacre and the forced displacement of civilians

ABOUT SOMALI DIASPORA NETWORK (SDN) – SDN is a grass-roots organization committed to advocate on critical policy matters pertaining to Somali-American interest and issues of concern through communication and information sharing, raising public awareness, and educating the public and government officials.

"Americans do not want to know the evil they have committed against the poorest nation on earth." -- Anon.

2007-12-24T20:04:00.000-05:00

Please take the trouble to read the comment posted by "Anonymous" regarding my recent exchange with NYU graduate student Julie W. (carried in the four entries preceding this one). Although "Anonymous" is harshly critical of my government for supporting the Ethiopian invasion and financing Somali clan warlords, I believe his complaints are generally valid and certainly worth pondering.

I also recommend taking a look at the YouTube video"Anonymous" refers to near the end of his/her comment, which he says explains "why America invaded somalia." Although dated, it shows rare footage of Somalis at work in Mogadishu while it was under the control of the United Islamic Courts, with views I had not seen before.

Here's the beginning of "Anonymous's comments." Read the rest by clicking on "Read more!"

Any human being would be shocked to know what america has been up to this year in somalia.

Not only has the united states financed financially and politically the ethiopian invasion of somalia, they have also actively took part in the war.

In one point, they killed 200 nomadic somali's in the somali countryside with powerful AC130 gunships, all this in the name of fighting terror.

The ethiopians are a poorly trained army that are deeply disliked by the somali people.
The ethiopians have batted the capital city with their tanks thereby driving 1.5 million somalis out of the capital city.

Now we have a serious humanitarian crises in somalia, where 1.5 million somalis do not have access to clean water or food or even shelter.

If anyone would like to know what made america do all this, it is because the somali people drove out the hated evil warlords who were the same ones that killed 600, 000 somalis and 18 american marines.
When the somalis got rid of the warlords that setup a new government called the islamic courts union.

There was one problem, america did not like the idea of seeing somalia having an Islamic government even though the government brought 6 months of peace and stability to somalia and chased out the warlord gangsters.

My friend, that is why somalia is not in the media, and that is why the Americans do not want know one to know the evil they have committed against the poorest nation on earth.
But the rest of the world especially the middle east watch on their screens the daily violence that america has created in somalia even though the western media make no coverage of the disaster in somalia.

Here is a video that explains, everything, why America invaded somalia, its a good interesting video, enjoy.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=b7MbCj_iMgw&feature=related

Now in somalia we have a terrible situation, the warlords are back in power but this time there are ethiopians that are raping and killing somalis.
So the hell that the somali people were in has become a greater hell.

I just wish that george bush and key members of he's administration can be taken to court in the future for crimes against humanity if there is any justice in this world.

"Why does Somalia receive less international attention than Darfur?"

2007-12-23T16:45:00.000-05:00

Julie W., a graduate student in Global Affairs at NYU, e-mailed me a set of four thought-provoking questions about Somalia's future. With Julie's consent, I'm posting her questions and my replies in four successive posts. (To read the posts in their proper order, begin here.)

Here is Julie's fourth question:

A UN representative recently said that the current situation in Somalia was the worst humanitarian crisis in Africa. Why do you believe that the humanitarian crisis in Somalia has received so much less international attention than the situation in Darfur?

. . . and my response:

Sad to say, ever since our humiliating retreat in 1993, most Americans have not wanted to hear about Somalia at all. Our purposes in "invading" Somalia in 1992 with a massive show of military strength were far more altruistic than were the Ethiopians' last year, and the results -- at least initially -- were far more positive and humane. But, as we know, after our efforts had saved tens of thousands of Somali lives, things went sour, largely because we Americans undertook to repair the "root causes" of Somalia's problems by force. When Gen. Aideed and others resisted our repair efforts, most Americans reacted -- not unreasonably -- as if we'd had our hands bitten while trying to feed people. Never mind that it was far more complex than that, the result has been that Americans have generally been unsympathetic to humanitarian crises afflicting Somalia ever since.

What's worse, since 9/11, Americans have been led to believe by their government that Somalia, in its perpetual state of anarchy and violence, was an ideal "breeding ground for radical Islam" if not a training camp for al Qaeda suicide bombers. Accordingly, they've registered little surprise that their government has not only condoned but encouraged and supported Ethiopia's invasion of its neighbor under the banner of the "war on terror."

Darfur, meanwhile, has been a poster child for humanitarian intervention, a place where hateful Arab rulers have tormented and brutalized virtuous and impoverished black farmers by unleashing horse-mounted killers called "janjaweed" (as evil-sounding a name as you could possibly think of!) to burn their villages and rape their women. How could good and evil be more clearly delineated? How could we not come to the rescue of the people of Darfur? (To my mind, what's been inexplicable about Darfur is how slow we've been to come to its rescue. Perhaps it's because we're afraid of having our hands bitten once again. . . .)

"When will Ethiopia withdraw its troops from Somalia?"

2007-12-23T16:30:00.000-05:00

Ethiopian troops remain in Somalia and have been engaged in hostilities with insurgents in Mogadishu in recent weeks. One incident, in which Ethiopian troops were dragged through the streets by insurgents, was eerily similar to the “Blackhawk Down” scenario involving U.S. troops. Do you think that Ethiopia now faces the prospect of being drawn into a long-term occupation of Somalia? Do you foresee a scenario under which Ethiopia would withdraw its troops?

. . . and my response:

I'm not sure what you see as "eerily" similar about the two incidents involving barbaric treatment of captured foreign soldiers by angry Somalis. But certainly they share a common theme: a suitable response to similarly barbaric treatment at the hands of foreigners:

• The 1993 incident involving brutalization of U.S. troops in Mogadishu followed on the heels of an even more brutal U.S. gunship TOW-missle attack, aimed at disrupting a meeting of several dozen respected Somali elders who had gathered, we later learned, to discuss dumping the infamous General Mohammed Farah Aideed and suing for peace with the Americans. Scores of men, women, and children were killed in the incident. (See Mark Bowden's version of the attack on "Abdi's House," pp. 72-74 of "Black House Down"; sadly, this incident was omitted from the grossly one-sided movie version of Bowden's book.)

• The 2007 incident that involved dragging captured Ethiopian troops through the streets of Mogadishu likewise occurred in the wake of a callous military attack on unarmed civilians, in this instance indiscriminate bombardment of civilian neighborhoods of the city by the invading forces; and it similarly caused a very considerable death toll and an angry response by families and neighbors of the victims.

I also question whether, or perhaps how, Ethiopia has been "drawn into a long-term occupation" of Somalia. With U.S. encouragement and tactical support, and after extensive preparation, Ethiopia launched its armed invasion of Somalia exactly a year ago (December 20), declaring of course that it had no intention of remaining there longer than was necessary to eradicate the terrorist threat it perceived inside Somalia, i.e., the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC).

Background (probably unneeded): The UIC had seized control of Mogadishu from clan warlords six months earlier, imposing its own shariah-based peace on the capital and winning a substantial popular following as a result. It had also defeated an attempt by those same ousted warlords, newly armed and supported by the United States, to regain control of Mogadishu. And it had subsequently expanded its political control outward from the capital into other areas under warlord control, finally threatening to capture the Transitional Government's provisional capital at Baidoa, located on the principal highway between Mogadishu and the Ethiopian border.

It was down that same highway (the very route Mussolini's army had taken to reach Addis and conquer Ethiopia seventy years earlier) that a major force of Ethiopian troops then poured into Somalia, easily routing the UIC militia, quickly seizing Mogadishu itself, and soon expanding to control most other towns in the area. Twice, its American friends sent helicopter gunships to attack throngs of Somalis fleeing the invaders, ostensibly to prevent "terrorists" from crossing the border into Kenya. Dozens of refugees and nomads were killed in the process.

A year later, a half-million Somalis have fled Mogadishu while the Ethiopian invaders find themselves in a quagmire not unlike ours in Iraq. I strongly doubt their government intends for them to remain in Mogadishu any longer than necessary to neutralize the radical Islamist threat it perceives from that quarter; and like ourselves in Baghdad, they have installed themselves as guarantors of very wobbly government and assumed the task of training and leading a new security force (largely composed of President Abdullahi Yusuf's own rag-tag tribal militia from the north) intended to suppress its opponents. But hundreds of young Somalis have meanwhile responded by organizing and arming a sort of maquis resistance to challenge the invaders and drive them out of the country.

As a consequence, as much as the Ethiopian troops might like to pack up and go home, they now have a tiger by the tail and cannot let loose without a serious loss of dignity. President Clinton swallowed a similar Somalia embarrassment in 1993 by simply declaring our job done, lowering our flag, and withdrawing our forces; that's the only scenario I can imagine under which the Ethiopians might withdraw now.

"Will anything concrete result from the Reconciliation Congress?

2007-12-23T15:45:00.000-05:00

A National Reconciliation Congress was held in Somalia this past August. The Congress produced some ambitious goals in their closing statement, including the drafting of a constitution and eventual free elections. However, a large opposition contingent did not participate in the Congress, and instead held a meeting in Eritrea under the banner of the Alliance for the Liberation of Somalia (ALS). Given the absence of much of the opposition, do you believe that anything concrete will actually result from the National Reconciliation Congress?

. . . and my response:

It is very difficult to achieve "reconciliation," national or otherwise, when one of the parties to the dispute is absent or deliberately excluded. This is what happened very recently at the US-sponsored Arab-Israeli peace conference in Baltimore, where some fifty nations and groups joined in congratulating each other for their high-mindedness, but Hamas, the one group whose cooperation is essential to the peace process, was excluded. Why bother convening such a useless and costly event, unless its real purpose is merely to impress the U.S. President's domestic audience?

The National Reconciliation Congress in Somalia last August was no different. The only groups and parties invited to attend were those known for their sympathies toward the TFG, transitional president Abdullahi Yusuf, and his Ethiopian patrons, and they naturally found much cause for hopeful celebration and fulsome pledges of cooperation. Systematically excluded, however, were those who were not prepared to give tacit welcome the Ethiopian invaders and condone their violent repression of opposition to the TFG. Yet without the active participation of the latter, I see no chance that anything meaningful will result, any more than the Baltimore spectacle will move Israel and Palestine any closer to peace. Again, why bother, unless the event's real purpose is to persuade foreigners that it's safe to return to Somalia?

No, I don't believe anything concrete will actually result from this "congress" any more than has resulted from the previous fourteen (if my counting is correct) Somalia gatherings that outsiders have sponsored since 1991. One of these days, though, perhaps many years from now, the Somalis will get it together and organize their own reconciliation conference without outside tutoring and management. That's when we can look for some significant "concrete results."

Who might broker the conflict in Somalia?

2007-12-23T14:27:00.000-05:00

Julie W., a graduate student in Global Affairs at New York University researching conflict assessment for her Master's Degree in Global Affairs, stumbled onto this blog three weeks ago and e-mailed me a set of four thought-provoking questions about Somalia's future (she has clearly done her homework!). Julie gave me permission to post her questions and my replies, which I'll do in this and three successive posts. If other readers wish to comment, I hope they'll do so, and I'm sure Julie will welcome them as well.

Here's Julie's first question:

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in early November that he felt that deploying a UN peacekeeping mission to Somalia was not a viable option because of the current security situation. He suggested that the small African Union force being deployed was the most that could be expected in the near term. Given that, what role do you think that the international community could legitimately play in helping to resolve the conflict in South-Central Somalia, given that most of the major international and regional players seem to have already taken sides, either with the Transitional Federal Government or with the opposition? Is there anyone that the parties to the conflict would view as an honest broker?

. . . and my response:

Although the Secretary General's view of Somalia is discouraging, it's hardly surprising. Right now, Ban Ki-moon's attention is focused on and the task of persuading the Sudanese government to allow in the 20,000-person force the Security Council has authorized to reinforce the African Union's small contingent there. Besides, he surely recognizes that any U.N. peacekeeping role in Somalia would have to be authorized by the Security Council and therefore blessed by the US government, whose support for the Ethiopian invaders has been disruptive rather than peaceable.

As for the African Union, Burundi was supposed to send a contingent to reinforce the luckless 6,000 troops sent in by Uganda some six months ago, but as far as I'm aware, hasn't gotten around to doing so yet. Bujumbura has no doubt noted the difficulty Uganda's forces have had and the number of losses they've suffered in trying to pacify the situation. I seriously doubt that any other AU state (or anyone else, for that matter) will be willing to take on the task either, so long as there is no sign of a peace to keep in Somalia.

Brokering a truce is another matter. As you suggest, it's not easy to find a potential broker who isn't already identified as biased in favor of one side or the other. Much earlier on, the U.S. might have been -- and should have been -- helpful in identifying such a broker and promoting serious negotiations between (or among) the parties; but that opportunity is long since past, wiped away by Washington's incredibly foolish support for the Ethiopian invaders. For their part, the Europeans are viewed with suspicion by the Islamists because of their early support for the Transitional Federal Government, while the Arab governments are mostly suspected by the Ethiopians of supporting and arming the "radicals" in both Somalia and Eritrea.

If I were in a position to do so, I'd look to the Scandinavians -- especially the Norwegians -- who from early on have played a remarkably even-handed role behind the scenes, especially in channeling badly needed humanitarian aid to the thousands of victims of this foolish conflict. They have managed somehow to stay very well-informed of the tortured developments in this tangled situation, generally without raising hackles or making enemies of any of the parties. (BTW, if you're not already familiar with "Africa News Update," an excellent current events newsletter put out by the Norwegian Council for Africa "as a counterweight to traditional western news agencies" [their quote], you might check it out at http://www.afrika.no/newsletter . I regard it as an excellent source.)

Somalia's political swords are drawn

2007-10-20T14:13:00.000-05:00

By Daud Aweis
BBC News, Nairobi

As if Somalis do not have enough battles to contend with, their two leading politicians, President Abdullahi Yusuf and Prime Minister Ali Mohammed Ghedi, have fallen out.

And as parliament marshals to take stock of the achievements of the two men since they took office three years ago, it looks likely that one will get their marching orders.

The formation of the interim government had been a time of hope; President Yusuf declared himself a man of peace.

Yet violence once again reigns in the capital, Mogadishu, following the December ousting of Islamists, who had ruled most of Somalia for six months last year, by Ethiopian-backed government troops.

Insurgent attacks proliferate against Ethiopian and government targets. Even the presence of African Union peacekeepers is failing to reassure the city's residents, who continue to flee in their thousands.

The United Nations says in September alone 24,000 people left. In the same month some 300 people were admitted to hospital with serious gunshot wounds.

Donor fatigue

Neither Mr Yusuf nor Mr Ghedi has been spared the onslaught.

Thousands have been fleeing violence in Mogadishu

On a number of occasions Villa Somali, the president's residence has come under attack, as has the hotel hosting the prime minister.

Some argue that the current leaders are hardly better than the warlords whose feuds fed the city's violent disorder over the past 16 years.

Although the transitional government has the support of the UN and Western governments like the US, it has failed to win popular support on the ground.

There is also a growing fatigue, some foreign diplomats say, about picking up the tab for Somalia, in terms of government expenses, with no tangible returns.

Hence the clamouring call for a change of guard - and Mr Ghedi looks most likely for the chop.

He is seen as a political novice, installed as prime minister by the president with Ethiopian backing, who is now a stumbling block to progress.

While analysts complain that the cabinet it is made up of sycophants with little commitment to effect real change.

Fall guy

There has also been disappointment on the reconciliation front: the opposition - an alliance now based in Eritrea, which includes moderates of the Union of Islamic Courts - boycotted a much-touted reconciliation conference.

Mr Yusuf is under increasing pressure from foreign donors

Instead the event turned into a cosy gathering of government supporters.

Without the opposition on board, analysts say there can be little chance for future stability.

Not prepared to be the fall guy, the president has garnered the support of more than 20 ministers and a large number of the 275 MPs who are calling for a parliamentary vote of no confidence in Mr Ghedi's administration.

The prime minister is not taking this lying down and has forged an alliance with the Hawiye, a power clan which has been supporting the insurgency and long controlled Mogadishu where Mr Yusuf has always been unpopular.

The country is braced for a political duel.

But should Mr Ghedi get the boot, it may not be to the president's gain as it will renew his rivalry with the Hawiye who want him and his Ethiopian allies out of Mogadishu.

Mr Yusuf, under pressure from donors, also needs another favour from parliament: he must convince MPs to change the Somali Transitional Charter to co-opt non-politicians into cabinet.

Given that most Somali technocrats have aligned themselves with the opposition, this means this too could compromise what grip Abdullahi Yusuf still has on the reins of Somali politics.

War on Terror? or Genocide?

2007-09-15T18:09:00.000-05:00

I find it awfully difficult to understand why the US government, and Assistant Secretary of State for Africa Jendayi Frazer in particular, do not see the contradiction in excusing the Ethiopian government for civilian casualties "because that's difficult [to avoid] in dealing with an insurgency" while labeling similar practices by the Sudanese government in Darfur as genocide. People in the region must surely wonder at our double standard.

Refugees claim mass killings in Ethiopia
By Shashank Bengali
MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS

The Ethiopian government is starving and killing its own people in the remote eastern Ogaden region, according to refugees, who describe a terrifying four-month crackdown in which security forces have sealed off villages, torched homes and businesses, commandeered food and water sources, and beaten, raped or executed anyone who resists.

Hundreds of civilians already might have been killed in the crackdown on a separatist movement known as the Ogaden National Liberation Front, according to interviews with dozens of Ogadenis who have gathered in a steadily growing refugee camp in this steamy port city 300 miles from the Ethiopian border. . . .

(Last week, after visiting one town in the Ogaden, Assistant Secretary of State Jendayi Frazer condemned the rebels and said reports of military atrocities were unsubstantiated. "We urge any and every government to respect human rights and to try and avoid civilian casualties," Frazer said, "but that's difficult in dealing with an insurgency.")

"They strangled my wife with a rope," said Ahmed Mohammed Abdi, a 35-year-old farmer from Degehabur province, who came home one day this month to see his wife's body lying by the door, his 1-month-old son still suckling at her breast. That night, he fled into the bush and began a seven-day trek to the relative safety of northern Somalia.

"If you come and try to identify the dead body, the soldiers will beat you also," said the wiry, wide-eyed Abdi. "I was afraid to be killed, so I ran away."

A top aide to Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi rejected the allegations. The government has barred reporters and international relief groups from most of the region, a vast desert that stretches from the central Ethiopian highlands to the border with Somalia.

In July, Ethiopia expelled the Geneva-based International Committee of the Red Cross from the Ogaden, accusing its workers of aiding the rebels. Last week, the aid agency Doctors Without Borders said it also had been denied access, and it warned of a major humanitarian crisis.

Some aid workers worry that the Ogaden could become a second Darfur, referring to the Sudanese government crackdown on insurgents in that country's Darfur region, which the United States has labeled genocide.

In this instance, the United States has come out in support of Ethiopia, one of its most important African allies in the war on terrorism. The United States has helped train Ethiopia's military -- one of the largest and best equipped in Africa -- and backed its recent invasion of Somalia to topple a fundamentalist Islamic regime there.

Last week, after visiting one town in the Ogaden, Assistant Secretary of State Jendayi Frazer condemned the rebels and said reports of military atrocities were unsubstantiated. "We urge any and every government to respect human rights and to try and avoid civilian casualties," Frazer said, "but that's difficult in dealing with an insurgency."

The accounts given by dozens of refugees in Bossasso this week paint a grim picture: Ethiopian forces burning or blockading scores of towns and villages in a strategy seemingly aimed at starving the population, which widely supports the insurgency. Since June, soldiers have confiscated food and medicine from shops, stolen camels and livestock and blocked people from using water wells, refugees said. Few commercial trucks have been allowed in, and relief workers say that food and humanitarian aid also has been stopped for most of the summer.

The people, mainly ethnic Somali nomads and farmers, are surviving on the meat and milk of their remaining goats. "They burned down my house," said Fatima Abdi Mohammed, a 40-year-old mother of six from a village near the eastern town of Warder. When she tried to protest, soldiers beat her with the handles of daggers, she said. "There is no water, no food, no health services. If people leave to fetch water with camels, they are killed or beaten." Many refugees said women in their villages had been raped.

Khadar Sherif Ahmed, 22, a villager from Degehabur, said he had watched security forces storm a mosque and fatally stab five people -- the oldest an 80-year-old man, the youngest a child of 8.

Bereket Simon, a senior aide to Prime Minister Zenawi, denied that soldiers were abusing or killing civilians. "We are singling out the terrorists. We know how to deal with insurgents," he said. "This army is well trained, and they know their mission." Earlier this month, Ethiopian forces escorted a U.N. fact-finding mission through parts of the Ogaden, but the team wasn't allowed to visit areas that refugees described as the worst affected.

Ethiopian officials accuse the separatist movement of fighting Ethiopian troops in Somalia and of receiving weapons and funding from archenemy Eritrea. The movement grew out of decades of neglect by successive governments in Addis Ababa, which left the region the least-developed part of one of the world's least-developed nations. Land-line and mobile phone networks barely function; walkie-talkies are the most reliable form of communication.

Roughly 1,000 refugees have made it to Bossasso, a port on the Gulf of Aden several hundred miles from the heart of the Ogaden, and there are new arrivals nearly every day. The U.N. refugee agency doesn't know how many Ogadenis have fled in recent months, although it thinks that several hundred are in Somaliland and neighboring Djibouti. "There hasn't been a refugee flood," said Alexander Tyler of the Somalia office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. "That could be a reflection of the control that Ethiopia still has over the area."

Escaping bombs in Mogadishu

2007-09-11T10:59:00.000-05:00

Journalists in Somalia face more danger than ever before, yet they persist in struggling to get their story out. Here's some insight into what they go through — and why.

Body of Somali journalist
Ali Iman Sharmarke

By Sahal Abdulle
MOGADISHU
First Published 2007-09-11, Last Updated 2007-09-11 12:24:48

I am in a car full of journalists driving from the funeral of a colleague murdered hours earlier in Mogadishu for doing his job. We don't get far.

An explosion throws our vehicle up and fills it with excruciating heat. Black smoke billows about us. I can feel the pressure rushing up inside my clothes, my neck splits open.

Climbing from the smoking wreck, blood spits through the fingers I clamp to my throat.

It was a remotely detonated bomb. Death is often random in Mogadishu, but in this case we were the target.

Journalist, friend, and founder of local media house HornAfrik, Ali Iman Sharmarke, lies dead beside the wreckage.

Amid the chaos and pain, I scan the crowd, looking for a doctor to help, or maybe the killer.

Somalia has become one of the most dangerous places on earth to be a journalist. I spent the last year there, staying in my family house, during some of the worst violence to hit Mogadishu in the last two decades.

