War on Terror? or Genocide?

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." Read more!

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

"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
Read more!