So Much Fear : War Crimes and the Devastation of Somalia(Human Rights report )
Summary
Medeshi Dec9, 2008
Somalia is a nation in ruins, mired in one of the world’s most brutal armed conflicts
of recent years. Two long years of escalating bloodshed and destruction have
devastated the country’s people and laid waste to its capital Mogadishu. Ethiopian,
Somali transitional government, and insurgent forces have all violated the laws of
war with impunity, forcing ordinary Somalis to bear the brunt of their armed struggle.
Beyond its own borders Somalia has had a reputation for violent chaos since the
collapse of its last central government in 1991. When Ethiopian military forces
intervened there in late 2006 the country already bore the scars of 16 conflict-ridden
years without a government.
But the last two years are not just another typical chapter in Somalia’s troubled
history. The human rights and humanitarian catastrophe facing Somalia today
threatens the lives and livelihoods of millions of Somalis on a scale not witnessed
since the early 1990s.
In December 2006 Ethiopian military forces, acting at the invitation of the
internationally recognized but wholly ineffectual Somali Transitional Federal
Government (TFG), intervened in Somalia against the Islamic Courts Union (ICU). The
ICU was a coalition of shari’a (Islamic law) courts that had taken control of
Mogadishu in June 2006 after ousting the various warlords who controlled most of
the city. At the time the ICU had begun what might have been a dramatic rise to
power across much of south-central Somalia. But Ethiopia viewed that development
with great alarm; leading figures associated with the ICU had openly threatened war
on Ethiopia and talked of annexing the whole of Ethiopia’s eastern Somali region.
Ethiopia’s ally the TFG was corrupt and feeble and it welcomed the Ethiopian military
support. In 2006 it had a physical presence in only two towns, provided no useful
services to Somalis, and with the ICU’s ascendancy was becoming increasingly
irrelevant. The United States, which denounced ICU leaders for harboring wanted
terrorists, supported Ethiopia’s actions with political backing and military assistance.
The Ethiopian military easily routed the ICU’s militias. For a few days it appeared that
they had won an easy victory and that the TFG had ridden Ethiopia’s coattails into
power in Mogadishu. But the first insurgent attacks against Ethiopian and TFG forces
began almost immediately and rapidly built towards a protracted conflict that has
since grown worse with every passing month. Opposition forces coalesced around a
broad group of ICU leaders, former parliamentarians, and others known as the
Alliance for the Re-Liberation of Somalia, around the fundamentalist Al-Shabaab
insurgent group and around numerous other largely autonomous armed factions.
During the past two years life in Mogadishu has settled into a horrifying daily rhythm
with Ethiopian, TFG, and insurgent forces conducting urban firefights and pounding
one another with artillery fire with no regard for the lives of hundreds of thousands of
civilians trapped in the city. The bombardments are largely indiscriminate, lobbed
into densely populated neighborhoods with no adequate effort made to guide them
to their intended targets. Insurgents lob mortar shells from populated
neighborhoods that crash through the roofs of families living near TFG police
stations and Ethiopian bases. Ethiopian and TFG forces respond with sustained
salvos of mortar, artillery, and rocket fire that destroy homes and their inhabitants
near the launching points of the fast-departed insurgents. Fighting regularly breaks
out between insurgents and Ethiopian or TFG forces and all too often civilians are
caught in the crossfire.
The warring parties in Somalia have been responsible for numerous serious human
rights abuses. TFG security forces and militias have terrorized the population by
subjecting citizens to murder, rape, assault, and looting. Insurgent fighters subject
perceived critics or TFG collaborators—including people who took menial jobs in TFG
offices or sold water to Ethiopian soldiers—to death threats and targeted killings.
The discipline of Ethiopian soldiers in Somalia has broken down to the point where
they increasingly are responsible for violent criminality. Victims have no way to file a
complaint—the TFG police force has itself been implicated in many of the worst
abuses, including the arbitrary arrests of ordinary civilians to extort ransom from
their families.
Two years of unconstrained warfare and violent rights abuses have helped to
generate an ever-worsening humanitarian crisis, without adequate response. Since
January 2007 at least 870,000 civilians have fled the chaos in Mogadishu alone—
two-thirds of the city’s population. Across south-central Somalia, 1.1 million Somalis
are displaced from their homes. Hundreds of thousands of displaced people are
living in squalid camps along the Mogadishu-Afgooye road that have themselves
become theaters of brutal fighting.
Thousands of Somali refugees pour across the country’s borders every month fleeing
the relentless violence. Freelance militias have robbed, murdered, and raped
displaced persons on the roads south towards Kenya. Hundreds of Somalis have
drowned this year in desperate attempts to cross the Gulf of Aden by boat to Yemen.