I saw countless burned bodies in hollowed-out houses, the corpses of 90-year-olds and infants ripped to pieces. I watched colleagues die trying to get the Somali story out to a world already jaded by wars in Iraq, Darfur and Afghanistan.

Riven by conflict since the 1991 ouster of a military dictator left Somalia in anarchy, Mogadishu is wracked by an Islamist-led insurgency against the government and its Ethiopian military allies.

My colleagues and I in Somalia often talked about why we did the job. Some of us had left lives and families in the West. Mine was in Canada.

Ali and I asked each other that question many times. He too had a Canadian passport. Ali believed until the end that he was giving Somalis a voice and, like me, kept coming back.

MOGADISHU'S 'CONSTANT GARDENER'

We all had our own way of coping. A motley crew of reporters used to hide out at my Mogadishu home. They teased me about the hours I spent every day with my eyes closed, blocking everything out, listening to John Coltrane.

When the violence woke us before dawn, I tended to my garden. I planted 72 new species this year. The Australian at head office in Nairobi called me The Constant Gardener.

I once forced a reluctant taxi driver to help me save a tortoise. It was caught in the crossfire on a city street. I adopted him. You need to protect something amid such danger.

When I told my 11-year-old son, Liban, about the plants and the tortoise and his homeland, he sent me a text message: "Are you sure these bombs aren't going to your head, Dad?"

Swaying by the wreck in Mogadishu on Aug 11, sure that I've lost my left eye, that I am bleeding to death, that whoever detonated the bomb is near, a local man comes to our rescue.

The man recognises Ali, saying he would be homeless today had the journalist not helped him in hard times.

We race in his car towards Madina hospital, where my parents brought me in my childhood to see an Italian doctor.

The driver speeds through the city and I tell him I don't want to die in an accident on the way to hospital.

I had made myself a favourite of doctors and patients at the hospital this year, often berating journalists for intrusive behaviour: "One day you'll need these doctors to sew you up!"

Now that I need their help, the overworked doctors treat me with the same painstaking care as so many thousands of others I had seen wounded and wheeled through to the emergency room.

I'm with my family in Canada now. I don't know what I'll do -- if I'll go back.

Journalists in Somalia are in more danger than ever before, but if we all leave, there'll be no one to tell the story.

Two independent Somali journalists murdered; Mogadishu radio station shut down

2007-08-11T15:20:00.000-05:00


By VOA News 11 August 2007

Two Somali broadcast journalists were killed just hours apart Saturday in Mogadishu.

Ali Iman Sharmarke, head of the HornAfrik media company, was killed by a roadside bomb as he was returning from the funeral of his employee, Mahad Ahmed Elmi, who had been shot to death earlier in the day.

Another journalist riding in Sharmarke's car was wounded in the bombing.

Elmi, who had a popular daily radio program, was often critical of the violence in Somalia. He was a manager of the Capital Voice radio station.

Somalia's transitional government temporarily shut down another radio station Friday. In an Internet posting, the station said it is closing after police arrested nine staff members, including the acting head of the station.

The radio station said the Ethiopian Embassy recently threatened to close the station.

Ethiopia has several thousand troops in Somalia to protect the fragile government.

In a separate incident Friday night, four government officials were killed in the capital.

The Islamic Courts Union took control of the capital last year before Ethiopian troops helped government forces oust the Islamists.

The government has battled an insurgency in Mogadishu since January, shortly after it seized control of the city.

The chaos in Somalia started in 1991 when warlords overthrew dictator Mohammed Siad Barre. The U.N. helped form a government in 2004, but it has not been able to restore peace.

Some information for this report was provided by AFP and AP.

U.S. readying new air strikes in Puntland?

2007-06-13T14:53:00.000-05:00

No sooner do I get back to my Somalia blog after a month's absence than I find my government preparing to send attack aircraft into northern Somalia in supposed pursuit of terrorists seeking America's destruction in the desert hills of Puntland. This after having shelled the same area from warships off the Somali coast two weeks earlier, ostensibly to knock off the same al Qaeda-linked terrorists reported to be hiding there. Obviously the earlier attack was unsuccessful, but one wonders how much collateral killing and destruction resulted then—and how much more can be expected this time.

Why is it I find it difficult to believe that these U.S. attacks in Puntland are unrelated to the political interests of Interim President Abdullahi Yusuf, who hails from that very region of the country and who has for years—in his capacity as regional warlord—been engaged in a bitter power contest there with certain political opponents with ties to the Islamic Courts movement?

Is the U.S. military, under the fraying banner of the War on Terror, again proving its inability to learn from experience, either in Somalia or Iraq?
In what way does it serve American interests to become entangled, yet once more, in local clan rivalries and religious disputes that we don't understand and can't possibly resolve?

As my friend Sadia has remarked a propos of these air attacks, "Our president asked, 'Why do they hate us?' I think I am figuring it out."

AFP - Tuesday, June 12 08:08 pm

MOGADISHU (AFP) - US warplanes are overflying the northern Somali region of Puntland in preparation for air-strikes against suspected Al-Qaeda fugitives, more than a week after US warships shelled the area, officials said Tuesday.

The semi-autonomous regional government had authorised the overflights to pursue Al-Qaeda members believed to be hiding in the moutainous area, Puntland's security minister Ibrahim Artan Ismail told reporters. . . .

"We know that American warplanes are overflying Puntland territory. This air surveillance is part of an agreement reached between Puntland authorities and the Americans," Islamil told a news conference in northern Somali town of Bosasso.

"The warplanes are looking for Al-Qaeda hideouts and when they get them, they will bomb them," he said, adding that the air operation covers areas where intelligence shows Al-Qaeda elements are hiding.

Residents told Somali media that US planes have been overfying the area.

Ismail asked residents of the inland mountanious areas and the hilly shoreline "not to worry about planes flying over them."

A US navy destroyer shelled the coast on June 2, killing at least 12 Islamist fighters, including foreigners, who were believed to be allied to extremist groups, Puntland officials said.

CNN reported that the destroyer was targeting a suspected Al-Qaeda operative believed to have been involved in the 1998 attacks on US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 224 people.

Earlier this year, a US plane bombed positions in southern Somalia after Ethiopia-backed Somali government forces ousted a powerful Islamist movement from the country's southern and central regions. Local elders said more than 100 civilians were killed.

The targets were suspected Al-Qaeda operatives blamed both for the 1998 US embassy bombings and the 2002 suicide attack on an Israeli-owned hotel in the Kenyan port of Mombasa that killed 15 people.

Among the so-called "high value" Al-Qaeda militants believed to be in Somalia are Fazul Abdullah Mohammed from the Comoros, Kenyan Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan and Sudanese national Abu Taha al-Sudani, an arms expert believed to be close to Osama bin Laden.

Others are Sheikh Dahir Aweys, the hardline cleric heading Somalia's Islamic Courts Union, and Adan Hashi Ayro, the commander of the Islamists' militia wing, the Shabaab.

A US force is based in Djibouti and patrols the Indian Ocean and the Gulf of Aden as part of the US-led "war on terror".

US intelligence says Al-Qaeda has stepped up operations in Somalia, a nation of about 10 million people wracked by lawlessness since the 1991 ouster of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre.

Somalia's Puntland and neighbouring Somaliland regions have declared a form of autonomy and have enjoyed relative stability compared to Somalia proper, which has been wracked by lawlessness since 1991.

Somalia loses a friend in Anthony Mitchell

2007-05-12T07:23:00.000-05:00

Associated Press reporter Anthony Mitchell, who was killed with 113 others in a tragic Kenya Airways crash May 5, was one of a handful of Western journalists giving serious and balanced attention to recent developments in Somalia. Mitchell's reporting was notable for its focus on the impact America's so-called "War on Terror" was having on innocent Somalis and Somali-Americans caught in the crossfire.
It was Mr. Mitchell who brought to light U.S. collaboration with Somalia's neighbors Ethiopia and Kenya in capturing suspected "terrorists" and detaining them for interrogation at secret locations in Addis Ababa and elsewhere in the region. (Click here to read his revealing report posted one month ago on this blog.)

Amy Goodman, host of the radio news program Democracy Now!, captured the importance of Mr. Mitchell's reporting in a tribute entitled "A Shining Light Goes Out in Africa." "The world has lost another journalist," she said, "one who was taking the necessary risks to get at the heart of the complex and often ignored story of Africa." She continued:

Mitchell's exposé detailed the fate of some of the hundreds of thousands of refugees. They were fleeing war, but to the United States they were possible al-Qaida operatives who had found a safe haven in Somalia. According to Mitchell, dozens of refugees were "transferred secretly and illegally in recent months from Kenya and Somalia to Ethiopia, where they are kept without charge or access to lawyers and families."

Be sure to read Ms. Goodman's piece in its entirety, either by clicking on "Read More" below or following this link to her ZNet website.

A Shining Light Goes Out in Africa
by Amy Goodman
May 10, 2007

On Saturday, May 5, Anthony Mitchell died in the crash of Kenyan Airways Flight 507, which killed all 114 people on board. Based in Nairobi, he was an Associated Press reporter who had recently broken a story on secret prisons in Ethiopia and the U.S. involvement in the detention and interrogation of prisoners there. The world has lost another journalist, one who was taking the necessary risks to get at the heart of the complex and often ignored story of Africa.

Most Americans know of Somalia as the setting for the feature film "Black Hawk Down." This film depicted the failed 1993 U.S. military assault on Mogadishu. Eighteen U.S. soldiers died. Less well known is that more than 1,000 Somalis also were killed. Somalia, which had been mostly ignored by the U.S. media, was briefly in the news as the U.S.-backed Ethiopian military overthrew the Islamic Courts Union, which had been controlling most of Somalia.

Mitchell's exposé detailed the fate of some of the hundreds of thousands of refugees. They were fleeing war, but to the United States they were possible al-Qaida operatives who had found a safe haven in Somalia. According to Mitchell, dozens of refugees were "transferred secretly and illegally in recent months from Kenya and Somalia to Ethiopia, where they are kept without charge or access to lawyers and families."

In his groundbreaking report, Mitchell wrote, "CIA and FBI agents hunting for al-Qaida militants in the Horn of Africa have been interrogating terrorism suspects from 19 countries held at secret prisons in Ethiopia, which is notorious for torture and abuse."

The U.S. State Department documented Ethiopia's use of torture, and the FBI admitted to Mitchell that it was interrogating prisoners there.

Several prisoners have since been released, including 17-year-old Safia Benaouda, a Swedish citizen. She was the first to report that uniformed U.S. military personnel arrested her and directed the Kenyan soldiers who took her captive.

Amir Mohamed Meshal is also being held there. The 24-year-old U.S. citizen is from Tinton Falls, N.J. His family's lawyer, Jonathan Hafetz of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, told me: "The U.S. admits that the FBI has interrogated him. The Red Cross and family have been denied access. We can't get a lawyer to see him because we don't know where he's being held. It has been over two months, with no charge. We are calling for congressional hearings."

Salim Lone, a columnist with the Daily Nation in Kenya, knows about terrorism. He was the U.N. spokesman in Iraq when the U.N. compound there was bombed in 2003. After the U.S. launched airstrikes against Somalia last January, Lone told me, "The world does want to help the U.S. end terror, but the way the U.S. repeatedly is doing it, from Iraq and Afghanistan to now in Somalia, this will increase the amount of terrorism that exists in the world."

Make no mistake about it, the Horn of Africa is in the cross hairs of the United States. There is oil in Sudan, Somalia and Ethiopia. The New York Times reported that after the U.S.-backed Ethiopian invasion of Somalia, the U.S. allowed Ethiopia to buy arms from North Korea even though the U.S. had just won tough U.N. sanctions against North Korea.

The Pentagon recently announced the formation of Africom, the "new unified, combatant command" for Africa. Columnist Salim Lone's response? "It's the last thing Africa needs. ... It's going to militarize Africa; it's going to inflame conflict. There is so much anger against the United States, especially if it's in the Horn of Africa, which is primarily Muslim."

Marc Lacey covered Africa for The New York Times from 2001 to 2006: "Africa correspondents spend a lot of time in the air, often on old planes. I think crashes are in the back of every reporter's mind. Anthony Mitchell was a fearless reporter. He understood the complexity of the continent and cared."

Our exchange with Africa must involve more than oil, guns and secret prisons. Once people know, they care. Shining a light, journalists provide understanding. We need more coverage of Africa, from African journalists and from reporters like Anthony Mitchell.

Amy Goodman is the host of the nationally syndicated radio news program, Democracy Now!

Amy Goodman Gets It Right!

2007-04-27T19:26:00.000-05:00

Mainline media in the U.S. have practically blacked out news of the tragedy unfolding in Somalia, while the State Department assures us that nothing dramatic is going on there. But Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! has slashed through the smokescreen to give us an authentic and altogether chilling account of the tragedy unfolding in Somalia and of the hurtful role being played by the Bush administration, which continues to support Ethiopia's lawless invasion and brutal occupation of the country in the name of combatting international terrorism and so-called "radical Islam."

In piecing together her devastating picture of what's happening, Ms. Goodman struck gold when she discovered Kenyan journalist Salim Lone, one of the few in the media who seem to understand what's really going on there, and why. Her detailed interview with Lone deserves careful reading in its entirety, as does her clip of Scott McClellan's clumsy justification of U.S. complicity in the widespread violation of human rights lately noted in the European media. Read the full text by clicking on the title line above. Better yet, click here and go straight to the full video of the program.

Democracy Now! deserves our deepest thanks for bringing the story of the Somali tragedy to broader public awareness. Some choice excerpts from the broadcast follow:

In Somali, fierce clashes in Mogadishu are being described as some of the heaviest fighting in the city's history. Some 329 people have been killed over the past ten days. This comes just three weeks after another series of battles claimed at least 1,000 lives. The United Nations says more people - over 350,000 - have been displaced in Somalia in the past three months than anywhere else in the world. [includes rush transcript] And here is the rest of it.

IRIN film on Somalia you MUST see!

2007-04-17T10:25:00.000-05:00

This just in from Bashir — a film you absolutely must see. Click here . . . but trust me, it will break your heart!

I hope you can watch this UN documentary by Lucy Hannah on Somalia. It is from December 2006, just before the "official" Ethiopian invasion, and it frames the Somali situation before the invasion. [It's] a sad juxtaposition to the current state of affairs. It is only 18 minutes long but it will bring tears to your eyes.

Bashir

http://newsite.irinnews.org/audiofiles/19122006.ram

I. M. Lewis: "TFG and Ethiopian war crimes no surprise."

2007-04-17T07:55:00.000-05:00

"Much more surprising," says Professor Lewis, the distinguished Emeritus professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics, "is that European ministers and officials who have supported them may also be implicated [in these crimes]." His insightful comments, backed by a lifetime's study of Somalia and deep affection for its people, deserve everyone's thoughtful attention.

Ethiopia's Invasion of Somalia
by I.M. Lewis
Monday, April 16, 2007

Reports that the forces of 'transitional president' Abdillahi Yusuf and his Ethiopian allies have committed war crimes against civilians in the course of trying to subdue the citizens of Mogadishu is no surprise. Much more surprising, and morally satisfying, is the news that the European ministers and officials, who have so vociferously and uncritically supported Abdillahi in his bid to represent himself as Somali President, may also be implicated in these charges.

Whatever the judicial position, the European Union is certainly morally guilty of doing its utmost to prop up the essentially otiose transitional federal government, whose only significant political action since its formation has been to get the Ethiopians to try to force their authority on Somalia. What is particularly astonishing, and in my view inexcusable, is the imperialistic behaviour of the European politicians and bureaucrats in completely ignoring Somali public opinion and its overwhelming rejection of Col. Abdillahi and his followers.

There are many causal strands in the present conflagration of violence in Mogadishu, but the most obvious and the most regrettable is the external recognition that Abdillahi has been given by people who clearly have closed their minds to his lack of support within Somalia. One could say that it is only ignorance, but I am afraid that it is worse than that, it is willful ignorance on the part of those whose democratic values seem not to be applied to the Horn of Africa.

There is certainly no lack of ignorance within Somalia on how Abdillahi was appointed transitional president with massive Ethiopian support and how, with Ethiopian prompting, he chose as prime minister their candidate, a connection of Prime Minister Meles himself. These links to Addis Ababa underlie the Ethiopian invasion. Another obvious link is, of course, the loosely organised Islamic Courts whose unwisely bellicose threats to Ethiopia, were provoked by Abdillahi's reliance on the Ethiopians.

Thus, in Somali ears the uninformed chorus of EU approval appeared to embrace the supporting role of the Ethiopians and to attack the Islamists. It only remained for the Americans (for whom the Ethiopians acted locally) to enter the fray, inevitably against the Islamic Courts, a tiny minority of whose leaders were actually extremists. . . .

The Americans, of course, are equally ignorant of the really amazing achievements of the Islamists' brief months in power in southern Somalia. The Courts, with their mostly humble and poorly educated local leaders, did more to restore order and social progress there than the US has done in Iraq in four years. Nevertheless, the suspected connexions of a minority of the Courts' leaders played into the hands of Abdillahi who, not for the first time, portrayed his enemies as Muslim terrorists.

[Abdillahi] still does this, of course, and fails to distinguish those who actually fit the description and those who are simply local citizens who consider that he has no legitimacy. As a former separatist guerrilla leader, like his Ethiopian friend Meles, he might be expected to easily recognise birds of the same feather. However, he protests suspiciously loudly and in his claims to be fighting Islamist terrorists includes in the same rubric non-Islamist tribal militias representing the ordinary citizens of Mogadishu. After the terrible atrocities which have been committed in his name these local people will never forgive him.

Abdillahi thus has no chance of ever ruling Mogadishu—except under the kind of dictatorial oppression that his ignominious predecessor General Mohamed Siyad Barre practised with American and Italian support. Is this what the European Union wants? God knows what the Americans might want: the obscene results of their imperialist adventures in other parts of the Islamic world give little cause for optimism

I.M. Lewis

WashPost: North Koreans Armed Ethiopians for Invasion of Somalia; U.S. Assented

2007-04-13T16:10:00.000-05:00

More week-old news but weighty in its consequences. Why is no one pressing the administration for an explanation of its on-again, off-again position on U.N. Security Council arms sanctions? Are those sanctions only to be enforced when they're convenient for Washington?

North Koreans Arm Ethiopians as U.S. Assents

By MICHAEL R. GORDON and MARK MAZZETTI
WASHINGTON, April 7 — Three months after the United States successfully pressed the United Nations to impose strict sanctions on North Korea because of the country's nuclear test, Bush administration officials allowed Ethiopia to complete a secret arms purchase from the North, in what appears to be a violation of the restrictions, according to senior American officials.

The United States allowed the arms delivery to go through in January in part because Ethiopia was in the midst of a military offensive against Islamic militias inside Somalia, a campaign that aided the American policy of combating religious extremists in the Horn of Africa.

American officials said that they were still encouraging Ethiopia to wean itself from its longstanding reliance on North Korea for cheap Soviet-era military equipment to supply its armed forces and that Ethiopian officials appeared receptive. But the arms deal is an example of the compromises that result from the clash of two foreign policy absolutes: the Bush administration's commitment to fighting Islamic radicalism and its effort to starve the North Korean government of money it could use to build up its nuclear weapons program. . . .

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, as the administration has made counterterrorism its top foreign policy concern, the White House has sometimes shown a willingness to tolerate misconduct by allies that it might otherwise criticize, like human rights violations in Central Asia and antidemocratic crackdowns in a number of Arab nations.

It is also not the first time that the Bush administration has made an exception for allies in their dealings with North Korea. In 2002, Spain intercepted a ship carrying Scud missiles from North Korea to Yemen. At the time, Yemen was working with the United States to hunt members of Al Qaeda operating within its borders, and after its government protested, the United States asked that the freighter be released. Yemen said at the time that it was the last shipment from an earlier missile purchase and would not be repeated.

American officials from a number of agencies described details of the Ethiopian episode on the condition of anonymity because they were discussing internal Bush administration deliberations.

Several officials said they first learned that Ethiopia planned to receive a delivery of military cargo from North Korea when the country's government alerted the American Embassy in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia's capital, after the adoption on Oct. 14 of the United Nations Security Council measure imposing sanctions.

"The Ethiopians came back to us and said, 'Look, we know we need to transition to different customers, but we just can't do that overnight,' " said one American official, who added that the issue had been handled properly. "They pledged to work with us at the most senior levels."

American intelligence agencies in late January reported that an Ethiopian cargo ship that was probably carrying tank parts and other military equipment had left a North Korean port.

The value of the shipment is unclear, but Ethiopia purchased $20 million worth of arms from North Korea in 2001, according to American estimates, a pattern that officials said had continued. The United States gives Ethiopia millions of dollars of foreign aid and some nonlethal military equipment.

After a brief debate in Washington, the decision was made not to block the arms deal and to press Ethiopia not to make future purchases.

John R. Bolton, who helped to push the resolution imposing sanctions on North Korea through the Security Council in October, before stepping down as United Nations ambassador, said that the Ethiopians had long known that Washington was concerned about their arms purchases from North Korea and that the Bush administration should not have tolerated the January shipment.

"To make it clear to everyone how strongly we feel on this issue we should have gone to the Ethiopians and said they should send it back," said Mr. Bolton, who added that he had been unaware of the deal before being contacted for this article. "I know they have been helpful in Somalia, but there is a nuclear weapons program in North Korea that is unhelpful for everybody worldwide.

"Never underestimate the strength of 'clientitis' at the State Department," said Mr. Bolton, using Washington jargon for a situation in which State Department officials are deemed to be overly sympathetic to the countries they conduct diplomacy with.

Sean McCormack, the State Department spokesman, declined to comment on the specifics of the arms shipment but said the United States was "deeply committed to upholding and enforcing U.N. Security Council resolutions." Repeated efforts to contact the Ethiopian Embassy were unsuccessful.

In other cases, the United States has been strict in enforcing the Security Council resolution. For instance, late last year, American intelligence agencies tracked a North Korean freighter suspected of carrying illicit weapons and pressed several nations to refuse to allow the ship to dock. Myanmar, formerly Burma, allowed it to anchor and insisted that there was no violation.

North Korea conducted its first nuclear test on Oct. 9, and the Security Council resolution, adopted less than a week later, was hailed by President Bush as "swift and tough," and a "clear message to the leader of North Korea regarding his weapons programs."

Among the biggest sticking points during the negotiations over the resolution were Chinese and Russian objections to language requiring inspections of ships leaving North Korea. The United States repeatedly pressed China and Russia to agree to the inspections, saying they were essential to enforcing the resolution's embargo on North Korea's sale of dangerous weapons, like ballistic missiles. In addition to the ban on the purchase of weapons from North Korea, the resolution also called for a ban on the sale of luxury goods to it and the freezing of its financial assets in banks worldwide.

The measure had special relevance for several African states that have long purchased low-cost military equipment from North Korea. Ethiopia has an arsenal of T-55 tanks that it acquired years ago from the Soviet Union and Eastern European nations. For years, it has turned to North Korea for tank parts and other equipment to keep its military running.

The Ethiopians bought the equipment at a bargain price; the North Koreans received some badly needed cash. In 2005, the Bush administration told Ethiopia and other African nations that it wanted them to phase out their purchases from North Korea. But the Security Council resolution put an international imprimatur on the earlier American request, and the administration sought to reinforce the message.

"They really are one of the larger conventional arms purchasers from North Korea, and we're pressing them hard and saying, 'Let's get you out of that business,' " said the American official.

Another American official, who is involved in Africa policy, said: "These are cash on the barrel transactions. The Ethiopians know that they can get the best deal in Pyongyang," a reference to North Korea's capital.

In late January, the Central Intelligence Agency reported that an Ethiopian-flagged vessel had left a North Korean port and that its cargo probably included "tank parts," among other military equipment.

American officials said that the ship, the Tekeze, a modern vessel bought from a company in Montenegro and named after an Ethiopian river, unloaded its cargo in Djibouti, a former French colony where the United States has based Special Operations troops and other military forces. From there, the cargo was transported overland to Ethiopia.

The Security Council resolution's list of prohibited items included spare parts. Because the cargo was never inspected, some administration officials say the United States cannot say for certain that the shipment violated the resolution.

It is not clear if the United States ever reported the arms shipment to the Security Council. But because the intelligence reports indicated that the cargo was likely to have included tank parts, some Pentagon officials described the shipment as an unambiguous Security Council violation.

American officials said that the Ethiopians acknowledged that the ship was en route and said they needed the military equipment to sustain their Soviet-era military. Ethiopia has a longstanding border dispute with Eritrea, but of more concern to Washington, Ethiopia was also focused on neighboring Somalia, where Islamic forces that had taken over Mogadishu, Somalia's capital, six months earlier were attacking Baidoa, the seat of a relatively powerless transitional government that was formed with the support of the United Nations.

The timing of the shipment was extremely awkward, as the Ethiopian military was preoccupied with Somalia and also quietly cooperating with the United States. Ethiopia began an offensive in Somalia to drive back the Islamic forces and install the transitional government in Mogadishu late last year. The United States was providing it with detailed intelligence about the positions of the Islamic forces and positioned Navy ships off Somalia's coast to capture fighters trying to escape the battlefield by sea.

On Jan. 7, American AC-130 gunships launched two strikes on terrorist targets from an airstrip inside Ethiopia, though it did not appear that the casualties included any of the few top Qaeda operatives American officials suspected were hiding in Somalia.

After some internal debate, the Bush administration decided not to make an issue of the cargo ship.

American officials insist that they are keeping up the pressure on Ethiopia. While Ethiopia has not provided an ironclad assurance that it will accept no more arms shipments from North Korea, it has told the United States that it will look for other weapons suppliers.

"There was a lot going on at that particular moment in time," said the senior American official. "They seem to have the readiness to do the right thing."

Salim Lone: "Kenya must take lead role in securing peace in Somalia"

2007-04-13T11:00:00.000-05:00

The following opinion piece appeared this morning in Nairobi's Daily Nation. I agree wholeheartedly with the writer's call for more active European involvement in efforts to prevent the Somalia situation from unraveling further. Be sure to read the entire article by clicking on "Read more!" below.

By: SALIM LONE
The Iraq war continues to spiral out of control, the year leading up to its fourth anniversary this week, being the deadliest so far. Unless a political solution is sought, the destructive toll in lives is destined to reach an astounding one million in the next year, since it was already 650,000 a year ago according to a Johns Hopkins University study.

The world has also never been so unstable or threatened. With Somalia invaded, the world and our region are even more so, with four countries now occupied, all of them Muslim.

Once a war deepens, positions become entrenched and finding a peaceful exit becomes harder by the day. Peace and human rights advocates in Kenya must, therefore, take the lead in emphasising the need for a democratic, inclusive government devoid of the rampaging warlords rather than support the current aggression. . . .

WE MUST LEAD THIS CAMPAIGN because we are next door and directly involved, and the whole region could be engulfed by this crisis, as Mr Bethuel Kiplagat emphasised on Monday in these pages, although he advocated use of force as the way to end the resistance.

The same global paralysis and despair that could not prevent the ongoing Iraqi holocaust must not now be allowed to let Somalia unravel. The key for preventing this lies in Europe's hands, given its position as the most influential US ally with whom it shares many strategic goals. EU experts had warned last fall about the looming invasion, but as usual the EU decided not to challenge a major US strategic decision.

However, the EU's going public last week with its worries that, as a major funder of the concerned parties, it might be culpable in the war crimes that might have been committed in the massive assault on Mogadishu's civilian neighbourhoods shows the continuing extent of EU fears over Somalia. Behind the scenes, Europe needs to aggressively pursue with the US the case for finding a political solution, since inaction now will surely see the Horn of Africa become an even bigger powder-keg.

Other non-involved parties such as Russia, China, India and the Arab states must also take up the peace cause. The AU is in a harder position, having been boxed into backing the TFG.

There are very good reasons for the world to emphasise the folly of the current enterprise. One is the high-level turnout at the Somali Diaspora Conference last weekend. Two prime ministers from the 2000-2004 Transitional National Government, which preceded the TFG, and numerous ministers and MPs from that period, as well as Baidoa MPs, who resigned in the last year attended.

The decision of all these leaders to unite with the Diaspora and the Islamic Courts Union, along with the internal resistance, poses an insurmountable challenge to the occupiers. Somalis will not abide an occupation, and if it continues, the US and Kenya will be forced to become even more directly involved.

The other factor pushing for a negotiated settlement is the very pragmatic decision of the ICU to forego regaining control of the country, as indicated to me by Prof Ibrahim Addou.

Even though the Courts were primarily a moderate Muslim union, the offspring of businessmen, they nevertheless were vilified in the build up to war as extremists.

THEY WERE NOT ALL ANGELS, BUT they performed some remarkable miracles in bringing peace to most of Somalia and in driving out the warlords. They did not commit a single terrorist act. They made some miscalculations, but they were slated for destruction whatever they did, since the US and Ethiopia needed a client regime in Somalia, which the Courts were never going to be.

So the world stood by as a truly lawless invasion was mounted, involving not only Guantamo-type kidnappings, but violating also the UN Charter and three specific Security Council resolutions, including one on North Korea, all barring arms as well as neighbouring country troops from being sent to the country.

It is distressing in the extreme that the UN is silent on these breaches, and, in New York, I saw the spineless contortions of UN officials and spokesmen this week as they struggled to avoid commenting on war crimes that have been committed.

"Va. firm aids forces in Somalia"

2007-04-12T09:47:00.000-05:00

This blows my mind! I guess it's old news, but it still shocks me to learn that the Department of State is responsible for out-sourcing a ten million dollar contract with a private U.S. firm to provide support for African Union "peacekeepers" in Somalia. Then again, hiring mercenaries to help suppress radical Islamist opposition to the Transitional Federal Government is consonant with our short-sighted War on Terror policy there.

Va. firm aids forces in Somalia

Richmond Times-Dispatch
From Wire Reports
Wednesday, March 7, 2007

The State Department has hired a military contractor to help equip and support international peacekeepers in Somalia, giving the United States a significant role without assigning combat forces.

Virginia-based DynCorp International, which also has U.S. contracts in Iraq, Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq, will be paid $10 million to help the peacekeeping mission. It was not immediately clear if DynCorp employees would work inside Somalia under a contract signed three weeks ago.

It's a potentially dangerous assignment. When the first 1,500 Ugandan peacekeepers arrived in Somalia's capital Tuesday, they were greeted with a mortar attack and a major firefight. Yesterday, attackers ambushed the peacekeepers in Mogadishu, setting off another gunfight that wounded three civilians. . . .

Also yesterday, gunmen killed two police officers who were trying to search vehicles for weapons.

The support for the Ugandans is part of a larger goal to improve African forces across the continent and promote peace and stability in a region that's often lawless and a haven for terrorists, including some tied to al-Qaida. The U.S. has also begun to depend more on African nations for oil and minerals and wants to expand its influence.

The State Department has committed $14 million for the African Union peacekeeping mission to Somalia.

DynCorp had been contracted until April to provide assistance that includes supplying tents, vehicles and generators, said DynCorp spokesman Greg Lagana.

Somalia has seen little more than anarchy for more than a decade. The government, backed by Ethiopian troops, only months ago toppled an Islamic militia that controlled Mogadishu.

East African: "U.S. Sees Terrorists Under the Bed as People Die in Mogadishu"

2007-04-11T19:16:00.001-05:00

OPINION
April 10, 2007
By Charles Onyango-Obbo
Nairobi

Given the iron fist with which the Ethiopian army put down the protests in Addis Ababa two years ago following disputed elections, it was perhaps only to be expected that it would be only more vicious in its latest campaign against alleged Islamist extremist strongholds in Mogadishu.

Up to 400 people have died, and over 100,000 have fled Mogadishu in what the International Committee of the Red Cross has described as the worst fighting for 15 years in the Somali capital. . . .

The Ethiopian invasion was justified by both Addis Ababa and the US on the grounds that the Islamic Courts government in Somalia had given sanctuary to Al Qaeda elements and was harbouring terrorists who were behind the terrorist attacks on the US embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi in 1998. That if the Courts hadn't been kicked out of power, the terrorist network would have blossomed and consumed East Africa and the Horn.

IT IS indeed possible that some terrorist found safe haven in Somalia. Lately, though, I have become sceptical about the ability of events in one African country to seriously destabilise an organised neighbour.One suspects that with just an ordinary level of vigilance by the security forces, the threat that a Somalia ruled by Islamic Courts posed, could have been eliminated. Therefore, the need for Ethiopia to invade the country should not have arisen.

The Democratic Republic of Congo is a good example. For many years, there was a terrible war in the DRC, which resulted directly and indirectly in the deaths of four million people. The media were full of stories about the likelihood that the conflict, which had drawn in Rwanda, Uganda, Zimbabwe and Angola, would result in a "third world war" (this writer too penned a few such worried articles).

In the end, the conflict ended without any extraordinary effect on any country in the Great Lakes region. Most of the damage was confined to the DRC. There were very few, if any, Rwandans or Ugandans who didn't eat dinner or couldn't buy a new shirt or dress because of the DRC war.

ONE REASON for this is that life is still largely primitive in those parts of neighbouring African countries that refugees flee to.

The most damage refugees do is that they hasten the destruction of local environments as they demolish trees for fuel wood, and harvest all the grass for their huts. Otherwise the communities where they seek shelter live much the same way as before.

It isn't as if thousands of Congolese refugees are going to arrive in western Uganda and put new pressure on sewerage systems because they are using flush toilets. They will dig pit latrines and use the bush just like the local folks. Indeed, conflicts between refugees and their host communities have mostly arisen because, after the aid agencies set up water points, clinics and schools for the former, they immediately have a far higher standard of life than the local folks, who have nothing.

ALSO, FEARS of the conflict "spilling over" into neighbouring countries are often overstated. As President Yoweri Museveni observed some years ago, war in tropical Africa is still largely a rudimentary affair with barefoot soldiers in tattered uniforms fighting their way around trees in dense forests or banana plantations.

When they cross the border, they might steal a few chicken and goats, and kill some hapless peasants in their farms. But certainly, they are not going to be wiping out whole towns or trashing international airports with weapons of mass destruction. Besides, a determined militia can always disperse them.

Accepting these facts would help to reduce the hysteria that attended the capture of power by the Courts in Somalia, and encourage more intelligent interventions to solve such crises.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is Nation Media Group's managing editor for convergence and new products.

NYT: "Somali Battles Bring Charges of War Crimes"

2007-04-06T17:57:00.000-05:00

By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
Published: April 6, 2007

NAIROBI, Kenya, April 5 — European diplomats said Thursday that they were investigating whether Ethiopian and Somali government forces committed war crimes last week during heavy fighting in Somalia’s capital that killed more than 300 civilians.

Relatives buried a family member in Mogadishu on Thursday, days after fighting killed more than 300 civilians and prompted charges of war crimes against Ethiopian troops and forces of the interim government.

The fighting, some of the bloodiest in Somalia in the past 15 years, pitted Ethiopian and Somali forces against bands of insurgents. It reduced blocks of buildings in Mogadishu, the capital, to smoldering rubble. Many residents have complained to human rights groups, saying the government used excessive force and indiscriminately shelled their neighborhoods.

Eric van der Linden, the chief of the European Commission’s delegation to Kenya, said he had appointed a team to look into several war crime allegations stemming from the civilian casualties. “These are hefty accusations,” Mr. van der Linden said. “We are examining them very prudently.” . . . .

In an e-mail message to Mr. van der Linden marked urgent, a security adviser to the commission wrote that there were “strong grounds” to believe that Ethiopian and Somali troops had intentionally attacked civilian areas and that Ugandan peacekeepers, who arrived in the country last month, were complicit for standing by. The message was provided by someone who thought that the issue should become public; its authenticity was confirmed by commission officials.

Ethiopian, Somali and Ugandan officials denied that their soldiers had done anything wrong.

A war crimes case is about the last thing Somalia’s transitional government needs. Ever since it took control of Mogadishu in late December, the transitional government has struggled to pacify the city and win popular support.

Many Western diplomats have expressed hope that this transitional government, Somalia’s 14th, will end the seemingly interminable chaos that has enveloped the country since the central government collapsed in 1991.

But so far, the government has failed to deliver the same level of stability that an Islamist administration brought during its brief reign last year. It was overthrown by Ethiopian-led forces, with covert American help.

Mogadishu has become so dangerous — again — that many residents say they are now doubting whether the government will be able to hold a major reconciliation conference scheduled for mid-April. The Ethiopian military struck a truce with insurgents on Sunday, though, and the past three days have been quiet, giving beleaguered residents a chance to bury their dead.

The European Commission has no authority to prosecute war crimes and would have to refer any findings to the International Criminal Court. But commission officials said they were investigating the accusations because the commission has provided money and technical assistance to the transitional government and the peacekeeping mission there.

A Western official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of diplomatic considerations predicted that even if there was compelling evidence of war crimes, the case would probably never get to court.

Another Western official, speaking anonymously for similar reasons, said, “At the end of the day, no one is going to want to further undermine the transitional government.”

Diplomats and analysts from Somali and international organizations predicted that the American government would resist the European effort because Ethiopia is a close American ally, valued as bulwark against Islamic militants in the Horn of Africa.

In the past week, human rights groups have been urging someone to look into the issue of civilian casualties. The Somali Diaspora Network, an American-based advocacy group, accused the transitional government and Ethiopian forces of “collective punishment” and genocide.

The Somali Disapora Network said Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, the transitional president, warned in a recent radio interview that “any place from which a bullet is fired, we will bombard it, regardless of whoever is there.”

Several of the analysts said they believed that Ethiopian forces overreacted in the fighting last week. One analyst who works closely on Somali issues said Ethiopian soldiers might have panicked after they were surrounded by insurgents in Mogadishu’s main stadium and commanders responded by carpet-bombing the entire neighborhood.

Ethiopian officials denied that.

“Our forces have been praised for not attacking civilians and nothing in recent days has changed,” said Zemedkun Tekle, a spokesman for the Ethiopian government.

Abdirizak Adam Hassan, chief of staff for Somalia’s transitional president, did not deny that many civilians had been killed. “Unfortunately, this is what happens when you fight in a city,” he said.

But, he said, the government was simply trying to defend itself.

“For a good two months, these insurgents have been attacking our government compounds, planting land mines in the road, assassinating people,” he said. “Our job is to protect the people, not kill them.”

AP: "U.S. interrogating at Africa's secret prisons"

2007-04-04T10:32:00.000-05:00

Why am I not surprised? The Associated Press has confirmed my worst fears about the role U.S. intelligence agencies were playing in the "War on Terror" in Somalia, profiling and detaining suspected Muslim "radicals" by the dozen and using the facilities of cooperative Christian governments among Somalia's neighbors for purposes of interrogation.

I agree with John Sifton of Human Rights Watch, as quoted by AP: "The United States has acted as 'ringleader' in a 'decentralized, outsourced Guantanamo'."

My friend Bashir adds a comment of his own: "The fact that many Somalis have 'disappeared' into secret prisons is news to AP but so well known in Somalia that the warlords working for the US were nicknamed 'slave traders' in Mogadishu, i.e., they were selling Somalis into captivity for a few dollars."

NOTE: Click on image above to view larger version.

CIA, FBI agents eye secret prisons in Ethiopia looking for al-Qaida militants.

AP: U.S. interrogating at Africa’s secret prisons

The Associated Press

Updated: 8:58 p.m. ET April 3, 2007

NAIROBI, Kenya - CIA and FBI agents hunting for al-Qaida militants in the Horn of Africa have been interrogating terrorism suspects from 19 countries held at secret prisons in Ethiopia, which is notorious for torture and abuse, according to an investigation by The Associated Press.

Human rights groups, lawyers and several Western diplomats assert hundreds of prisoners, who include women and children, have been transferred secretly and illegally in recent months from Kenya and Somalia to Ethiopia, where they are kept without charge or access to lawyers and families.

The detainees include at least one U.S. citizen, and some are from Canada, Sweden and France, according to a list compiled by a Kenyan Muslim rights group and flight manifests obtained by AP.

Some were swept up by Ethiopian troops that drove a radical Islamist government out of neighboring Somalia late last year. Others have been deported from Kenya, where many Somalis have fled the continuing violence in their homeland. . . .

Ethiopia, which denies holding secret prisoners, is a country with a long history of human rights abuses. In recent years, it has also been a key U.S. ally in the fight against al-Qaida, which has been trying to sink roots among Muslims in the Horn of Africa.

U.S. government officials contacted by AP acknowledged questioning prisoners in Ethiopia. But they said American agents were following the law and were fully justified in their actions because they are investigating past attacks and current threats of terrorism.

The prisoners were never in American custody, said an FBI spokesman, Richard Kolko, who denied the agency would support or be party to illegal arrests. He said U.S. agents were allowed limited access by governments in the Horn of Africa to question prisoners as part of the FBI’s counter-terrorism work.

Western security officials, who insisted on anonymity because the issue related to security matters, told AP that among those held were well-known suspects with strong links to al-Qaida.

An 'outsourced Guantanamo'
But some U.S. allies have expressed consternation at the transfers to the prisons. One Western diplomat in Nairobi, who agreed to speak to AP only if not quoted to avoid angering U.S. officials, said he sees the United States as playing a guiding role in the operation.

John Sifton, a Human Rights Watch expert on counter-terrorism, went further. He said in an e-mail that the United States has acted as “ringleader” in what he labeled a “decentralized, outsourced Guantanamo.”

Details of the arrests, transfers and interrogations slowly emerged as AP and human rights groups investigated the disappearances, diplomats tracked their missing citizens and the first detainees to be released told their stories.

One investigator from an international human rights group, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to speak to the media, said Ethiopia had secret jails at three locations: Addis Ababa, the capital; an Ethiopian air base 37 miles east of the capital; and the far eastern desert close to the Somali border.

More than 100 arrests in January
More than 100 of the detainees were originally arrested in Kenya in January, after almost all of them fled Somalia because of the intervention by Ethiopian troops accompanied by U.S. special forces advisers, according to Kenyan police reports and U.S. military officials.

Those people were then deported in clandestine pre-dawn flights to Somalia, according to the Kenya Muslim Human Rights Forum and airline documents. At least 19 were women and 15 were children.

In Somalia, they were handed over to Ethiopian intelligence officers and secretly flown to Ethiopia, where they are now in detention, the New York-based Human Rights Watch says.

A further 200 people, also captured in Somalia, were mainly Ethiopian rebels who backed the Somali Islamist movement, according to one rights group and a Somali government official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he did not want to jeopardize his job. Those prisoners also were taken to Ethiopia, human rights groups say.

Kenya continues to arrest hundreds of people for illegally crossing over from Somalia. But it is not clear if deportations continue.

The Pentagon announced last week that one Kenyan al-Qaida suspect who fled Somalia, Mohamed Abul Malik, was arrested and flown to the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Ethiopia denying secret prisoners
When contacted by AP, Ethiopian officials denied that they held secret prisoners or that any detainees were questioned by U.S. officials.

“No such kind of secret prisons exist in Ethiopia,” said Bereket Simon, special adviser to Prime Minister Meles Zenawi. He declined to comment further.

A former prisoner and the families of current and former captives tell a different story.

“It was a nightmare from start to finish,” Kamilya Mohammedi Tuweni, a 42-year-old mother of three who has a passport from the United Arab Emirates, told AP in her first comments after her release in Addis Ababa on March 24 from what she said was 2½ months in detention without charge.

She is the only released prisoner who has spoken publicly. She was freed a month after being interviewed, fingerprinted and photographed by a U.S. agent, she said. Tuweni, an Arabic-Swahili translator, said she was arrested while on a business trip to Kenya and had never been to Somalia or had any links to that country.

She said she was arrested Jan. 10. Tuweni said she was beaten in Kenya, then forced to sleep on a stone floor while held in Somalia in a single room with 22 other women and children for 10 days before being flown to Ethiopia on a military plane.

Finally, she said, she was taken blindfolded from prison to a private villa in the Ethiopian capital. There, she said, she was interrogated with other women by a male U.S. intelligence agent. He assured her that she would not be harmed but urged her to cooperate, she said.

More families speak out
In a telephone conversation with AP, Tuweni said the man identified himself as a U.S. official, but not from the FBI. A CIA official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Tuesday that the agency had no contact with Tuweni.

“We cried the whole time because we did not know what would happen. The whole thing was very scary,” said Tuweni, who flew back to her family in Dubai a day after her release.

Tuweni’s version of her transfer out of Kenya is corroborated by the manifest of the African Express Airways flight 5Y AXF. It shows she was taken to Mogadishu, Somalia, with 31 other people on an unscheduled flight chartered by the Kenyan government.

The family of a Swedish detainee, 17-year-old Safia Benaouda, said she was freed from Ethiopia on March 27 and arrived home the following day. Benaouda had traveled to Somalia with her fiancé but fled to Kenya during the Ethiopian military intervention, her mother said.

“She is exhausted, her face is yellow and she’s lost about 10 kilograms (22 pounds),” her mother, Helena Benaouda, a 47-year-old Muslim convert who heads the Swedish Muslim Council, wrote on a Web site she set up to help secure her daughter’s release. “She was beaten with a stick when she demanded to go to the toilet.”

The mother spoke briefly by telephone with AP, saying any information she had was being posted on the Web site. She declined to make her daughter available for an interview.