In spite of the dangers, thousands make these journeys every month. As a result the
Dadaab refugee camps in northeastern Kenya are now the largest in the world with a
collective population of more than 220,000.
Somalia’s humanitarian needs are enormous. Humanitarian organizations estimate
that more than 3.25 million Somalis—over 40 percent of the population of southcentral
Somalia— will be in urgent need of assistance by the end of 2008. But
violence, particularly targeted attacks on aid workers, is preventing the flow of
needed aid. This past year has seen a wave of death threats and targeted killings
against civil society activists and humanitarian workers in Somalia. At least 29
humanitarian workers have been killed in 2008 and the threat of more attacks has
driven many of the very people Somalia most needs in this time of crisis to flee the
country.
As shocking as these statistics are, the full horror of the crisis in Somalia can only be
understood through the experiences of the ordinary people whose lives it has
shattered. Human Rights Watch interviewed a young boy whose wounds from an
insurgent bomb attack were festering in Kenya’s under-resourced refugee camps.
Others saw their relatives cut down by stray bullets during wild and indiscriminate
exchanges of gunfire. One young man saw his parents shot and killed for arguing
with TFG security personnel. A pregnant teenage girl told Human Rights Watch that
she was gang raped by TFG forces. Another young man was overwhelmed with rage
after seeing his sisters and mother raped by Ethiopian soldiers who had killed his
father.
No party to the conflict in Somalia has made any significant effort to hold
accountable those responsible for war crimes and serious human rights abuses. The
grim reality of widespread impunity for serious crimes is compounded by the fact
that both TFG and insurgent forces are fragmented into multiple sets of largely
autonomous actors. TFG security forces are not regularly paid and often act as
freelance militias rather than disciplined security forces.
Somalia’s conflict has international as well as domestic dimensions. For Somalia’s
regional neighbors—Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Kenya—the conflict creates immediate
security risks. Regional and western governments are currently trying to play an
active role in supporting peace talks between the TFG and opposition groups in
Djibouti. With key warring factions refusing to take part, however, these have made
virtually no progress.
This report recognizes that there is no “quick fix” to bring about respect for human
rights, stability, and peace in Somalia. However this does not justify a lack of
political will to engage with problems that past international involvement in Somalia
helped create, let alone policies by outside powers that are making the situation
worse. Many key foreign governments have played deeply destructive roles in
Somalia and bear responsibility for exacerbating the conflict.
The poisonous relations between Ethiopia and Eritrea have greatly contributed to
Somalia’s crisis. Eritrea has treated Somalia primarily as a useful theater of proxy
war against Ethiopian forces in the country, while one of Ethiopia’s reasons for
intervening was a fear that an ICU-dominated Somalia would align itself with Eritrea
and shelter Ethiopian rebel fighters as Eritrea has done.
Ethiopia has legitimate security interests in Somalia, but has not lived up to its
responsibility to prevent and respond to war crimes and serious human rights
abuses by its forces in the country. Ethiopia’s government has failed to even
acknowledge, let alone investigate and ensure accountability for the crimes of its
force. This only serves to entrench the impunity that encourages more abuses.
United States policy towards Somalia largely revolves around fears of international
terrorist networks using the country as a base. The United States directly backed
Ethiopia’s intervention in Somalia and has provided strong political backing to the
TFG. But US officials have refused to meaningfully confront or even publicly
acknowledge the extent of Ethiopian military and TFG abuses in the country. The US
approach is not only failing to address the rights and suffering of millions of Somalis
but is counterproductive in its own terms, breeding the very extremism that it is
supposed to defeat.
The European Union and key European governments have also failed to address the
human rights dimensions of the crisis, with many officials hoping that somehow
unfettered support to abusive TFG forces will improve stability.
Now is the time for fresh thinking and new political will on Somalia. Human Rights
Watch calls upon all of the parties to the conflict in Somalia to end the patterns of
war crimes and human rights abuses that have harmed countless Somalis and to
ensure accountability for past abuses. This can only come to pass with much
stronger and more principled engagement by key governments that have hitherto
turned a blind eye to the extent and nature of conflict-related abuses in Somalia.
International engagement must take into account the rights and needs of the Somali
people. It should include better monitoring of past and ongoing abuses and, as a
starting point, a commitment at the UN Security Council to establish an independent
commission of inquiry to investigate serious crimes in Somalia. Key governments
should also use their diplomatic leverage with Ethiopian, TFG, and opposition
leaders to insist upon accountability and an end to the daily attacks upon Somalia’s
beleaguered citizens.
In the short term, Human Rights Watch calls upon the TFG to immediately suspend
officials implicated in serious human rights abuses pending the outcome of
independent investigations. The Ethiopian government should launch a full
Read full report at : http://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/somalia1208web.pdf