According to the Web site, an American specialist visited the location where Benaouda was being held and took DNA samples and fingerprints of detainees. It said the teenager was never charged or allowed access to lawyers. The teen was also concerned about a 7-month-old baby that was in detention with her, the Web site said.

One American among detainees
The transfer from Kenya to Somalia, and eventually to Ethiopia, of a 24-year-old U.S. citizen, Amir Mohamed Meshal, raised disquiet among FBI officers and the State Department. He is the only American known to be among the detainees in Ethiopia.

U.S. diplomats on Feb. 27 formally protested to Kenyan authorities about Meshal’s transfer and then spent three weeks trying to gain access to him in Ethiopia, said Tom Casey, deputy spokesman for the State Department.

He confirmed Meshal was still in Ethiopian custody pending a hearing on his status.

An FBI memo read to AP by a U.S. official in Washington, who insisted on anonymity, quoted an agent who interrogated Meshal as saying the agent was “disgusted” by Meshal’s deportation to Somalia by Kenya. The unidentified agent said he was told by U.S. consular staff that the deportation was illegal.

“My personal opinion was that he may have been a jihadi a-hole, but the precedent of ’deporting’ U.S. citizens to dangerous situations when there is no reason to do so was a bad one,” the official quoted the memo as saying.

Like Benaouda, Meshal was arrested fleeing Somalia. A Kenyan police report of Meshal’s arrest obtained by AP says he was carrying an assault rifle and had crossed into Kenyan with armed Arab men who were trying to avoid capture.

Meshal’s parents insist he is innocent and called on the U.S. government to win his release.

“My son’s only crime is that he’s a Muslim, an American Muslim,” his father, Mohamed Meshal, said from the family’s two-story home on a cul-de-sac in Tinton Falls, N.J., where he lives with his wife, Fifi.

“Clearly the U.S. government interrogated him, and threatened him with torture according to the accounts that we’ve seen,” said Jonathan Hafetz, a lawyer at the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law who has been assisting the family.

Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., wrote to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Monday to demand Meshal’s immediate release. “Our government cannot allow an American citizen to continue to be held by the Ethiopian government in violation of international law and our own due process,” he said.

The International Committee of the Red Cross, the guardian of the Geneva Conventions that protect victims of war, is seeking access to the Ethiopian detainees, said a diplomat from a country whose citizens are being held. He insisted on speaking anonymously because he is working for their release.

U.S. officials, who agreed to discuss the detentions only if not quoted by name because of the information’s sensitivity, said Ethiopia had allowed access to U.S. agencies, including the CIA and FBI, but the agencies played no role in arrests, transport or deportation.

One official said it would have been irresponsible to pass up an opportunity to learn more about terrorist operations.

Kolko, the FBI spokesman, also said the detainees were never in FBI or U.S. government custody.

“While in custody of the foreign government, the FBI was granted limited access to interview certain individuals of interest,” he told AP. “We do not support or participate in any system that illegally detains foreign fighters or terror suspects, including women and children.”

Paul Gimigliano, a CIA spokesman, declined to discuss details of any such interviews. He said, however: “To fight terror, CIA acts boldly and lawfully, alone and with partners, just as the American people expect us to.”

One of the U.S. officials said the FBI has had access in Ethiopia to several dozen individuals — fewer than 100 — as part of its investigations.

1998 bombings a focal point
The official said the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania that killed hundreds are a major focus of the agents’ work. Law enforcement officials have long believed the bombings were carried out by members of Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network who were later given safe haven in Somalia.

The official said FBI agents would not be witness or party to any questioning that involved abuse.

It wasn’t clear how many people the CIA interviewed or whether the agency’s officers were working jointly with the FBI.

The CIA began an aggressive program in 2002 to interrogate suspected terrorists at an unknown number of secret locations from Southeast Asia to Europe. Prisoners were frequently picked up in one country and transferred to a prison in another, where they were held incommunicado by a cooperative intelligence service. But President Bush announced in September that all the detainees had been moved to military custody at Guantanamo Bay.

One Western diplomat, who refused to be quoted by name for fear of hurting relations with the countries involved, would not rule out that additional suspects in Ethiopia could be sent to Guantanamo.

Kenyan government spokesman Alfred Mutua insisted no laws were broken and said his government was not aware that anyone would be transferred from Somalia to Ethiopia.

Lawyers and human rights groups argue the covert transfers to Ethiopia violated international law.

“Each of these governments has played a shameful role in mistreating people fleeing a war zone,” said Georgette Gagnon, deputy Africa director of Human Rights Watch. “Kenya has secretly expelled people, the Ethiopians have caused dozens to disappear, and U.S. security agents have routinely interrogated people held incommunicado.”

Bashir: "Ethnic cleansing dressed up as a war on terror"

2007-04-02T09:01:00.000-05:00

My friend Bashir brought to my attention an article from the Times (UK) online that underscores how much innocent Somalis are suffering in the aftermath of the U.S.-supported invasion of their country by Ethiopian troops (see below). By way of comment, Bashir asks "Where are all those human rights groups who go on about Mugabe now?"

Meanwhile, dramatizing its full commitment to the war on terror, the Ethiopian-supported interim Somali Government claimed that al-Qaeda had named an Islamist commander, Aden Hashi Ayro, as its leader in Mogadishu (read today's Times UK report).

War-scarred Mogadishu plunges back into the abyss
Jonathan Clayton, Africa Correspondent

"They are firing heavy artillery into residential areas . . . innocent people who have nothing to do with these insurgents, let alone Islamists, are being slaughtered. Where are all those human rights groups who go on about Mugabe now; this is ethnic cleansing dressed up as a war on terror," he told The Times.

Estimates of the number of people killed vary widely. Some now put the death toll as high as 150, but with most of the Indian Ocean port city a "no-go" area it is impossible to verify. Hospitals across the city are overflowing with wounded. Residents say that they represent only a fraction of the casualties.

Some of the heaviest fighting has taken place in the Ali Kamin neighbourhood, a rabbit warren of narrow alleyways, and the area around the main stadium in south Mogadishu, for years a stronghold of Somali gunmen.

Witnesses said yesterday that they saw at least six bodies of civilians lying in the street, unable to be retrieved by relatives because of heavy crossfire.

"There are tanks everywhere. Shells are landing everywhere and this is very scary," Hussein Ali, a resident said. "I cannot confirm the exact casualties, but a lot of people have been killed and others wounded." . . . .

Witnesses also reported the charred bodies of Ethiopian soldiers, near a burnt out army truck, and said that tanks had taken up position on main crossroads. All access to the areas of the heaviest fighting have been prevented by road-blocks manned by a joint force of Ethiopian and Somali government forces.

In another ominous development, a Ugandan peacekeeper – part of an African Union (AU) force supposed to maintain order after an Ethiopian Army pull-out – was killed on Saturday and five others wounded after mortars fired by the insurgents slammed into their base at the Presidential Palace. "We are not surprised by what took place, we expect those people [insurgents] to do more of such things. We are not in any fear at all," Major Fe-lix Kulayigye told journalists in the Ugandan capital, Kampala.

Regional experts, however, said that the AU force, which controls the airport from where the Ethiopians had launched helicopter raids against suspected insurgent positions, was no longer seen as a neutral force.

The US, which has supported the Ethiopian incursion, says that the Islamists have links to al-Qaeda. Somali experts say there are some links, but the imposition of a President from the Darod clan of southern Somalia has united rivals in the Hawiye sub-clans of central Somalia against a common foe.

"This is clan-based civil war now, the Islamists are fighting on the side of some of the Mogadishu clans but they are not leading this insurgency. It is very dangerous for the AU forces," said a Somali expert. He cannot be identified for fear of reprisals in neighbouring Kenya to where many Somalis have fled.

The Ethiopians drove the Islamists from power in December, ending the only period of calm the city has seen since 1991, when Mohammed Siad Barre, the former Cold War dictator, was overthrown.

Somali Diaspora Network issues urgent appeal

2007-03-31T14:57:00.000-05:00

Attached in pdf format (click here to download and read) is a media release just published by the Somali Diaspora Network, a cross-ethnic group of young Somalis in the U.S. concerned by the unfolding tragedy in Somalia that I know you're familiar with. The members of this group are especially concerned that news coverage of recent events has given an inaccurate picture of the serious harm done to the Somali people by Ethiopia's massive and unprovoked invasion of their country, an intervention encouraged by the U.S. government ostensibly for purposes of capturing dangerous Islamist "radicals." Hundreds of innocent Somalis have died, many more have been wounded or displaced, and efforts by Somalis to bring long-sought peace and stability to their country have been seriously undermined as a consequence of Ethiopia's actions

It happens that a number of the network's leaders and members are good friends of mine, and many are U.S. citizens. As a former U.S. ambassador to Somalia, I highly regard their integrity and applaud their effort to shed light objectively on recent events in their homeland, irrespective of their own clan affiliations. I sincerely hope you will take a close look at their release and give it the thoughtful consideration it deserves.

Repeating Our Mistakes in Somalia

2007-03-23T15:01:00.000-05:00

I had occasion three days ago to deliver a lecture on Somalia to faculty and students at a small Christian college in North Carolina. The timing couldn't have been better, since recent ugly events in the news served to make my points very clear: (1) the U.S. is making the same mistakes it made in Somalia twelve years ago, when our attempt to be helpful ended in tragedy and humiliation; (2) our efforts this time around have already set back what progress the Somalis themselves had made in overcoming clan enmities and patching their nation back together since we bugged out in 1994; and (3) if we continue to blunder as we have since the first of the year, treating Somalia as a battlefront in our so-called War on Terror, we may well find ourselves sucked back into a problem we can't and don't know how to solve.

In posting my overly long text here, I invite you to browse through it but to pay particular attention to the latter third or so. I hate to claim satisfaction from any supposed "insights," but I believe I've pinpointed some of the reasons why things have turned ugly — and unfriendly toward the U.S. — all over again.

The 2007 Graham A. Barden Lecture
Campbell University — Buies Creek, North Carolina
March 20. 2007

Repeating Our Mistakes in Somalia

I’m pleased to have the opportunity to talk with you this evening about America’s relations with Somalia, a country that’s managed to find its way back into the news headlines recently. Just two weeks ago today, after fifteen years of virtual anarchy, a wobbly “transitional” government was finally installed in the Somali capital, Mogadishu. Curiously, it was put in place by Ethiopian military forces backed by the United States, both countries claiming that Somalia was in danger of falling into the hands of Islamic radicals. And indeed, the Ethiopian invaders had ousted a band of Islamic clerics as they marched into Mogadishu. Shortly afterward, the first elements of an eventual 8,000-man African Union peacekeeping force began arriving from Uganda, empowered by the U.N. Security Council to replace the Ethiopians, train a new national security force, and keep the lid on until the government gets its feet securely planted.

Sounds auspicious, doesn’t it? Some good news at last from Somalia. But whether these latest efforts to resurrect the Somali nation-state will succeed is, to say the very least, uncertain. And what the U.S. should do — or should not do — to move this process along is even more problematic. Personally, I believe we’ve set out on a dangerous path, forgetting lessons we should have learned when our Black Hawk helicopters went down in Mogadishu fourteen years ago. As you’ll see, I think we made matters worse rather than better when we tried to be helpful in Somalia last time, and I’m worried that we’re repeating our mistakes — even compounding them — this time. . . .

As you may be aware, I spent three years in Somalia just before retiring from the foreign service in 1990. Those were fascinating times — challenging, sometimes harrowing, but very satisfying overall, both professionally and personally. But Somalia was no bed of roses. It’s a harsh country, mostly hot, dry, windy and rocky—a lot like the Arizona desert where I grew up. Its people can be harsh too, but you always knew where you stood with them. They’re bold, handsome, proudly independent — and egalitarian, even to a fault. When I traveled around the country — which by the way, I was able to do then, without bodyguards or armed escorts — and stopped to talk to local officials or clan elders, my Somali driver Shariff thought nothing of walking in uninvited, sitting down, and joining in my conversations, often making interesting comments of his own.

If you saw the movie “Black Hawk Down,” you’re likely to have a very different impression of Somalis from mine. But almost all Somalis I met deeply admired America and Americans. Here’s one of my favorite recollections:

• It’s the 4th of July, during our last year in Somalia. Several hundred guests — Somalis from all walks of life, and practically every member of the government — have come to the American embassy to join us celebrating the inauguration of a beautiful new chancery building. The highlight of the ceremony is, believe it or not, a lengthy poem — Somalis take great pride in their rich tradition of oral literature, passed along in the style of Homer from one generation to another. This, however, was to be a brand-new poem, composed for us by one of the country’s rock-star calibre woman poets. It was almost shamefully flattering of America and Americans. It even compared our new hi-tech building, with its bright lights, sparkling windows, shining floors, and blinking electronic systems, to our Apollo moon-landing achievements.

• Picture the scene with me: a clear, star-filled sky in the embassy courtyard, a soft wind blowing off the Indian Ocean, this beautiful young poet, dressed in a flowing red gown that fluttered in the breeze, reciting her extraordinary poem from memory . . . and the crowd roaring its approval at the end of every verse.

So you can imagine how heartbreaking it was for me to see on television, less than three years later, how this very same embassy courtyard had become a scene of devastation and deadly conflict between American soldiers and angry Somali mobs. Shouldn’t my staff and I have seen this coming? Shouldn’t we have prevented it somehow? Well, in fact we did see it coming, and we tried to prevent it. But we were unsuccessful, and I believe I know why.

First, though, let’s recall what happened to turn our relations so bitter:

Just eighteen months after our beautiful embassy ceremony, Somali’s aging dictator, General Mohamed Siad Barre, lost his grip on power and was overthrown, literally dragged from his presidential palace by his own fleeing supporters, after running the country with an iron fist for almost twenty-five years,. The U.S. had been remarkably close to General Siad and his army during the 1980s. My embassy had been in charge of the largest U.S. military aid program in Africa. And in exchange, our armed forces were able to make use of Somali military bases and ports that were important to us for Cold War strategic reasons.

By 1990, however, we could see that Siad Barre’s days were numbered. His government had lost almost all popular support and was steadily rotting from the inside out. His army was unable to suppress the insurgent movements popping up around the country. His brutal treatment of opponents became an embarrassment. We fully expected his regime to collapse, and we had already closed our aid pipeline and sharply reduced our embassy staff. To be brutally frank, with the end of the Cold War, we no longer needed the dictator’s cooperation or access to Somali military facilities. So it made sense to Washington that we distance ourselves from him and hope we could work with his successor, whoever that might be.

And mind you, while these moves President Siad unhappy, they were very popular with the Somali people, who seemed unanimously hopeful that without our support he would fall. What we didn’t anticipate, however, nor I suspect did the Somalis, was how violent and bloody the struggle for power would be when the dictator fell. To be sure, it was a struggle that Siad Barre had largely brought upon himself by playing one clan family against another, but it soon grew into a full-fledged civil war that was not so different from our own. Mogadishu itself was practically destroyed, as rival clan militia sought to take control. Thousands were killed in the crossfire. Hospitals were quickly overwhelmed and medical supplies were soon exhausted. Fighting ravaged the countryside as well, destroying food stocks and decimating herds of livestock. Hundreds of thousands soon faced starvation.

With American encouragement, the U.N. Security Council took steps to curb the fighting, and blue-helmeted peacekeeping forces were flown in, but they were far too few in number to cope with the jealousies and hatreds that had erupted. Before long, television screens in this country became filled with ghastly images of suffering and deprivation.

God bless Americans — those images touched our hearts, and cries arose for our government to “do something” to rescue the starving Somalis. Evidently, the scenes of tragedy even touched the broken heart of poor George Bush—George H. W. Bush, that is—who had just suffered a stinging rebuff by the American people in the 1992 elections. Before leaving office, President Bush launched “Operation Restore Hope”, an unprecedented mercy mission into Somalia led by 30,000 combined U.S. military forces that pushed aside the warring clan militias, broke open the roadblocks they had put up, and cleared the way for relief agency trucks to deliver food, medicine and other supplies to the civil war’s innocent victims.

I had retired and left the government by then, but I was able to return to Mogadishu on the eve of our forces’ arrival, as a consultant to ABC’s “Nightline” news, and to witness their spectacular landing and deployment. Throngs of grateful Somalis danced in the city’s streets and crowded the airport runways to welcome the amazed soldiers. The crowds were so thick, in fact, that crowd control became the troops’ first military challenge. It was one of the proudest moments of my life.

MISTAKE ONE: Trying to “fix” problems we don’t understand

During the next four months, our troops restored a great deal of hope in Somalia. Thousands of weapons were confiscated from fighters. Hundreds of miles of roads were reopened, cleared of mines, and bridges rebuilt by Army engineers. With relief organizations now able to operate in most of the country, medical facilities were reopened and mass starvation was averted. A safe guess is that over a half-million Somali lives were saved. Logically, it was now time for our troops to hand over responsibilities to someone else and come home.
Unfortunately, no one had given much thought to just how or with whom this hand-over would be arranged, in a country with no government at all. The bitter clan rivalries that were at the heart of the civil war had been momentarily swept aside to make way for the relief convoys, but they had certainly not been resolved. Most of us assumed that the U.N. would now take charge, perhaps with a token U.S. military force remaining to back up a refortified U.N. peacekeeping contingent.

However, the new Clinton administration, just then taking office in Washington, rightly suspected it was being handed a hot potato. In its view, Operation Restore Hope amounted to little more than a “band-aid.” Nothing had been done to correct what it perceived to be the “root problems” of clan mistrust and jealousies. With U.S. troops removed, they asked, what was to prevent the conflict from breaking out all over again, with yet another round of misery in its wake?

MISTAKE TWO: Trying to “rescue” Somalia with made-in-USA solutions

After intense behind-the-scenes negotiations, the new Secretary of State, Madelaine Albright, and U.N. Secretary General Boutros Ghali agreed on a plan to return responsibility to the U.N., but also give the United States a major voice in the operation. Instead of merely turning back the clock, the new UN peacekeeping force would be significantly larger, more “robust,” and authorized to use force as needed to impose order. Its commander would be a military officer on loan from the U.S. Navy, Admiral Jonathan Howe; his staff would include military and civilian specialists, mainly from the U.S., whose job would be to coax and prod the Somalis into forming a new democratic national governmental; and his resources would include an American rapid reaction force that would be posted just over the horizon, to be deployed in case matters got out of hand.

MISTAKE THREE: Taking sides in someone else’s dogfight

In fact, matters got out of hand rather quickly after the hand-over, when Pakistani members of the new UN force were sent to take possession of a major weapons cache controlled by General Mohamed Farah Aidiid, the most powerful of the clan warlords in Mogadishu. Gen. Aidiid’s forces objected strenuously, fierce fighting ensued, and some two dozen Pakistani troops (plus an unknown number of Aidiid loyalists) were killed. Admiral Howe was furious, as was Washington, and American troops responded by attacking sites controlled by Aidiid’s followers. One of these was a two-story residence where General Aidiid was believed to be meeting with his lieutenants. U.S. helicopter gunships virtually tore the house apart in two successive waves, the first killing scores of Somali men, and the second, numbers of women and children who had rushed to the scene. Aidiid, however, was not among them. In fact, intelligence later revealed that those present at the meeting were elders of Aidiid’s clan who, ironically, had gathered to discuss ways of restraining their warlord and making peace with the Americans.

MISTAKE FOUR: Applying force when conciliation was needed

Now it was the Somalis who were furious. Admiral Howe placed a sizeable bounty on Aidiid’s head, but it was never collected. Instead, crowds grew increasingly hostile toward foreigners, and incidents involving U.S. troops grew more frequent and intense, culminating in the now-famous “Black Hawk Down” incident that cost the lives of 18 American soldiers and left seventy-three wounded. Upwards of one thousand Somalis were killed in that same battle.
Americans were again horrified by TV images from Somalia, but this time it was by video footage of angry Somali mobs dragging bodies of American soldiers through the streets of Mogadishu. Upset that matters had gotten out of hand and might grow worse, President Clinton immediately ordered a halt to all U.S. military operations against Aidiid and promised to remove all U.S. troops quickly. Five months later, all were gone.

Three lessons we should have learned

Our disastrous experience in Somalia sixteen years ago had serious reverberations on U.S. foreign policy through the rest of the Clinton administration, causing the president to shy away from engaging U.S. troops in Third World conflicts anywhere. Most notably, it discouraged our leadership from becoming involved in the Rwandan genocide that was unfolding just as our troops were returning home from Somalia.

But there were more mundane lessons that we should have drawn from our Somalia experience, lessons that might have prepared us to deal more effectively with future “failed state” crises—lessons that might even have helped if, God forbid, we found ourselves back in Somalia again. Here is my own personal short list:

Don't take sides in someone else’s dogfight. We were even-handed enough when our troops were clearing the way for food convoys. But when we undertook to “level the playing field,” we picked a fight with the bully on the block and made a national hero of him.
Don't try to "rescue" Somalia with made-in-USA solutions. It is not helpful to Somalis when we press them to adopt American-style multiparty elections and free markets. Somalis need to rediscover and update the traditional systems that served them well enough for a thousand years.
Don’t try to solve problems force, when conciliation is called for. Resist the temptation to throw armed "peacekeepers" at every problem. Instead of weapons, offer mediators, conciliators, brokers. Get Somalis talking to each other again, in traditional “palaver” style.

* * * * *

Several months ago, when I first conceived of this little sermonette, I gave it a working title: “Learning from our Mistakes in Somalia” and intended to conclude here. Since then, with the flurry of new activity in Somalia and new headlines about U.S. involvement in the region, my sermon has grown longer (I’m sorry to say), but I’ve come to realize that the Nine-Eleven tragedy in New York had somehow “changed” Somalia, so that — in the eyes of some, anyway — the old lessons no longer apply. Instead, terrorism experts have rediscovered Somalia as a potential hiding place, even a possible training ground for international terrorists. And when it was learned that two or three persons implicated in the 1998 bombings of our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were reportedly hiding somewhere in Somalia, analysts became more excited than ever: the ungoverned Somali deserts had become the perfect battleground for our War on Terror.

In 2002, the Pentagon became so concerned about Somalia’s potential that it quietly established a small military base in neighboring Djibouti to serve as headquarters for a new Horn of African anti-terror task force. Some 1,500 U.S. civilian and military intelligence personnel are now assigned there, and a new five-year lease just signed will permit expanding the operation to six times its present size.

Among the activities that our personnel in Djibouti conduct “downrange,” as they say, is one that involves helicoptering into Somali villages and offering cash rewards for information on anyone suspected of harboring terrorists or preaching a “radical” brand of Islam. Just imagine the damaging effect this “finger-thy-neighbor” campaign has had on efforts of Somalis themselves to overcome the deep-set suspicions they have of each other — the very “root problem” that was blamed twelve years ago for the country’s civil war. One outstanding Somali peacemaker, a former colleague and friend of mine, was coldly murdered by masked gunmen in front of his wife and family eighteen months ago as a consequence of this project.

Another, even more flagrant example of ignoring the lessons of our past mistakes cropped up in the news just a few months ago:
• A group of determined Islamic clerics in Mogadishu had organized a militia that successfully trounced and ousted the clan warlords who’d been robbing and terrorizing the city’s inhabitants for a decade. Somalis at home and abroad were cautiously applauding these audacious clerics for bringing law and order to the capital city. Then it was learned that the very same ousted warlords had formed a so-called “Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism” and had secured backing from the U.S. Defense department and C.I.A. to retake the city and drive out the clerics’ militia. This unbelievable “alliance” failed in its mission, and the warlords were again sent packing, while the Islamic clerics not only maintained their hold on Mogadishu but began to expand their sphere of influence beyond the capital.

How, I asked myself, could the Pentagon—burned so badly before by taking sides in Somali clan disputes—have repeated their mistake by backing the very warlords who had burned them before? And how had the CIA been conned into joining such a foolish enterprise?

I was still puzzling over this behind-the-scenes foolishness when, just before Christmas, an even bigger bombshell dropped and brought Somalia the front-page news attention I spoke of at the beginning of my talk:
• Somalia’s next-door neighbor and age-old enemy, Ethiopia—with explicit and very public United States approval and support — sent a major combat force across the border into Somalia for the purpose of rescuing a fragile new government that had lately set itself up in the town of Baidoa, close to the Ethiopian border. With the support of U.S. C-130 gunships launched from inside Ethiopia, it took the invading force only three days to blast its way across the country to Mogadishu, chase away the Islamic clerics once again, and plant the new government’s prime minister and his cabinet in their places.

“Wow!” I thought to myself. “Organizing a comic-opera coalition of warlords to track down a few terrorists was one thing; organizing a full-fledged, heavily armed, and distinctly Christian invading force to save Somalia from Muslim radicals was quite another!” Trust me, it immediately brought to mind our disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961.

(Now before I conclude and invite your questions, let me say a brief word about this “transitional” Federal Government that the Ethiopians have just propped up in Mogadishu with our help, because its beginning was hopeful and, if all goes well, it may yet turn out to be a good thing. It was formed two years ago in Nairobi, Kenya by a large congregation of rival Somali warlords, political leaders, and clan elders, after many months of acrimonious bargaining and occasional fist fights. Sponsored by the U.N. and generously supported by the Kenyan government, the birthing process was nothing if not democratic. But the outcome was flawed because those elected to office couldn’t agree on where and how to set up shop in Somalia’s dangerous environment. So it sat for over a year, stymied and powerless, in far-away Nairobi. The U.S. has never recognized this “transitional” government and it appeared to take interest in it only with the rise of the Islamic clerics’ movement in Mogadishu six months ago.)

Which brings us back to the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia in December, which the U.S. supported:
• Once again, the justification was our worldwide “War on Terror” and the supposed threat to American interests posed by the movement’s Islamist “radicals.” This time, however, the devastating firepower of our airborne gunships was aimed directly at Somalis — remnants of the clerics’ rag-tag army that had been outgunned and overwhelmed by the Ethiopian invaders and were overtaken by the C-130 gunships as they fled toward the Kenyan border. Those lucky enough to escape our airborne assault were intercepted and interrogated by Kenyan border police—with the encouragement of officials in our embassy in Nairobi. Most have since been forced back across the border, and many — in violation of international laws protecting refugees — have been turned over to the new government’s police. At least one, as it turns out, a U.S. citizen named Amir Mohamed Meshan, is now imprisoned in Ethiopia.

Not all the clerics’ militant supporters fled, however. During the past four weeks, the newly installed government has faced a storm of opposition from armed insurgents inside Mogadishu itself that even its Ethiopian sponsors have been unable to suppress. And already, the African Union’s peacekeeping forces that are now arriving to replace the Ethiopians have run into armed assaults from followers of the defeated Islamic clerics. Far from pacified by either invaders or peacekeepers, Mogadishu itself—after six months of tranquility under the Islamic clerics—has once again become a battlefield.

What remains to be seen is how invested the United States really is in the outcome of this contest. Enough to send in troops of our own if need be? Is it possible that a growing Iraq-style insurgency — and perhaps another “Black Hawk Down” — could force the international peacekeepers to retreat again from Somalia, just as happened thirteen years ago?

Have we indeed learned any lessons at all from our earlier experience in Somalia? Or has the Nine-eleven tragedy simply erased those lessons from our memory? Right now, I’m not optimistic. But I hope I’m wrong.

McClatchy: "U.S. isn't trying to free American jailed in Ethiopia"

2007-03-22T22:16:00.000-05:00

"RENDITIONS"

In another valuable follow-up article today on the disturbing case of Amir Meshal, the American citizen now jailed in Ethiopia on suspicion of terrorism activity, McClatchy Newspapers journalists Shashank Bengali and Jonathan S. Landay reported that Meshal could face the death penalty if found guilty of violating Ethiopia's anti-terrorism laws.

ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia - The U.S. government will let Ethiopian authorities decide the fate of a 24-year-old American who was held here incommunicado for more than five weeks, the State Department said Thursday.

The Ethiopians haven't told American officials what charges, if any, they plan to bring against Amir Mohamed Meshal of Tinton Falls, N.J., at a hearing to determine whether he can be held as a prisoner of war - or when the hearing will occur.

The FBI has determined that Meshal wasn't a combatant in the recent war in Somalia and broke no U.S. laws. However, he could face life in prison or the death penalty if he's convicted of violating Ethiopia's anti-terrorism laws or taking up arms against Ethiopian forces, . . . . according to Ethiopian lawyers familiar with such cases.

The State Department made clear Wednesday evening that it would allow the Ethiopian legal process to take its course.

"We have asked that his case be handled in a timely and a fair manner in accordance with local laws and procedures," said Gonzalo Gallegos, a State Department spokesman in Washington.

U.S. officials in Addis Ababa had refused to answer a McClatchy Newspapers reporter's questions for several days, but they indicated considerable frustration when they received permission from Washington Thursday evening to describe their dealings with the Ethiopian authorities. U.S. officials gained access to Meshal on Wednesday after three weeks of "trying very hard," a U.S. official said in the Ethiopian capital. "We are still trying to understand the nature of his being held." The official and others spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case.

Mohamed Meshal, the young man's father, charged the U.S. government with being "very deceitful and untruthful."

"I felt all along that the State Department and the FBI have known my son's whereabouts from day one, and they know he was not accused of any crimes, but handed him over to a third country. He has nothing to do with Ethiopia, and this happened under their supervision," he told McClatchy Newspapers.

Meshal's case has been shrouded in secrecy since he was arrested while fleeing hostilities in Somalia in late January. He's been held incommunicado in Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia.

Meshal told Kenyan human rights monitors that he was twice driven to a local hotel to be interviewed by the FBI. According to Meshal's father, when the FBI determined that there wasn't sufficient cause to charge Meshal, the State Department told him that Meshal would be sent home. But for reasons that remain unclear, the Kenyan government then deported Meshal and about 80 other people who had sought refuge in Kenya back to war-torn Somalia, from which he and others were then flown to Ethiopia.

State Department, FBI and CIA officials appear to disagree on who was to blame for Meshal's secret deportation. Some U.S. officials blame the CIA for not using its influence to prevent the deportation, which the State Department said it had formally protested. The FBI has disclaimed any responsibility, saying it wanted to continue questioning Meshal in Kenya. Officials in other agencies are pointing the finger at the Justice Department, which directs the FBI.

Meshal has an attorney, a U.S. official in Addis Ababa said, but it's not clear what charges he could face. Ethiopian authorities have said they're holding an unspecified number of prisoners from foreign countries in connection with December's conflict in Somalia, when Ethiopian troops with U.S. support ousted Islamist militias that U.S. officials had linked to al-Qaida.

Meshal was among at least 150 people arrested in Kenya and questioned about possible links to the Islamic Courts movement, which briefly ruled Somalia until it was toppled by the U.S.-backed Ethiopian army. Another American, Daniel Joseph Maldonado, was taken into U.S. custody and charged last month in federal court in Houston with training in al Qaida camps in Somalia.

The embassy official in Ethiopia said of Meshal: "We try to do everything we can to make sure he's OK while in custody, make sure he's in contact with family and has a lawyer."

The difficulty the embassy faced in gaining access to Meshal suggested that Ethiopian authorities were taking his case seriously.

Prime Minister Meles Zenawi's regime has cracked down in recent years on dissidents and rebel groups along its restive eastern border with Somalia and are holding incommunicado Ethiopian rebels who are believed to have fought alongside Somalia's Islamists. The U.S. State Department, in its 2006 human rights report, said prisoners in Ethiopia were at risk of torture and other abuses.

"The government is very tough on matters affecting the security of the state," said Tameru Agegnehu, a longtime judge and now president of the Ethiopian Bar Association. "I don't think they will be lenient on this matter."

Landay reported from Washington.

McClatchy: "American's rendition may have broken laws"

2007-03-22T12:35:00.000-05:00

Reporters for the McClatchy Newspaper chain are probing the arrest of an American citizen, Amir Mohamed Meshan (shown at left), by Kenyan authorities during the US-supported Ethiopian intervention in Somalia and his eventual deportation to Ethiopia and incarceration in Addis Abeba. Meshan was first mentioned in their report published yesterday and posted below. A second report, published today, supplies a photograph of Meshan supplied by his family, along with assurances by unnamed U.S. officials that Meshan was "in good health."

But the latter report also indicated that Meshal might be detained in Ethiopia as a prisoner of war, and it cited the opinion of "several [American] legal experts" that the U.S. may have violated U.S. law as well as international conventions banning torture and protecting refugees who escape to a neighboring country.

To read the entire report click on the headline at the beginning of the post. To read excerpts from today's McClatchy Newspaper report, click on "Read more!" below.

NAIROBI, Kenya - American diplomats on Wednesday paid their first visit to an American who was detained five weeks ago by Ethiopian authorities after a middle-of-the-night secret transfer from Kenya and said he was in good health.

But U.S. officials couldn't secure the release of Amir Mohamed Meshal, 24, of Tinton, Falls, N.J., who was arrested at the Somali-Kenyan border after the U.S.-backed Ethiopian army toppled the Islamist government in Somalia.

Instead, Meshal will appear at an Ethiopian hearing to determine whether he can be detained as a prisoner of war, said a U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case.

In Nairobi, U.S. Ambassador Michael Ranneberger praised the deportations of Meshal and some 80 other detainees who were arrested on the Kenyan-Somali border, saying Kenyan officials had complied with their own laws.

Kenyan officials have said the prisoners - including several Kenyans who were living in Somalia - entered Kenya illegally because the border was closed. They said national immigration laws allow for the detainees to be returned to the country they came from.

"The Kenyans have carried out security operations based on their own security interests," Ranneberger said at a news conference. "It's my understanding that the Kenyans have dealt with all of those people in a way consistent with Kenyan law." He refused to say whether Meshal, whose deportation the State Department said it had tried to block, was among those expelled.

But several U.S. legal experts said American officials who questioned Meshal while he was in Kenya may have violated U.S. law as well as international conventions that ban torture and protect refugees who escape to a neighboring country.

"It's a very serious concern," said Jonathan Hafetz of the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law. Hafetz is providing legal assistance to Meshal's family in New Jersey.

FBI agents who interviewed Meshal in Nairobi in early February believed he was a "jihadist" who'd trained in al-Qaida camps in Somalia, according to an internal U.S. government e-mail that was read to McClatchy Newspapers by officials at two different U.S. agencies.

But the agents didn't have enough evidence to charge him with a crime if he returned to the United States. They left him in the custody of Kenyan authorities, who secretly deported him to Somalia on Feb. 10.

He was then turned over to Ethiopian forces, which had launched a U.S.-backed offensive to crush the Council of Islamic Courts, a coalition of Somali militias that the Bush administration has accused of being an al-Qaida front.

Hafetz and other international legal experts said that the deportations of Meshal and other detainees to Somalia appear to have broken the Convention Against Torture. The FBI also may have violated Meshal's U.S. constitutional rights, they said.

The Convention Against Torture bars the deportation of people to countries where there are "substantial grounds" to believe they'd be in danger of being tortured or abused.

Ethiopia also has a bleak human rights record; the State Department and human rights organizations have accused the nation of abusing and torturing detainees.

Paul Williams, a former State Department lawyer, said the FBI may have violated Meshal's constitutional right to due process by returning him to Kenyan authorities after twice taking him out of prison and interrogating him at a hotel.

"You can make an argument that . . . he had the right to due process when he was in the physical custody of the FBI," said Williams, who heads the Public International Law and Policy Group, which provides free legal aid to developing nations involved in conflicts. "Your constitutional right to due process travels with you and your citizenship. The moment he was in FBI custody, he had ( U.S.) legal rights and the FBI acted illegally by passing him back to the Kenyans."

Richard Kolko, an FBI spokesman, denied that the FBI ever had custody of Meshal.

"Mr. Meshal was not in FBI custody when interviewed in Kenya, nor are there any outstanding U.S. charges against him," Kolko said. "As such, his situation is in the hands of the foreign government."

Tom Casey, a State Department spokesman, reiterated an earlier statement that Meshal's deportation took U.S. officials by surprise and was contrary to their request that he be released to return home. He said a formal protest was lodged with the Nairobi government.

Another American, Daniel Joseph Maldonado, also was arrested crossing into Kenya from Somalia, but the FBI said he had admitted to being trained at an al-Qaida camp in Somalia, and he was released to U.S. custody, flown back to Texas and accused under U.S. anti-terrorism laws.

Meshal told Kenyan human rights activists who interviewed him in custody and other detainees who since have been freed that the FBI agents threatened to send him back to Somalia if he didn't admit that he was associated with al-Qaida.

Edwin Williams, an attorney in New York who represented detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, said that such a threat - if it was made - could be considered a form of torture.

Fire at Bakaara Market, Mogadishu

2007-03-21T14:45:00.000-05:00

My good friend Bashir just forwarded me the following photos of a Bakaara Market building on fire as a result of Ethiopian Army shelling aimed at insurgents in Mogadishu. He commented that there had been heavy fighting throughout the morning during which Ethiopian troops showered the city with artillery shells.

Meanwhile, the Shabelle Media Network's Aweys Osman Yusuf reports: "More than ten die as heavy fighting continues in Mogadishu."

Mogadishu 21, March.07 ( Sh.M.Network) Heavy fighting between the Somali government troops backed by Ethiopians and a large number of armed Somalis opposing the government and the Ethiopians is continuing in the capital Mogadishu on Wednesday.

The heavy gun battle started around 6:10 am local time and then spread into fresh areas in the capital where insurgents toughened their soldiers, increasing the number of combatants with the government troops and Ethiopians in south and north of Mogadishu.

Witnesses around the former Somalia Defense Ministry told Shabelle that they saw at least 10 people, including 7 government soldiers and three civilians, who died in the gun battle.

. . .

The Ethiopians based at the Defense Ministry compound in south of Mogadishu have been attacked by the gunmen while the Ethiopians have been firing tanks and missiles towards north of Mogadishu. It is not yet known the exact number of civilian casualties in today’s fighting. However, the fighting [has continued] for four consecutive hours.

. . .

The fighting comes a day after the Hawiye clan issued a press statement condemning the transitional government and threatening they would fight with the government if it did not change what it called the discriminating policy against the Somali clans.

The complete story with additional photos can be accessed by clicking here. CAUTION: Some photos are extremely graphic.

American is held by Ethiopian forces

2007-03-20T14:21:00.000-05:00

According to the McClatchy newspaper chain, Amir Mohamed Meshal, 24, a U.S. citizen who was caught fleeing the fighting in Somalia, was questioned by FBI agents in Kenya about possible links to al-Qaeda, then forced to return to Somalia. There he was handed over to Ethiopian forces and sent to Addis Abeba, the Ethiopian capital, where he is now imprisoned. There, he is being "visited regularly" by FBI agents, according to U.S. officials in Washington.

The full story — extraordinary and unsettling, in my view — can be accessed by clicking on the title, above. As time permits, I'll add some excerpts from the McClatchy report here.

Comment re: "Ten Things" & more . . . .

2007-03-16T19:21:00.000-05:00

My good friend "Joseph Peter" had some important things to say about my recent post listing Ten Things I thought the U.S. should or should NOT do about Somalia (the list was contained in my post entitled, somewhat foolishly, "Speak for Yourself, John Alden"). "Joseph Peter" is in fact Joseph Peter Drennan, a distinguished lawyer, legal scholar, and specialist on international legal affairs. To make sure as many people have a chance to read it as possible, I'm reposting his fascinating and trenchant comments here.

To state the obvious, the increase in violence and chaos in Mogadishu and the ominous reports of attacks directed towards journalists covering the conflict there, that have accompanied the decampment of the putative Transitional Federal Government("TFG") from its redoubt in Baidoa to Mogadishu, augur poorly for the prospects of the TFG, and portend a protracted conflict there, with a further increase in the already alarming level of death and destruction for the long suffering Somali people. When we contrast this misery and bloodshed with the brief period of relative calm and order in Mogadishu and its environs, in 2006, during the interregnum following the ouster of the warlords from Mogadishu by the Islamic Courts Union ("ICU"), and before Ethiopia's military invasion of Somalia to overthrow the ICU and install the TFG, we are compelled to analyze the role of the United States Government in fomenting this shambolic state of affairs in Somalia, if we are to harbor any realistic hope that the United States can change its disastrous policies that have contributed to the unfolding catastrophe on the Horn of Africa.

Although it is true that the ICU imposed Sharia law, the ICU was remarkably successful in banishing from Mogadishu the murderous and thuggish militiamen of the warlords who had held the good people of Mogadishu in a veritable state of terror for well over a decade and a half. In this context, Sharia represented a considerable improvement over the earlier lawless enviroment of a patchwork of militias commiting crimes and running rackets in what was, essentially, a lawless metropolis of over three million people.

The initial question to be raised about the recent role played by the United States is this: what is the taproot of the Zeitgeist that has caused the United States to follow such a benighted course?

[Please continue reading Joseph Peter's comment by clicking on "Read more!" below.]

My efforts to answer this question lead me, ineluctably, to an article penned by Harvard University Professor Samuel P. Huntington entitled "The Clash of Civilizations?", that appeared in the Summer of 1993 issue of the scholarly journal Foreign Affairs, in which future conflicts were envisaged, essentially, as a long, ideological struggle between, as the late Professor Edward Said summed it up, in 2001, in the aftermath of the terrible events of 11 September, "[t]he basic paradigm of West versus the rest(the cold war opposition reformulated)."

In the popular construct of Professor Huntington's proverbial "Clash of Civilizations," Islam is seen as the enemy of the Christian West. Putting aside the utter ignorance displayed by such a simplistic view, it becomes a particularly dangerous mindset in the face of the security challenges posed by the attacks on the American homeland on the 11th of September 2001.

The embrace of Professor Huntington's "vision" by the so-called neoconservative policymakers, who, apparently, still rule the roost in the White House these days, has had disastrous implications for American foreign policy in the Middle East. We need look no further than the fiasco in Iraq to see that. In this context, it is not at all bold to state that the incipient American misadventure in abetting Christian Ethiopia's efforts to create a vassal state in neighboring Moslem Somalia, holds the potential to cause as much, if not more, damage to American interests and prestige over the long term as that caused by the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Just as the realpolitik of the Cold War caused the Reagan Administration, in the 1980s, to favor the authoritarian regime of Siad Barre, in Somalia over the then Marxist regime in Addas Ababa, led by Mengistu Haile Mariam, in order, as it were, to check Soviet influence in the Horn of Africa, and, concomitantly, to obtain port access to deal with the threat posed by the Islamic Revolution in Iran, the current involvement of the United States on the Horn of Africa appears to have arisen from the notion, dubious though it is, that Somalia is but the latest front in the amorphous "War on Terror." Just as the invasion of Iraq has been touted by its supporters with the specious and inane clarion call that we must take on and kill "the terrorists" there so that we don't have to fight them here, the same is said to be true with regard to Somalia.

It might be said that the tilt of the United States towards Somalia in the 1980s achieved its stated objectives, even if the armaments provided to the Barre regime fell into the hands of the Somali warlords and, hence, increased the lethality of the clan conflict that ensued following the collapse of the Barre regime and persists to the present. However, the same cannot be said about the current conflict in Somalia. Instead of remediating the anarchy and chaos that could be the incubator for future terrorists, the deteriorating security situation in Mogadishu actually appears to have made matters worse, setting the stage for a widening of the conflict, just as the invasion of Iraq has actually created a veritable cauldron of violence and hatred of the West in Mesopotamia that is breeding instability and terrorism there that could soon engulf the entire region.

However, what makes the situation in Somalia potentially worse than that in Iraq is that, whereas the involvement of the United States in Iraq has apparently unleashed a civil war among Arab Sunni Moslems, Kurdish Sunni Moslems and Shi'ite Moslems, the meddling in Somalia, especially the tacit U.S. backing of an Ethiopian invasion of Somalia could, conceivably, be a rallying cry for extremists throughout the Moslem world who seek, wrongly, to portray the United States as a Christian nation with a crusader-like penchant to attack and destroy Islam. This is certainly an incendiary issue, and it is striking how the press and policymakers in the United States appear to have been oblivious to the ominous implications of American interference in Somalia.

Before addressing the fundamental questions of the efficacy and morality of the current American strategy on the Horn of Africa, if it can be assumed that the current efforts of the United States to influence, if not ordain, events in Somalia represents a coherent plan at all, as opposed to a succession of disparate blunders, we need to focus on the flawed premise of the thinking that appears to inform such strategy, namely, that any movement to impose Sharia, anywhere, is an effort to create a haven for al-Qaida extremists that, ultimately, would pose a gathering threat to the United States homeland, or so the thinking goes. Put another way, the ICU sought to impose Sharia; ergo, the ICU, somehow, represents a threat to the West, specifically, the United States, and, therefore, the ICU must be vanquished.

To be sure, in June of 2006, Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, Jendayi Frazier, foreshadowed American efforts to topple the ICU by contending that the ICU was sheltering three suspects implicated in the 1998 East African embassy bombings and the 2002 Mombasa hotel bombing, and, since the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia, in December of 2006, approving commentaries from the State Department have, typically, been accompanied by reference to the three terrorist suspects said to be sheltered by the ICU in Somalia. However, what has by and large gone unsaid is that none of the suspects is Somali (one is said to be from the Comoros Islands, another is said to be a Kenyan and the third is said to be Sudanese), much less how three foreigners said to be marauding in Somalia could ever, possibly, pose any credible threat to the United States, either in the near term or else over the long term. Moreover, there appears to have been precious little consideration of the dearth of evidence of significant Islamic extremism in the ICU, and even less of the incompatibility of Islamic extremism with Islam as practiced by Somalis.

Instead, for six months or so leading up to the invasion of Somalia by Ethiopia the pronouncements from the Bush Administration about the ICU were suffused with a steady drumbeat about the three terrorist suspects supposedly harbored by the ICU, the clear implication being that the ICU is a terrorist organization that must be destroyed. It did not pass unnoticed in the region that, in the lead up to the invasion, virtually nothing was said by the Administration concerning the significant abuses of human rights by the Ethiopian regime.

Even more incongruous, and palpably absurd to boot, was the notion advanced by many inside the Administration, that the ICU was on the road to imposing an astringent, Taliban-like regime on Somalia.

That Wahhabisim (Salafism) has only appeared to have generated a negligible toehold in Somalia among a few fanatical followers in the Northern Somali city of Bosaso, and among far fewer souls on the radical fringe of the ICU in Mogadishu, has passed virtually unnoticed among those who have demonized wholesale the ICU. In a sense, calling Somalia under the ICU an "al-Qaida haven" is akin to branding France as racist merely because the execrable Jean-Marie Le Pen and his Front National political party enjoy some modest support at the margins of French politics.

Even if it could be said that there exists some sort of diffuse security threat in Somalia, arising from the fact that three dangerous fugitives are said to remain at large there, the known military operations of the United States military in the region seem to be grotesquely disproportionate, with operations conducted by the U.S.S. Eisenhower aircraft carrier conducting operations off the coast, in conjunction with C-130 gunship raids conducted out of a base in Djibouti.

Whereas American policy towards Somalia in the latter stages of the Cold War may have had some defensible basis in fact, the efforts of the neoconservatives to crush the ICU appear to be utterly indefensible. Indeed, the analogy of using an elephant to swat a flea seems like an understatement here. Worse still, such efforts, if not soon reversed, may well bring about exactly the opposite result to that intended, namely, an increase in support among Somalis, to say nothing of other Moslems across the globe, for the sort of quasi-religious extremism and terrorism that has, hitherto been antithetical to Somali sensibilities.

Whither the professed aims of recent American meddling in the strife that has so bedeviled the Somali people over the past twenty-five years, and the effectiveness, or, more aptly, ineffectiveness, of such hamhanded efforts, there remains an overriding series of profound legal and moral questions that come to mind, a few of which are set forth here, to-wit:

As I queried in one of my earlier postings on this topic, where is the Congresssional authorization for the President to wage war in Somalia? (phrased differently: can the President simply use the putative justification of the "War on Terror" to conduct military operations anywhere, without Congressional authorization?);

Is it justifiable to cause degradation and loss of life on a massive scale to a society and a culture in an effort to apprehend three fugitives who do not pose an imminent threat to the safety and well-being of the United States?

And, as I also mentioned in one of my earlier postings: has any thought been given to the implications of casually equating Islam with extremism? (put another way: Isn't the wholesale demonization of Islam because of the poisonous perversion of Islam by Osama bin Laden and his followers akin to condemning Christianity because of the heresies of David Koresh and the Rev. Jim Jones?).

Moving beyond the issues of the misunderstanding of Somalia and Islam that has so hampered American judgment about what is at stake in Somalia, and has contributed to the flawed execution of our policy there, to say nothing of the legal and moral questions raised by our involvement there, we need to address the appropriate steps to be undertaken in order to restore American credibility and honor in the region, as well as to help the Somali people to find the peace and stability that has eluded them for far too long. Here,I am obliged to defer to the ten excellent suggestions about what to do, and what not to do, about Somalia, that were posted on 8 March 2007, by the Honorable Trusten Frank Crigler, former Ambassador of the United States to Somalia (1987-1990), as I find myself unable to improve on his erudition and wisdom as to the best pathway for the United States to follow. [The list is posted here for easy reference.] . . . .

The Somalis are a resilient people with a rich and vibrant culture, and they are deserving of our assistance and understanding as they struggle to resolve and reconcile their differences, our own past disagreements with them notwithstanding. They are also deserving of our respect. What they do not need is the sort of arrogance, callousness, dismissiveness and belligerency that has been meted out to them in an ill-begotten "War on Terror", as this brusque treatment of a proud, if troubled, people can only serve to exacerbate their troubles and insecurity, and our own as well.

Joseph Peter Drennan

Journalists attacked in Mogadishu

2007-03-15T13:53:00.000-05:00

The following report alleging harsh physical abuse of independent journalists in Mogadishu is very troubling. If true, it speaks poorly for the transitional government's intentions with respect to press freedom and human rights generally. Please share your comments below.

Shabelle Media Network (Somalia)
March 13, 2007

Mogadishu (Somali) - The National Union of Somali Journalists (NUSOJ) is today shocked by the declining security situation of journalists in Mogadishu after journalists working for Mogadishu based independent Radio station, Shebelle Media Network, were ruthlessly beaten in two consecutive days. Three Shabelle journalists were beaten today, 12 March, after they went to the ex-building of the Somali Ministry of Defence, which is occupied by Ethiopian forces backing the Transitional Federal Government (TFG). The journalists Ismail Ali Abdi, Mohammed Ibrahim Raggeh and Mohammed Ibrahim Ali (known as Ruush) reportedly went there to confirm unproven news about the departure of the Ethiopian troops from the building, according to a member of the management of Radio Shebelle.

On Sunday, 11 March, journalist Abdirahman Yusuf of the Shabelle Radio, publicly known Al-Adala, was beaten in the neighbourhood of north Mogadishu by the armed forces of the TFG, while carrying out journalistic assignment. On Friday 9 March, Hassan Sade Dhaqane, a reporter for Horn Afrik Radio, was arrested by forces of the transitional government in KM4 area while making live coverage of disarray that existed at the sight. Government officials confirmed the arrest, but the journalist is up till now held in unidentified place.

"We resolutely denounce the fresh life-threatening attacks of journalists Ismail Ali Abdi, Mohammed Ibrahim Raggeh, Mohammed Ibrahim Ali, Abdirahman Yusuf and Hassan Sade Dhaqane," said Omar Faruk Osman, Secretary-General of the National Union of Somali Journalists (NUSOJ). "The time has come for the transitional government to completely examine and elucidate reasons behind the painful violations against Shabelle journalists" Omar Faruk Osman added.

"We are really troubled by the detention of Journalist Hassan Sade Dhaqane," said Omar Faruk Osman. "Arresting a journalist in the course of his duty and detaining him unduly are intolerable acts of aggression, and we appeal to the transitional government to immediately instruct its armed forces to release Hassan Sade Dhaqane and end violating journalists' rights". "This is the time the transitional government is to protect its citizens, mainly journalists, and not to assume them as spies or combatants," Omar Faruk added. NUSOJ commends the cooperation that Ugandan forces of the African Union peace-keeping mission in Somalia are making with the media.

2007 already became another year that journalists are facing grave abuses of their human rights. Journalist Ali Mohammed Omar was murdered on Friday, 16th February 2007, around 20:30hrs local time in Baidoa of Bay region in south-western Somalia by three men. The National Union of Somali Journalists (NUSOJ) is supporting the Report of the United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on the situation in Somalia, which said "Limits to freedom of expression are a serious concern throughout Somalia....". In his Report released on 28th February 2007, the UN Secretary General said "I call on all Somali parties to provide unhindered humanitarian access for relief efforts, as well as guarantees for the safety and security of humanitarian aid workers, and to respect the fundamental human rights of all people in Somalia".

Transitional government moves to Mogadishu

2007-03-15T13:08:00.000-05:00

A news broadcast from South Africa records the move of the Transitional Federal Government from its temporary quarters in Baidoa to Mogadishu, assisted by elements of the Ethiopian army.

News 24 (South Africa)
March 13, 2007

Mogadishu (Somalia) - Somali President Abdullahi Yusuf moved to violence-wracked Mogadishu on Tuesday, a day after parliament voted to relocate the government from Baidoa to the capital, an official said.

"The president's office will be fully operational in Mogadishu from today and all other ministers and government officials will follow suit," deputy defence minister Salad Ali Jelle said. "Every minister will set up his offices in the capital," he added.

The president immediately left the airport, the base of about 1,200 freshly-arrived African Union troops from Uganda, and the target of recent mortar attacks. "From what you see on the ground, Ethiopian and Somali troops are at every junction so the president can safely get to Villa Somalia (the presidential residence)," Jelle said. The Somali interim government on Monday overwhelmingly voted to relocate from the provincial town of Baidoa to Mogadishu, where insurgents have stepped up guerrilla-style attacks in recent weeks, killing dozens of civilians.

But the move is pegged on the government's ability to restore stability there. The government on Sunday announced a massive security drive to pacify Mogadishu within a month using its newly trained forces as well as Ethiopian and [African Union] troops. "Thanks to the improved security in Mogadishu that will allow the government to operate from here," Jelle said. So far, attacks have continued, with Mogadishu residents on Monday reporting at least one dead and five injured after a gun battle sparked by an insurgent attack on Ethiopian forces.

The incident was the latest in a string of attacks since January when joint Ethiopian-Somali forces ousted a powerful Islamist movement from the country's southern and central regions. The six-month AU mission aims to deploy about 8,000 troops to enable Ethiopian forces to leave and Somali forces to take over security. It is the first international peacekeeping venture in Somalia since an ill-fated UN-backed, US-led peace mission launched in the early 1990s. Somalia has lacked an effective government since the 1991 ouster of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre.

"Speak for Yourself, John Alden!"

2007-03-08T13:45:00.000-05:00

After having followed this blog for some time, Tom Schaffer, a political sciences student in Vienna, kindly e-mailed me two weeks ago to ask what I thought should be done in Somalia, and why. I replied by confessing that I had mostly (and rather lazily) been letting my very eloquent friends speak for me. However, I promised to put down some thoughts of my own and post them (see "Ten Things," below).

Please share your own thoughts and comments about my list with me and others by clicking here or at the end of the list.

I also visited Tom's own website and found it to be a most interesting and lively discussion of international affairs issues generally and, of course, Austria in particular—in German. Check it out.

TEN THINGS
the U.S. should or should NOT do about Somalia

Forget force, think conciliation. Resist the temptation to throw armed "peacekeepers," whether ours or someone else's, at Somalia's problems. Instead, press for enforcement of the Security Council's total arms embargo—against everyone. In place of weapons, offer mediators, conciliators, brokers. Get Somalis talking to each other again, as they did in Nairobi. And be patient—don't expect a breakthrough overnight.

Don't take sides. So long as we continue to view Somalia in terms of good guys and bad guys, we're certain to choose the wrong side. By picking favorites, we only reinforce the ethnic and cultural divisions we should be helping Somalis overcome.

Don't project our terrorism issues onto Somalia. Somalia is not a War on Terror battlefield and isn't likely to become one (unless we make it happen). Embassy bombings elsewhere in Africa notwithstanding, the handful of Somali "radicals" on our terrorist list are simply incapable of seriously damaging vital U.S. interests. Chasing down suspected Al Qaeda followers only turns moderate Somalis into enemies.

Don't try to "rescue" Somalia by applying made-in-USA solutions. Resist tutoring them, even with the best of intentions, in how to organize their politics. Let them rediscover and update the traditional systems that served them well enough for a thousand years. We proved a decade ago that we didn't have the answers to Somalia's problems, and we still don't.

Don't take on the task of keeping peace in the Horn of Africa. Resist the imperial urge. No one appointed us to take on that task, much less to hire the Ethiopians, Ugandans, or Kenyans—each with its own private agenda in the Horn—as our surrogates. When the Berlin Wall fell, we swore we would not become the world's sheriff, but we're becoming just that.

Send a diplomat to be our eyes and ears in Somalia. Despite the risks, make the grand gesture. Establish an official presence, at least part time. Send a courageous veteran FSO to set up an office in Mog; establish regular contact with political leaders, the clergy, the business community, and NGO people; and report back regularly to Washington on what's really happening.

Consult seriously with friends and allies about joint, non-military, confidence-building steps. Listen carefully to what the British, Italians, Saudis, Omanis, and Scandinavians say; they know Somalia better than we do. Explore ways to be jointly supportive of reconciliation.

Be genuinely neutral. Don't be sucked into taking sides in clan or factional disputes. Resist being used by one side or another in settling local scores. Asking Somalis to "finger" terrorists has been highly disruptive of conciliation efforts. . . . and absurdly naïve.

Do good works and make them visible. Send food and medicine through NGOs. Nothing won us more Somali friends and admirers than "Operation Restore Hope." They danced in the streets when our troops arrived and pushed aside the warlords' militias when we brought food to the hungry and medicine to the sick. The mission only went sour when we undertook to repair the "root causes" of the country's disorder; we should have quit while we were ahead.

Try making friends. Deep down, the vast majority of Somalis love and admire Americans. Treat them as valuable friends and seek their collaboration as equals. Allying ourselves with warlords and with Ethiopia, to oust a faction that had actually done some good for lots of people, was a colossal PR mistake that won't be easily undone.

''Somalia Reverts to Political Fragmentation''

2007-02-23T16:08:00.000-05:00

If you're a serious Somalia watcher, I strongly recommend you read PINR's in-depth examination of the post-intervention tragedy now unfolding in that country. Here are its introductory paragraphs (to jump to the complete article, click here or on the title line above):

During the first three weeks of February, Somalia continued its slide into political fragmentation as violent attacks against occupying Ethiopian forces and militias loyal to the Transitional Federal Government (T.F.G.) persisted on a nearly daily basis, inter-clan fighting continued to break out, and the level of crime increased.

Although the T.F.G. claimed to be in control of security in the official capital Mogadishu, local media reported that its forces were failing to patrol the streets and that the Ethiopians were remaining in their bases, which came under attack, leading to exchanges of artillery fire that resulted in scores of deaths and injuries, mainly suffered by civilians. With approval of and pressure from the T.F.G., neighborhoods and businesses recruited their own security forces, restoring the situation that existed before the Islamic Courts Council (I.C.C.) had made its unsuccessful bid to unify Somalia in an Islamic state during the last half of 2006.

As the T.F.G. proved unable to establish itself as a legitimate and effective governing authority, external actors -- international and regional organizations, Western donor powers, and regional states -- continued to urge the T.F.G. to initiate reconciliation talks that would include conciliatory elements of the formally disbanded I.C.C. and would be geared to the formation of a national unity government, and to press for the deployment of an African Union (A.U.) "stabilization mission" (AMISOM) that would protect the T.F.G. and train its security forces. Although halting progress was made toward both goals, neither had as yet been realized, due to the reluctance of the T.F.G. to share power and of African states to contribute troops to the mission and donor powers to fund it adequately.

Ethiopia, whose invasion of Somalia in December 2006 had defeated the I.C.C. and whose troops and armor had been propping up the T.F.G. since then, had declared that it would pull out of the country in mid-February, but kept its forces there under Western pressure when AMISOM did not materialize as quickly as hoped. Some Ethiopian withdrawals were reported in local media, but they were only of marginal significance.

The T.F.G. failed to make progress on its top priority of disarming independent clan-based militias, which the United Nations reported were once again falling under the control of warlords who had divided Somalia into fiefdoms before the rise of the I.C.C., and suppressing criminal groups and the militant elements of the I.C.C.

The judgment of PINR's February 2 report on Somalia that the country had entered a devolutionary cycle has been confirmed during the past three weeks. Addis Ababa is satisfied with a fragmented Somalia, Western powers and international organizations have not made stabilizing the country a high priority, African states are either unwilling to contribute troops to a conflict zone or will only sign on to a restricted mission, and the T.F.G. is resistant to "inclusive" reconciliation.

"Relative success" in Somalia

2007-02-23T10:28:00.000-05:00

I sent the following letter to the editor of the New York Times this morning, in response to its front-page article "U.S. Used Bases in Ethiopia to Hunt Al Qaeda in Africa":

To the Editor:

If some U.S. officials regard our wrecking-ball intervention in Somalia to have been a "relative success," their notion of success is a baffling one. Like our search for WMD in Iraq, our dragnet for Al Qaeda operatives in the Somali desert has turned up nothing useful whatever in our war on terror. Instead, by contracting the services of the hated warlords and then relying on the less-than-impartial Ethiopians for intelligence, we "succeeded" only in killing and maiming scores of Somali nomads while snuffing out the only gleam of hope for national recovery that Somalia has seen in sixteen years. Along the way, of course, we managed to derail chances for an accommodation among feuding clans that might have allowed the fragile transitional government to assume effective power; we plunged the country's heartland back into the nightmare of violence it had begun to escape; and we shredded whatever admiration and gratitude toward the U.S. remained among a people that desperately wished to be our friends. What a strange measure of success . . . but then we're also "succeeding" in Iraq, aren't we?

Frank Crigler
Durham, North Carolina

"Fighting fire with fire" is not the answer

2007-02-20T22:48:00.000-05:00

Fighting in Mogadishu grew much more intense over the past weekend, as transitional government forces using heavy artillery sought to neutralize the rocket and mortar attacks of its opponents. At least sixteen noncombattants were reported killed early today (Tuesday), and hospital personnel said that at least 40 more were wounded. Many Mogadishu residents were reported streaming out of town to escape the violence.

Transitional government officials, counting the days before an African Union peacekeeping force begins arriving, have meanwhile organized a "twenty-four hour paramilitary force" to chase down and capture dissidents.

I am personally very skeptical that either government backed paramilitaries or foreign peacekeeping troops will succeed in curbing the violence. So long as the transitional government and its foreign allies insist that the solution lies in suppressing dissent by force, I predict their efforts will fail. What is needed instead right now is some courageous mediation effort on the part of Somalia's real friends, aimed at a ceasefire and a resumption of political dialogue. The United States, instead of fanning the flames, should be seeking to organize such an effort. Otherwise, the ranks of angry Islamists are almost certain to swell.

I'm not sure my good friend Bashir agrees. "So this is the kind of 'freedom' the US government was trying to secure for Somalis!" he writes. " And where are all those (UN, AU, Human Rights Organizations etc.) who claimed to be 'struggling' for human rights, women's rights .....? They are all silent or hypocritically calling for peace talks with the 'moderates' of the Islamic courts."

REUTERS
Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Mortar blasts rock Mogadishu

By Guled Mohamed and Sahal Abdulle, 2 hours, 44 minutes ago

A wave of pre-dawn mortar attacks pounded Mogadishu and killed at least 16 people on Tuesday in one of the most brutal bombardments since an Islamist movement was forced out of the Somali capital last month.

The hilltop presidential palace, Villa Somalia, and the coastal city's defense headquarters were among the targets hit in attacks that struck many quarters of Mogadishu and sent hundreds of residents fleeing to outlying towns.

"They showered us with rockets and a mortar also hit the compound. Luckily no one was hurt," said a government soldier who was in Villa Somalia during the attack but declined to be named for fear of reprisal.

"Our troops and those from our ally Ethiopia were forced to fire heavy artillery," he told Reuters. "We had to retaliate. These elements are being paid to cause all this destruction."

A spate of near-daily attacks have challenged the government's effort to impose security on the city recaptured in December by government forces and their Ethiopian allies from Islamists who controlled it for six months.

The death toll climbed throughout the day on Tuesday as more reports came in from across the chaotic capital, with witnesses and officials putting the total at 16 -- all of them civilians.

"A pregnant woman died in a house made of iron sheets after a mortar hit where she was sleeping. ... There was blood everywhere," witness Ibrahim Maalim, who said he saw six bodies in the central Wardigley district, told Reuters.

At one Mogadishu hospital alone officials said there were more than 40 wounded and those with lesser injuries were sent home. Relatives gathered around patients wrapped in bandages lying on the steamy, crowded hospital's floors.

The city's taxis, buses and trucks were packed with residents heading out of town.

"May God help us. These people played mortar games with us caught in between," said Salavo Elmi, an 80-year-old great-grandmother, as she left Mogadishu by taxi.

CASH FOR ATTACKS

Deputy Defense Minister Salad Ali Jelle accused Islamist remnants of paying the gunmen in the impoverished city where jobs are scarce and being a hired gun has long been one of the steadiest sources of employment for young men.

"The insurgents are paying $100 a day to whoever fires rockets and mortars at the government and people," he said.

But Jelle said a 24-hour paramilitary unit introduced on Monday would soon demonstrate its effectiveness: "The plan is to expand our control in the city so the extremists are no longer safe anywhere."

President Abdullahi Yusuf's government says it is doing its best to police one of the world's most dangerous cities with little help. And there are plenty of people with military weapons and anti-government grudges to make the task harder.

Ugandan soldiers are due to deploy in Mogadishu soon as the vanguard of an 8,000-strong African Union peacekeeping force to replace the Ethiopians.

The Nigerian army said 850 of its troops had completed training for induction into the AU mission and were expected to arrive in Somalia by mid-April at the latest.

Also on Tuesday, one of three private media groups summoned by intelligence chiefs a day earlier said it was "shocked and dismayed" after being told to stop reporting unrest in the city.

Shabelle TV and radio said the deputy head of national security "threatened the directors that (under) martial law... government soldiers can shoot and kill everyone they want."

Shabelle Chairman Abdi Maalik Yusuf Mohamuud called on the international community to pressure the government to respect press freedom.

Sadia to Zakaria: "Somalia Back to Square One"

2007-02-16T09:12:00.000-05:00

Sadia Ali Aden, president of the Somalia Diaspora Network, tried her best last week to explain to Newsweek International editor Fareed Zakaria why U.S. intervention on the warlords' side had not been helpful to Somalia—but he just didn't get it.

In a television interview on Zakaria's program "Foreign Exchange" February 8, Sadia said the U.S. had mistakenly relied upon Ethiopian intelligence when it judged that the Union of Islamic Courts harbored al Qaida terrorists and thus concluded the Courts were a threat to its interests in the region. So when the Courts gained control of Mogadishu and expelled the warlords, Somalia became a new front in its worldwide "war on terror," the C.I.A. channeled funding to the warlords through the CIA, and the U.S. endorsed Ethiopia's military intervention to halt the Courts' advances. The result, Sadia said, was a renewal of ethnic conflict that had brought Somalia "back to square one."

Zakaria pressed Sadia to clarify what the U.S. should be doing in Somalia. "It should NOT have supported the warlords," she answered. "It should stop the bombing, encourage the Ethiopians to withdraw, and deploy human rights monitors who could provide an accurate picture of what was happening in Somalia." But Zakaria wasn't satisfied. "You say the U.S. should support the Somali government [although Sadia had not said that exactly]. But wasn't it the Somali government that approved of the bombing and invited the Ethiopians to intervene?"

Sadia attempted to explain that the U.S. had in effect sided with one faction within the transitional government when it should have supported reconciliation among its factions, but Zakaria's eyes glazed over. They agreed finally that it was a "very complex situation."

Click here to see and hear the full interview on Zakaria's website.

Museveni Dismisses Somali Islamists' Threats to Peacekeepers

2007-02-14T11:49:00.000-05:00

President Museveni of Uganda told IRIN reporters earlier this week that "death threats" by Somali Islamist leaders would not deter Uganda from sending troops to Somalia, as promised. "If you bring Jihad, we'll bring back Black Jihad to you," he is quoted as saying.

Museveni also insisted that the Ugandan troops in Somalia would not be a "peace-keeping" force but rather a "peace-building" force, intended to empower those Somalis who truly wish to rebuild their country. Uganda, he said, had sent similar forces into Rwanda, [DRC]Congo, and Sudan with the same goal in mind. By contrast, "Peace-keeping is a Western concept. [It] is UN-ism . . . which is simply loitering around the globe with no solutions, adding to the problems. We are not part of the UN confusion."

Portions of the interview concerning Somalia follow; you can read the full interview by clicking here.

Q (IRIN): In terms of the domestic issues you have to deal with, is it wise to get involved in Somalia?

A (Museveni): The Somalia issue is not that difficult in my opinion. It is the collapse of the state of Somalia. Now that the Somalis have consensus, they should be helped to rebuild their state. Our going to Somalia will not be to do work for Somalis, but to enable them to do their work - rebuild their state, rebuild their army in particular, train the new army. And that is all. This can be done, we've done it before; it is not such a big problem.

Q: What exactly have you offered the African Union?

A: Soldiers - to provide insurance against any attempt to overthrow the government. And number two, to train the Somalis. It is a catalyst force, not the one to do the work. The problem with western countries is they try to act on behalf of the people, that is where their programmes get into problems. But if you come to empower the people to do their own thing, it is easier - that's what we did with the Tanzanians in 1978-1979 against Idi Amin. The Tanzanians empowered us, and then they left. Thereafter we did our own thing.

Q: After the Ethiopian invasion and the US bombardment, there is a power vacuum and no peace to keep. Is it a problem sending in peace-keeping troops when there no peace to keep?

A: That concept of peace-keeping is a western concept. It is just a part of the UN [United Nations]-ism. There is a problem called UN-ism, which is simply loitering around the globe with no solutions, adding to the problems. The issue there is peace-building. We are not going to keep the peace, because we are not supposed to be bringing the peace. That's opportunistic - how can you say, I will not come in until there is peace, and I will come to keep the peace! Who will get the peace? It should be part of peace-building. That is what we did in many of the situations - in Uganda with Idi Amin; in Rwanda with the genocidaires, we empowered the RPF [Rwanda Patriotic Front], then they were able to stop the genocide. In our fight with Sudan - we empowered those who wanted peace in Sudan, and a solution. So in Somalia it's the same thing - it is not 'peace-keeping', it is peace-building. And peace-building is helping the Somalis to empower themselves, on the one hand, and on the other to be as inclusive as possible. After a little while, maybe two, three years - I don't know what they've agreed - go for elections, give back sovereignty to the people. So it is peace-building, not peace-keeping. That is UN-ism; we are not part of the UN confusion.

Q: The African Union is aiming to recruit 8,000 troops - if they are not able to raise that number, would you still send in the Ugandan unit?

A: Yes, because what the Somalis need is someone to train them, that is all.

Q: But there have been death threats against the peacekeepers .

A: That is no problem - we are used to those so-called Jihadis . because we had [Hassan al] Turabi [a prominent Sudanese Islamist politician] here on our border, he was using that language - 'Jihad'. We are black people, this is a black continent - our continent. You cannot bring that Middle Eastern nonsense here. We are not going to accept it. If you bring Jihad, we'll bring back Black Jihad to you. These are Somali people. They are all Muslims. So Jihad to do what now? [Somalis] have a temporary government now. Restore a normal life; then go for elections, after a little while. So, Jihad against whom?

It Must Be True: VOA reports "unconfirmed" deal aimed at freeing U.S. troops captured in Somalia

2007-02-12T20:57:00.001-05:00

Although hushed up in Washington, there was apparently some foundation in fact to the report posted here on February 6 that about a dozen U.S. troops had been captured by Islamist forces during fighting last month in Somalia. In a dispatch from its East Africa Bureau in Nairobi just this morning, VOA Correspondent Alisha Ryu quoted an "unconfirmed" Yemini newspaper report claiming that "a top Islamist leader, who surrendered to U.S. and Kenyan authorities last month, has traveled from Kenya to Yemen, allegedly under a deal aimed at securing the freedom of more than a dozen U.S. troops captured by Islamist forces in early January."

The report, which appeared in an Arabic-language newspaper, said "the United States agreed to allow Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed to go to Yemen in exchange for the release of the U.S. servicemen." VOA Correspondent Ryu notes that the captured troops were "allegedly seized around the Islamist stronghold of Ras Kamboni, near Somalia's border with Kenya, while the United States carried out air strikes in the area."

The reporter adds that "the Pentagon has repeatedly said that no U.S. ground troops were deployed in Somalia."

In the same VOA dispatch, Ms. Ryu also reports a third straight day of intensive attacks in Mogadishu by an Islamist group calling itself the "People's Resistance Movement in the Land of the Two Migrations." The group has claimed responsibility for much of the recent violence aimed at the Presidential palace and police stations. It has called for war against Ethiopian troops in Somalia and has threatened to kill any peacekeeper who steps foot on Somali soil.

(The full text of the report on these two subjects is available at the VOA website.)

My friend Bashir, who drew my attention to the VOA report, comments as follows:

The report by the VOA reporter Alisha Ryu is interesting, in that 3 weeks [after it first circulated] this 'rumour' is given credence just by the VOA's mentioning it and even more importantly by the last phrase--a blatantly false denial.

Is This True? " Eleven US soldiers reported seized in Somalia fighting last month

2007-02-06T22:06:00.001-05:00

I find the following news report astonishing but intriguing nonetheless:

According to Al-Khaleej news agency based in the Emirates quoting DPA news agency, Somalia’s routed Islamist leader Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed and the US ambassador to Kenya, Michael Ranneberger, are said to be bargaining over the release of 11 US servicemen reportedly captured by the defeated Islamists in southern Somalia.

The news agency asserts that "reliable diplomatic sources" indicate that the two men have held four rounds of talks over the American soldiers in the captivity of Islamists in southern jungles of the war-torn country, Somalia.

The remainder of the report may be read on the Shabelle Net News page by clicking here. I'm personally unaware of any Western media report that any such number of U.S. soldiers were taken prisoner during the brief US-supported invasion of Somalia by Ethiopian forces last month. Can anyone shed light from other sources on these claims? If so, kindly comment below.

Experts warn US air raids in Somalia may be inefficient, harmful

2007-01-30T13:19:00.000-05:00

PARIS (AFP), by Michel Moutot Sun Jan 28.

US air raids in Somalia to flush out suspect Al-Qaeda operatives may be ineffective in fighting terrorism and risk making the country's Muslim population more radical, regional experts warn.

US military forces have carried out several attacks on Islamist targets or suspected members of Al-Qaeda since the start of the month, but Washington has admitted it is "doubtful" that "any of the big guys", sought for attacks against US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, were hit. . . .

"Somalia's tribal system is very strict," warned French Africa expert Roland Marchal from the Paris-based Center for International Studies and Research. "If anyone gets hurt in your tribe, either you accept the price for the bloodshed or you kill the assailant.". . . .

Karin von Hippel, a former UN mission member in Somalia, sees sketchy intelligence as one of the key problems in the air raids. "I'm very concerned about these air strikes," said Hippel who works for the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "I don't think the intelligence they're acting on is very good.". . . .

Hippel, who is regularly consulted by US authorities, said she was told during these meetings, "We have to build as many schools as we kill terrorists," but added, "They don't do that."

"You talk to CIA people, they tell you that of course they perfectly understand that, and then they just go on killing people, so... I don't understand why the rhetoric is not matched by reality."

"These air raids can only make the Islamic Tribunals (militia) more palatable for the people," regretted Francois Grignon, Africa programme director of the International Crisis Group (ICG). "Collateral damage provokes hatred and fury among people who suffer from it, all the more so as the Americans have so far not given any proof of their victory: no terrorist leader has apparently been wiped out.". . . .

"The aim seems to be to score at home: to show that they do not hesitate to use a big stick," Grignon added.

To read the complete AFP story by Michel Moutot, click here.

Somali Islamists threaten AU peacekeepers

2007-01-30T13:10:00.000-05:00

ADDIS ABABA (Reuters) - A Somali Islamist group threatened on Tuesday to fight any peacekeeping troops sent to their country as African leaders struggled to put together an international force for the anarchic Horn of Africa nation.

The European Union released 15 million euros ($19 million) to finance peacekeeping operations, but leaders at an African Union summit were still seeking the 4,000 troops they need to bring the projected force up to strength.

A total of 8,000 troops are seen as necessary to fill a power vacuum when Ethiopian troops pull out after having backed the government in a brief war that defeated the Islamists who had run much of the country for the previous six months.

"If African troops are not in place quickly, then there will be chaos," African Union commission chief Alpha Oumar Konare told the summit.

Delegates to the summit in Addis Ababa said Ghana, Algeria, Tanzania and Zambia were considering whether to provide troops but final pledges might not be made at the talks. So far Uganda, Nigeria and Malawi have promised soldiers.

As the African leaders deliberated, a Somali Islamist Web site posted a message apparently from a new insurgent group which spelled out the dangers awaiting any peacekeeping force.

"Somalia is not a place where you can come to earn a salary -- it is a place where you can die," said the self-styled Popular Resistance Movement.

"The salary you are coming to look for here would be used to transport your coffin back home.". . . .

To read the full story, click here.

Ambassador promises U.S. will stay the course in Somalia

2007-01-27T16:16:00.000-05:00

My good friend Bashir has drawn my attention to an extraordinarily straightforward interview with the U.S. ambassador to Kenya, Michael Ranneburger, carried recently by ShabelleNet from Mogadishu. According to the ambassador, U.S. policy toward Somalia consists of just three goals:

Help the Somali people establish security;
Help them establish stability, law, and order with peace; and,
Help them get the humanitarian assistance they need.

Asked whether the U.S. will be involved militarily in Somalia (to take up the slack after the after the Ethiopians leave), our ambassador solemnly promised that "the United States is going to be involved for [a] very long time. This is not something where we are going in very quickly and will then leave. We are coming in to stay."

Was the U.S. was encouraging dialogue between the transitional government and the Islamic Courts? Amb. Ranneburger pointed out that, "of course the Islamic Courts no longer exists as an institution, but . . . any Somali who renounces violence and extremism and terrorism should have a role to play in the future of their country, and this will include individual members of the Islamic Courts if they are moderate people who as I say renounces violence, extremism and terrorism."

Does the U.S. have evidence that terrorists involved in the Nairobi embassy bombings were present in Somalia? The ambassador is emphatic:

There is no question about it. The evidence is clear and it is absolutely certain. At least three of the individuals responsible for the bombing of the US embassies in Nairobi and Daressalam in 1998 were taking refuge within Somalia. Those three people were Fazul, Napal, and al-Sudani. There is no doubt whatsoever about that. There is also no doubt whatsoever that the Islamic Courts knew they were there and this is something that the Somali people need to know. These three people are individuals are associated with al-Qaeda.

But more importantly, there were a large number of foreign fighters and foreign jihadists and other people associated with al-Qaeda, who were there active in support of the Islamic Courts. I can tell you with great certainty that the influence of al-Qaeda people was growing within the Islamic Courts and posed a major threat to the people of Somalia.

You can read a transcript of most of the interview at the ShabelleNet website.
Better yet, listen to the audio of the entire interview here.

Bashir's own comments:

Please note that the ambassador mentions terrorism, terrorists etc. but since the fall of the Islamic Courts it is rather obvious the previous UN/US reports of presence of Eritrean troops 2000 strong, several hundred foreign fighters, Al qaeda etc. have turned out to be false. In fact the few "foreigners" so far arrested in Somalia were Canadian-Somalis and some Tabliq (Islamic version of Jehovah Witness or Mormon in their traveling preaching style) . . . .

Also the ambassador is asking the classic question, "Have you stopped beating your wife?" of Sheikh Sharif, the Islamic courts, and specifically the Ayr subclan in demanding that they first renounce violence, terrorism etc. before they can be allowed to participate in the politics of the country i.e. they have to first announce that they have engaged in unacceptable violence and terrorism and that they will now stop that. If defending one's country from the invasion of a foreign foe is considered radical and extremism I wonder how many founding fathers and heroic Presidents will join the ranks of extremists?

"You break it, you own it!"

2007-01-16T21:36:00.000-05:00

Bashir drew my attention this evening to an excellent piece of analysis published in today's Guardian by one of this country's few scholarly experts on Somalia, Dr. Ken Menkhaus of Davidson College in North Carolina. Bashir commented that Prof. Menkhaus "raises the issue of the US getting rid of the courts and the stability they brought and leaving the chaos to the Ethiopians and the TFG."

As always, Menkhaus makes some solid points:

Thanks to the Ethiopian intervention, the jihadist wing of the UIC is at least temporarily on the run. But Mogadishu is again ungoverned and growing more lawless by the day.

Somalia's Transitional Federal Government (TFG) is now expected to assume administrative control of Mogadishu, a city of one million hostile, fearful, and well-armed people. But the TFG is weak and intensely disliked by most Mogadishu constituencies. It is in no position to govern absent a partnership forged with the Mogadishu leadership, and will not even be able to remain in the capital without the continued presence of Ethiopian forces.

However, Bashir wonders whether Prof. Menkhaus hasn't let the U.S. off the hook, given this country's evident complicity in breaking the Somali pottery. "I have not heard [U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Africa] Jendayi [Frazer] talking about Somalia lately because for her it is mission accomplished. Jendayi is in the proverbial Somali situation of a man having just convinced a passerby (in this case Meles) to hold the lion (somalia) for him by the ears while he secures his macawiis or sarong and then departs from the scene. Meles is frantically looking for the AU troops but his American friends have gone AWOL on him."

Bashir makes a valid point himself!

Oxfam reports 70 nomads killed in Somalia bombings

2007-01-13T11:24:00.000-05:00

According to the international relief agency Oxfam, based in Nairobi, its partner organizations in Somalia report that recent bombing raids have claimed the lives of at least 70 people. Reports indicate that bombs have hit vital water sources as well as large groups of nomads and their animals who had gathered around large fires at night to ward off mosquitoes.

PLEASE COMMENT! Do you have information about casualties or collateral damage resulting from last week's military action in southern Somalia? If so, please share your information or link by clicking here.

Conflict expert warns of intervention's broader impact

2007-01-13T09:04:00.000-05:00

Nii Akuetteh is Executive Director of Africa Action and founder of the Democracy and Conflict Research Institute, based in Accra, Ghana. At a press panel January 9 organized by the Somali Diaspora Network at the National Press Club in Washington D.C., Dr. Akuetteh warned of the destabilizing effect the US-backed Ethiopian intervention in Somalia could have throughout the region. Citing the growing human tragedy in Darfur, he said "we have bigger fish to fry" in Africa than taking sides in another country's internal quarrels.

Akuetteh expressed similar concerns in a December 28 radio discussion hosted by Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! Radio, where Prof. Said Sheikh Samatar of Rutgers University was also a panelist. Here are excerpts from Dr. Akuetteh's earlier remarks:

. . . [As] you know, a few weeks ago, the US pushed for a resolution in the Security Council that called for a peacekeeping troops in Somalia. And it was stipulated that none of the major regional powers that share borders with Somalia, should have troops in there. And we are talking especially about Kenya and Ethiopia.

Now, if Ethiopia had stepped in against those wishes, one has to imagine what the other powers in the region will be thinking. I do think that it is a major mistake for the United States to be encouraging Ethiopia to step in, in such a heavy-handed way. It is not a sustainable solution because as Prime Minister Meles Zenawi said, they have a mission, when they're done with their mission they’ll withdraw.

Let’s say they’ll withdraw in several weeks, what happens then to the transitional government? So this is not a sustainable solution either by the Ethiopians or by the Untied States. And I might say that this is just the latest in our view of a long series of blunders by American policy in the region, going all the way back to the support of Siad Barre during the Ogaden wars in the 1970's.

You can read the full transcript of the earlier discussion, including the dissenting views of Professor Samatar, at the Democracy Now! website (click here).

A Somali Jihadist: "We're Not Al-Qaeda"

2007-01-11T10:04:00.000-05:00

The following lead (courtesy of Bashir) introduces a most interesting interview with a Somali militia member, published yesterday on the website of TIME Magazine:

Said Ali, 21, is a volunteer fighter for the Shabab militia, the feared enforcers of the Islamic Courts Union. The U.S. brands the organization as an ally of al-Qaeda; in reality, it is also a nationalist anti-warlord movement that contains many Muslim moderates and has no international ambitions. He was 11 when he left his village in southern Somalia and traveled to Mogadishu to look for an education. But all public education had collapsed with the last functioning government in 1991, leaving private school the only option. And Said Ali, like most of his generation, was unable to afford the fees. Instead, he found a job as a porter, and then graduated to selling shirts and kikoi wraps by the side of the road. In time, he was given a job inside a clothes store in Bakara Market, where he earned about 10,000 Somali shillings (80 cents) a day. But often he would be forced to hand over his earnings to armed militias blocking the roads on his way home. He came out of hiding in central Mogadishu to meet TIME's Alex Perry. . . .*

Read the full interview on TIME's website (click here).

*Photo above, by Abukar Albadri (EPA), shows fighters loyal to the Islamic Courts Union loading up on trucks to head to the front in December 2006.

NOTE: Be sure to read Joseph Peter's probing comment on this posting. (CLICK HERE)

Somali physician calls on leaders in Diaspora to return home and work for reconciliation

2007-01-07T15:07:00.000-05:00

On the Hiiraan Online website, Dr. Abdishakur Jowhar, a Somali physician living in Toronto, predicts that Ethiopia's intervention in Somalia will result in a war of insurgency that will only please al Qaeda while making "sacrificial lambs" of both Ethiopian and Somali youths. Somalis should not wait on anyone else to head off this tragedy, he argues. Rather, Somali leaders in the diaspora must seize the opportunity to return home and work for national reconciliation.

Some quotes (but please take the trouble to read the whole article):

"Somalia’s Diaspora leadership has a rare opportunity to make a difference. They have gone out far and wide to over to 15 different foreign countries in artificially baked dead-end Somali reconciliation conferences. Now they need to go to the one place where they have a reasonable chance at long last of making a real difference for Somalis- Somalia. These reconciliation professionals need to go to Mogadishu. They need go to Baidoba. And they need to do so now.

"The situation is ripe for Somalis to reconcile by themselves, in their own country with the help of their own people. No more Yemenis. No more Sudanese. No more Kenyans, Libyans, Egyptians. No more IGAD nonsense. No more holding Somali “unity” conferences in posh hotels. Few brave good Somalis are needed now to provide a face saving formula for both Zenawi and Aweys and to provide some space for rational dialogue for Somalis every where."

Kenya to expel Somali leaders

2007-01-07T09:07:00.000-05:00

Drawing my attention to a report from Nairobi in today's "Sunday Standard ," a Somali friend suggests that the U.S. may be pressing the Kenyan government to turn the screws on Somali opponents of transitional president Abdullahi Yusuf. My own reading of the report deepens my concern, since the report coincides with a meeting in Nairobi of the so-called Contact Group on Somalia and suggests that the U.S. member of that group, Assistant Secretary of State Jendayi Frazer (shown above), is winning closer cooperation from the Kenyans in support of U.S. policy toward Somalia. Kenyan authorities are screening refugee flows from Somalia, detaining those who may have been supporters of the Islamist movement, and cautioning others who might use Kenyan asylum as a platform for criticizing Somalia's fragile transitional government. What will become of those detained in Kenya is anyone's guess; but it's clear they will not be allowed, in the Foreign Minister's words, to "subvert peace efforts" in Somalia.

State Department spin on Somalia news

2007-01-04T17:28:00.000-05:00

The previous posting referred to difficulties at least one Italian journalist has had getting a balanced perspective on Somalia published in Italy. The New York Times ran a piece on December 26 reporting on our own government's efforts to slant news about Ethiopia's offensive in Somalia against Somali Islamists and in favor of the invaders. "The Department's internal guidance to staff members," said the Times, "instructed officials to play down the invasion in public statements." Some quotes from the Department's guidance:

"The press must not be allowed to make this about Ethiopia, or Ethiopia violating the territorial integrity of Somalia. . . .

"Emphasize that this is a distraction from the issue of dialogue between the [transitional federal government] and the Islamic courts and shift the focus back to the need for dialogue."

Be sure to read this enlightening article in its entirety (click here or on the title of the posting, above).

Journalistic balance on Somalia situation suffers setback in Italy

2007-01-04T16:51:00.000-05:00

Please take a look at the comment left by an Italian journalist who dared to offer her readers a balanced view of Ethiopia's intervention in Somalia (click here -- you'll find it at the end of my posting "Questions from a close friend"). A bit disheartening, to say the least.

Background on the U.S. "war" on terrorism in Somalia

2007-01-04T16:07:00.000-05:00

A Somali-American friend has just brought the following article to my attention. Published six months ago in the Washington Post, it sheds light on how the U.S. got itself in the ludicrous position of backing Somalia's tyrant warlords against the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC).

Black Eye in Somalia
By Craig Timberg
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, July 2, 2006; A22
MOGADISHU, Somalia -- The land was little more than a patch of scrub outside the city. But this being Somalia -- lawless, fractured and armed to the teeth -- it was a patch of scrub that two of the country's most powerful families were prepared to fight over.
The fighting, which began Jan. 13, quickly took on wider significance because of the presence, at an airstrip just three miles away, of a small team of U.S. intelligence officials, according to Somalis knowledgeable about the events of that day.
The Americans were in Somalia because of concerns about terrorism, not land. But when the gunfire rang out, the sources said, the U.S. officials wrongly concluded that they were under attack by Islamic terrorists and abruptly fled. It was a provocation, U.S. officials later told Somalis, that demanded a muscular response.
In the weeks that followed this little-known incident, which U.S. officials have refused to confirm or deny, the United States expanded its role in Somalia to levels not seen since it abandoned the country in 1994. The Americans helped organize a group of secular warlords into an "anti-terror coalition" and provided them with a large, steady diet of cash.
The warlords, feared and hated by many Somalis, bragged about the money as they armed themselves as never before.
The infusion of cash upset a fragile balance between the two sides -- but not in the direction the Americans had hoped.
By March, the warlords were under siege. By June 6, they had fled. And by June 24, Hassan Dahir Aweys, a militant Islamic leader hostile to Western democracy and reputed to have ties to al-Qaeda, had taken control of Mogadishu. Late last week, Osama bin Laden boasted of successes there in an audiotape that singled out Somalia as a front in his war against Americans.
"Simply, they made a mistake," Ali Iman Sharmarke, a prominent Mogadishu businessman and radio journalist, said of the Americans in an interview in Nairobi. "If their intent was to capture terrorists, they needed a wider approach . . . to help the people of Somalia."
American analysts, though not knowledgeable about the incident at the airstrip, said that by giving cash to the warlords the United States triggered events that quickly moved beyond its control, producing a setback likely to hurt not only Somalis but also the U.S. war on terrorism.
"U.S. support for the warlords hit Mogadishu like a stick in the hornet's nest," said John Prendergast, an Africa analyst with the International Crisis Group, a research organization, speaking recently from Chad, where he was traveling. "It was totally the law of unintended consequences in the extreme."
The accounts in this article are based on interviews with Somali business leaders, politicians, civil society activists and members of one of the families involved in the January fight.
The protagonists in the initial dispute were political and military rivals, both fromMogadishu's elite Abgal sub-clan.
Abukar Omar Adan was a devoutly Islamic and heavily armed clan elder with ties to the strict neighborhood religious courts that had brought a semblance of order to a city without a government.
His rival, Bashir Raghe, was a brash, younger man who had been a waste contractor with the U.S. military forces in Mogadishu before the United States pulled out.
After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States, Raghe became one of America's foremost allies in Somalia, receiving payments of hundreds of thousands of dollars for capturing and turning over terrorism suspects to U.S. officials, Somalis say.
Raghe strode through Mogadishu wearing Ray-Ban sunglasses on his head and a pistol strapped to each hip. And in the months leading up to the fighting in Mogadishu, he was seen using crisp, new $100 bills to buy machine guns and heavily armed pickup trucks.
In addition to his alliance with the Americans, Raghe had other strategic assets: He controlled Esaly Airport, a seaside strip of packed sand north of Mogadishu, and, at least nominally, the road leading there from the city.
The trouble began late last year when Adan paid $30,000 for land that straddled the airport road, intending to build a development including homes and warehouses.
Fearing the loss of control over lucrative airport traffic, Raghe objected, according to Adan's brother and son. After several verbal confrontations, the two sides began fighting in the open Jan. 13, moments after the U.S. intelligence officials -- most accounts put the number at four -- had landed at Esaly.
A few miles away, fleets of trucks mounted with machine guns exchanged fire. By the end of a battle lasting nearly six hours, Raghe's forces had killed seven of Adan's men and captured the land and four of his gun trucks -- a source of enduring frustration to Adan in a city where clout was measured mainly in terms of firepower.
Adan's son, Abdulkadir Abukar, 30, a key adviser to his father, said by phone that his family had no idea that Americans were nearby during the battle. But through the Abgal sub-clan's system of rapidly shared information, it soon became known.
Fearing a reaction by the Americans, Abukar and his uncle traveled to Nairobi, the region's business and diplomatic hub, to reassure U.S. officials that the gunfight was only about land. Abukar and his uncle also requested that their four captured gun trucks be returned.
But over the next several weeks, in numerous discussions in person and on the phone, U.S.officials accused Abukar and his family of being terrorists, he said. "They said, 'You were ready to kill us.' . . . They said, 'Your file will be put in Washington, and you will be recorded as a terrorist group.' "
Two other Somalis with direct knowledge of the meetings gave similar accounts. A third Somali, speaking on condition of anonymity, recounted a separate but similar conversation with a U.S. intelligence official who said of the officers at the airstrip on Jan. 13: "They were ambushed. This was a terrorist who was trying to kill American officers."
Back in Mogadishu, the fight was seen differently -- as a sign of growing belligerence by the United States and the warlords it backed.
In the months leading up to the battle, Somalis say, officials of the Islamic courts had grown increasingly nervous as they watched Raghe and other suddenly flush warlords add men, guns and trucks to their arsenal. Surging demand caused the price of AK-47 assault rifles at Mogadishu's main market to more than quadruple, from $120 to $580. The price of gunmen went from $70 a month to $300, Somalis say.
"All of a sudden they were buying weapons," said Khadija O. Ali, founder of a Mogadishuwomen's group and a graduate student at George Mason University, speaking in Nairobi. "All of the sudden there were planes coming and the Americans were meeting only with" the warlords.
Anti-Americanism, stoked by the war in Iraq, intensified as supporters of the Islamic courts spread word that the United States was backing the warlords, whom many residents of Mogadishu say operated with impunity as their gunmen terrorized the lawless city, raping, robbing and killing as they pleased.
Public opinion gradually coalesced in favor of the Islamic courts and their militias, Somalis say. Prominent businessmen contributed men, trucks and guns to the cause of driving out the warlords. And so on Feb. 18, when Raghe and several other warlords announced the formation of an "anti-terrorism coalition" -- featuring the backing of even more American money -- the reaction was swift. Battles broke out the same day in a struggle now seen as being between homegrown Islamic militias and a hated U.S. proxy force.
A month later, on the morning of March 22, Adan's forces -- backed now by the Islamic militias -- attacked Raghe's position at the disputed land. This time, despite the enhanced support of the U.S. government for the warlords, Raghe was routed in fighting that left dozens of his men dead.
The battles between Adan and Raghe were viewed in Mogadishu as the crucial first fights between Islamic militias and secular, U.S.-backed warlords.
By the time the fighting ended in early June, more than 300 Somalis had been killed. Aweys, long a target of U.S. counterterrorism efforts, now heads the Islamic militias that rule Mogadishu.
The U.S. effort failed, Somalis said, because it focused only on seizing terrorism suspects, not attempting to improve living conditions in one of the world's poorest countries.
"It will radicalize the people," said Ali, a naturalized U.S. citizen. "Unless I am also safe, you are not going to be safe. That's the message the Americans must learn. They cannot fight this alone."
Staff writer Karen DeYoung in Washington contributed to this report.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company

Questions from a close friend

2006-12-30T09:15:00.000-05:00

Following message from a distinguished diplomat and close friend reached me yesterday (my reply follows):

I confess that I have great difficulty understanding what is happening in Somalia. It is not self evident to me that restoration of the so-called official or recognized government is necessarily undesirable, although the downsides are clear enough: continuing long-term insurgency, a refugee mess in Kenya, uncertainty to say the least about the motivation and intentions of Meles Zenawi, further international opprobrium for the Bush Administration. But "victory" for the Islamists would result in miserable continuing problems for poor Somalia as well, would it not, and perhaps for the US also? Are the Islamists in fact patriots with any realistic hope of unifying the country?

What, practically, could diplomacy accomplish in these circumstances beyond a temporary pause in the bloodshed? USG encouragement of warlords and Ethiopian invaders is distasteful, but I am not sufficiently informed to evaluate the options.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Dear ______,

. . . . None of us has a whole lot of trustworthy information about what's happened in the last few weeks. Still, the broad outlines are pretty clear and need to be aired and discussed among people who really care about the country and its future. The outcome just might be an improvement in understanding all around, not least of all among members of the press and policy makers in government. . . .

A few points in response to your questions:

-- There will be no "restoration of the so-called official or recognized government," whether desirable or undesirable, because it was never ousted or overthrown. Actually, it has been an extremely frail flower from the start, unable -- until now, at least -- even to agree on where to base itself, much less on how to govern the country. That's because it's a hodge-podge of contending, quarreling faction leaders, old-line politicians and warlords, deeply split among themselves over how and whether to relate to the Ethiopians, Kenyans, Saudis, etc. From their standpoint, the Islamist movement has served as a "common enemy" helping them overcome their differences, at least temporarily, but it remains to be seen how long they'll hang together if that enemy disappears.

-- It's worth noting that although the media are calling the TFG "internationally recognized" -- presumably because it's been allowed to occupy Somalia's seat at the U.N. -- no major state that I know of has in fact extended it formal recognition. Certainly the USG has not -- and probably won't as long as the issue of Somaliland's jealously held independence remains unresolved. (Ironic, isn't it, that we've been promoting and sponsoring a government we don't recognize while ignoring another Somali government that's pretty much put its house in order?)

-- A "long-term insurgency" by the Islamists seems unlikely to me right now, in part because so few Somalis are really religious zealots (I simply don't buy the notion that the Islamic Courts movement was captured or even very strongly influenced by the handful of radicals with alleged ties to al-Qaida who came to the fore after the mainline clerics gained power in Mogadishu). But a great deal depends on what happens next. A return to the feudal anarchy of nine months ago and a failure of the TFG to get its act together and impose order could very well result in rekindling the Islamist movement -- probably more radical than ever -- as an alternative to secularist bumbling. Somalis really want an end to anarchy.

-- Are the Islamists really "patriots with any realistic hope of unifying the country?" If the operative word is "realistic," probably not. But in the minds of many Somalis , they seemed to represent a significant step above and beyond eternal clan feuding, especially when they showed they could bring order and a semblance of tranquility to Mogadishu after fifteen years of bloody anarchy. Clan rivalries and enmities run deep, however, as we'll soon see when the TFG itself attempts to "unify" the country. I predict the road to unity will be a long one.

-- What can diplomacy do? Well, diplomacy literally created the TFG during more than a year of mediation and arm-twisting in Nairobi (with grudging support and encouragement from Washington, by the way). With a little more backing from the international community, the TFG might actually have got on its feet, had not the Islamic Courts lost patience with the politicians and taken matters into their own hands. Diplomacy will now have another chance, thanks (?) to the Ethiopian army, and Somalia's real friends should press hard now for amnesty, reconciliation, a withdrawal of foreign troops, full enforcement of the arms embargo, an increased physical U.N. presence, both political and humanitarian -- and, above all, an end to the fruitless search for al Qaida in the sands of Somalia.

-- The very worst thing the U.S. could do is take sides in the disputes that inevitably lie ahead, as Somalis try to sort things out. Funding and encouraging the despised villain warlords out of fear that Somalia could become a breeding ground for Muslim extremists was incredibly stupid and engendered enormous resentment toward the U.S. Any pressure on the TFG to round up the rebels or crack down on "insurgents" would be foolish and counterproductive. At a minimum, the U.S. should avoid meddling in Somalia's byzantine politics and clan feuds, resist giving advice on how to build democracy, keep its Special Forces troops off Somali soil, and give the Somalis themselves a chance -- two or three decades, at least -- to figure out how to put their country back together again.

All the best,
--frank

On PBS: "Conflict in Somalia Escalating"

2006-12-27T21:57:00.000-05:00

Click on the title above to view the full video of last night's PBS interview with Prof. Abdi Samatar and Akwe Amosu of the Open Society Institute (be sure to be sure to click on the audio or streaming video link). The remarks of both persons were insightful and well-informed. I personally found Abdi Samatar's commentary particularly thoughtful, especially in underscoring the mischievous role the United States has played -- but judge for yourself.

Sadia Aden on Somalia's grim future

2006-12-27T16:48:00.000-05:00

My Somali-American friend Sadia Aden contributed the following piece to the BBC's "Have Your Say" section yesterday and shared it with me today. I fully share her anxiety about the country's future.

We do not know what tomorrow holds and we are only capable of false predictions. Nevertheless, I will say the future of Somalia as well as that of the horn of Africa looks very grim. I am a Somali-American and I see Iraq of Africa written all over this Ethiopian invasion.

For those Somalis who think Ethiopia is after the Courts, we are WRONG! Ethiopian machine guns do not know the difference between us and them, but for sure they know what a Somali looks like. The intelligence our western governments are using to condemn the Courts, is intelligence provided by Prime Minister Meles's government. This is tantamount to condemning India on intelligence collected by its arch-enemy Pakistan and vice versa. How ironic is that?

Those of us who closely monitor the status of Ethiopia understand very well that Prime Minister Meles is simply trying divert attention from the 2005 election he rigged that was won by the opposition groups whose over 200 peaceful demonstrators were killed and thousands more locked up in prisons including Ethiopian opposition leaders. With all the poverty, AIDS epidemic increasing. and human rights violations committed in Ethiopia under his watch, Meles like any other African dictator tightens his grip by instilling fear in people's hearts and deflecting attention from his dictatorial behaviors.

Wanting peace and saying NO to Ethiopian invasion of Somalia DOES NOT mean [we are] against the TFG or supporting the Courts. What it means is, that there is a dead body that lies upon all of us peace lovers, waiting for a burial, and to have a debate over it and watch it rot is a sin. It reminds me of Rwanda, where 800,000 Tutsi's were massacred in 3 months while the world debated whether it was a GENOCIDE or not.

The African Union's (AU) ill advised backing of the bombing of Somalia further complicates the crisis. If the AU was any help, or for that matter capable of easing the pain of the burden carried by African women and children, it would ease that of Darfur. From the drought of April 2005 to the severe floods that devastated Somalis, Somalia is on her knees, desperately waiting for a helping hand. Somalia stands naked, striped of her dignity on the highway of horn of Africa.

What all Somalis want will come, but we must realize that we can not furnish a burning house. We should put out the fire, allow home grown peace to take root, meet every Somali's basic needs and then call for the real thing, ELECTIONS. Remember what Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. correctly said decades ago: "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." The history we always hear and read about is tantamount to the one before us today. Hence, history is in the making and I know with all my being that it will not be kind to many of us.

May peace, justice and equality remain our foremost conviction.
Sadia Ali Aden

Somali Diaspora Network Issues Appeal

2006-12-23T21:57:00.000-05:00

On behalf of the Somali Diaspora Network, Hassan Warsame today published the following appeal to the contending parties in Somalia. I personally subscribe to it without reservation.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Renewed Conflict in Somalia

Fairfax, Virginia, December 23 - We are deeply saddened and troubled by the renewed fighting and hostility in Somalia. It has been reported that hundreds of civilians and combatants including Ethiopian troops lost their lives or were seriously wounded because of the fighting for the past several days. In addition, thousands of civilians are caught in the cross fire and are in a dire humanitarian situation. As a result, large crowds of civilians have started fleeing the effected area and are dispersed into the bushes with no food, water or shelter.

Somali Diaspora Network issues the following direct appeal to the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) and to the Somali Council of Islamic Courts (SCIC) leadership:

Immediately stop the fighting without any condition;
Disengage your forces and return them to their previous positions;
Establish security protocol teams to monitor and oversee the ceasefire and the disengagement;
Return to the Khartoum peace conference promptly.

The above appeal will be futile if the presence of foreign troops inside Somalia is not addressed. Independent media has confirmed that Ethiopia committed large mechanized battalions of its army into Somalia. In addition, it has sent tanks and attack helicopters to the battlefields deep into Somali territories.

Therefore, in order to avoid the escalation of the conflict into regional dimension, we urge both sides to banish foreign troops from Somalia. In particular, we, plea to the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) to work toward securing the withdrawal of Ethiopian troops immediately from all Somali territories. Reciprocally, we urge the Somali Council of Islamic Courts (SCIC) leadership to pull back their forces from Baidao and surrounding vicinities and refrain from future use of force.

We wish to remind the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) and the Somali Council of Islamic Courts (SCIC) leadership the seriousness of a new conflict and the resulting tragedy and human loss to the Somali people who have already suffered enough from years of anarchy, civil war, famine, and now deadly floods and new conflict. We urge both sides to return to the peace talks and commit to a peaceful resolution to the conflict.

CONTACT: Somali Diaspora Network
Hassan Warsame hwarsame@somalidiaspora.com

Islamists and Ethiopia "Gird for War"

2006-12-14T10:24:00.000-05:00

In an especially perceptive NYT piece today, Jeffrey Gettleman probes current U.S. policy toward Somalia in a way that calls into question tacit American support for Ethiopian military involvement there. His appraisal suggests that by opposing the Islamic Courts movement and endorsing a one-sided U.N. Security Council resolution that partially lifts the arms embargo in a way favoring the Transitional Federal Government (TFG), we are feeding the popular animosity toward the West that spoiled Operation Restore Hope and led to "Black Hawk Down."

Gettleman points out that, while Ethiopia increases its troop levels inside Somalia in support of the TFG, the Islamists continue to broaden their support among the Somali populace:

In Mogadishu the Islamists are continuing their hearts-and-minds campaign, organizing neighborhood cleanups, delivering food to the needy and resuscitating old national institutions like the Supreme Court, which was given a fresh coat of paint and reopened in October.

He continues:

Streets that were clogged with years of debris are now clear and bureaucracy is budding, with more rules and more paperwork, including forms at the airport that ask name, age, nationality and religion — Muslim or non-Muslim being the only choices.

He also quotes Ibrahim Hassan Addou, whom he describes as foreign minister for the Islamists and an American citizen of Somali descent:

Moderates were backed into a corner by an American-led campaign to discredit and isolate the Islamic administration. . . . Everybody was against us from the beginning, and now we have no choice but to fight . . . . What I don’t understand is why the whole world is trying to throw its weight behind a government that has been totally rejected by its own people.

The Somalis of Lewiston

2006-12-13T12:18:00.000-05:00

Retired FSO Curtis Jones sent me an article from the December 11 New Yorker entitled "New in Town: The Somalis of Lewiston [Maine]." I emailed him the following comments today:

Dear Curt,

Thanks for sending me the Finnegan piece. Overall, it's a splendid and heartening account of how these refugees are adapting themselves and their culture to life in the U.S., where they are certainly lucky to have landed (believe me) after escaping their awful difficulties in Somalia. The piece is particularly useful in its description of how so many Somalis have unfortunately managed to import their clan and sub-clan conflicts from home, playing them out here as if those same differences weren't the very ones that caused them to flee Somalia. But it's also encouraging to see how the younger and/or wiser members of the Lewiston community are seriously wrestling with those issues and successfully overcoming them.

I was frankly dismayed to read about the degree to which illiteracy in in general and lack of fluency in English in particular have been impediments to resettlement. Not so very long ago (in the 1970s), when President Siad decreed that the Somali language should be written using the Roman alphabet instead of Arabic, his government launched a huge and amazingly successful literacy campaign that gave the country one of the highest literacy rates in Africa. After twenty years of anarchy that essentially closed down the public education system, that "great leap forward" has evidently been nullified, to judge from the Lewiston Somalis anyway, and along with it the learning of English that had flourished in Somali schools.

Where I have difficulties with Finnegan's piece is the disproportionate attention he gives to the "Bantu" Somalis as a distinct and historically disadvantaged element in the community. There is no question but that these "kinky-haired" farmers, as some called them, were second-class citizens where they came from and were often discriminated against and even despised by "traditional" Somalis, as indeed farmers so often are by pastoralists elsewhere (snobbish Somalis used to boast to me of the country's homogeneity, claiming that 99 percent of Somalis were "nomads" rather than dirt farmers). And because they were the sedentary types who cultivated the land and harvested and stored their produce for market or for seed, they were the ones who suffered most painfully during the civil war when their lands were overrun and their stores looted by warring militias.

But I think it's unhelpful of the author to convey the impression that the "Bantu" (a term that was rarely used in Somalia) were treated as low-class "slaves" at home -- my driver was one and was so self-possessed that he used to insist on sitting in and injecting his opinions, sometimes contrary to mine, when I met with local officials around the country! In a way, Finnegan's focus on their complaints helps to perpetuate and even exacerbate the excess-baggage prejudices that Somalis brought with them as refugees.

On the whole, I'm amazed at how successfully the younger generation of Somalis have been in building new lives for themselves in the U.S., often in the face of serious obstacles (most notably the terrorism factor but also our own abiding racism). They're an energetic and resourceful bunch, and I find the Lewiston "experiment" to be very encouraging.

Troubling Tidbits from NYT

2006-12-07T11:24:00.000-05:00

Two tiny but very unsettling items in the Times caught my eye this morning

Peacekeepers for Somalia (p. A7) - In only two sentences, a report that the U.N. Security Council had unanimously approved Amb. John Bolton's latest and (I hope) last piece of mischief: a resolution backing the formation of a peacekeeping force to "monitor" the Somali government's struggle with Islamist foes. It also "partly lifted" the arms embargo and called for peace talks.
Somalia: Pray or die, town tells residents (p. A16) - An AP item quoting an Islamic Courts official in Bulo Burti, one Sheik Hussein Barre Rage, warning that town residents who do not pray five times a day "will definitely be beheaded."

Neither one is encouraging for Somalia's friends.

* * *

P.S. Hassan Warsame has kindly supplied the following link to the text of the Security Council's Resolution 1725 (2006) by e-mail:
http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2006/sc8887.doc.htm

After a quick reading of the text, I'm more dismayed than ever, especially since it explicitly places the resolution under the "use of force if necessary" umbrella of Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter. It further mandates the peacekeeping force "to protect the members of the Transitional Federal Institutions and Government, as well as their key infrastructures, and to train the Transitional Federal Institutions’ security forces to enable them to provide their own security and to help facilitate the re-establishment of Somalia’s national security forces. No mention of protecting members of the Islamic Courts, of course, or training their security forces.

The resolution goes on to modify the arms embargo the Council previously imposed to permit import "supplies of weapons and military equipment and technical training and assistance intended solely for the support of, or use by, the force."

Finally, it warns that the Council intends to "consider taking measures against those that [seek] to prevent or block a peaceful dialogue process, overthrow the Transitional Federal Institutions by force, or take action that further threatens regional stability." And how about those that seek to overthrow the Islamic Courts or their institutions by force??

I find it dismaying that the Security Council members could unanimously adopt a resolution that is as manifestly one-sided as this one. Perhaps after I wade through the "explanations of vote" by the Council's individual members (they're included at the link above), I'll be less mystified.

Tragedy lurking ahead in Somalia

2006-12-06T14:17:00.000-05:00

My good friend Sadia recently e-mailed me the following. I fully share her concern.

Salaam:

Reading this article published in New York Times (link is below) has created a great concern in my mind. I realize, that there is so much and so many other issues to deal with, including the aftermath of the drought, the complicated political turmoil and the serious humanitarian crisis that is current unfolding with the latest floods, but is there anything that can be done to avert the tragedy that is lurking ahead in Somalia?. There must be a peaceful way to save Somalia....there's got to be!

NYT link

Wasalaam,
Sadia

Robert Gates Hearings

2006-12-06T13:41:00.000-05:00

On December 5, Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV), on behalf of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, asked supporters to submit questions they thought should be asked of Robert Gates at his confirmation hearings in the Senate. I submitted the following:

Will you call off the Special Operations forces based in Djibouti who are now meddling in Somalia and undercutting local efforts to achieve peace between the fragile transitional government and the reform-minded Islamic Courts (an effort we should be encouraging, not sabotaging)?

As a former U.S. ambassador to Somalia, I believe our role should be limited to (a) enforcing the U.N. arms embargo, (b) discouraging other nations from intervening militarily, and (c) supporting good-faith conciliation efforts.

T. Frank Crigler

Start Peace Not War in Somalia

2006-12-06T11:46:00.000-05:00

Poster received December 2 from Hassan W.