By Amina Mire
On 12 June 2007, the UN’s Human Rights Council issued a damning report on widespread human rights violations against the Somali population between December 2006 and April 2007. What is not clear from this report is who are the perpetrators committing these crimes against humanity. In this report, there are victims but no perpetrators! This is strange. So, how did the UN’s Human Rights Council has collected its evidence? What method has it used to find such mass gross human rights violations, including rape, looting, mass killing and 400,000 internally displaced people, indiscriminate shelling of heavy populated neighborhoods, but was not able to find who the are people responsible for these gross human rights violations? Thus, we have victims but no predators, victimizers, rapists, looters! How can this report be taken seriously?
Well, I, also have been collecting evidence on the gross human rights violations in Somalia and my sources are more persuasive than the ones used by the UN’ Human Rights Council. My sources are, primarily widely and publicly accessible media reports on the human rights violations in Somalia sine Zinawi’s Tigre army and the warlords have invaded Somalia with US backing. Let me quote from the UN’s Human Rights Council’s report first and then compare it to my sources.
“The human right situation in Somalia is deteriorating as hundreds of thousands have been forced to flee their homes while others are being subject to threats, rape and violence in the war-torn East African nation, a United Nations expert said today. Ghanim Alnajjar, the Independent Expert on the situation of Human Rights in Somalia, told the Human Rights Council in Geneva that the current circumstances in the country are much worse than they were when he last briefed the 47-member body in September 2006.”
Note, in the above quote, we have not been told who is ‘forcing’ hundreds of thousands of civilians out of their homes, nor are we told who is ‘threatening,’ raping Somali women? While the UN has difficult naming who are the people responsible for the current unspeakable suffering in Somalia, the international media has no such difficulties. Here is how the British newspaper, the Observer has described what the UN’s Human Rights Council can only call “human rights situation.”
“Somalia’s recent agonies are a direct consequence of the American-backed invasion by Ethiopia four months ago to topple Mogadishu’s Islamic Courts Union and install the weak and largely secular transitional federal government.”
Observer’s reporter names who are the people doing raping, looting and menacing the Somalis population: The Ethiopian (Woyanne) soldiers and the warlords.
“There are already signs that the transitional federal government is using aid as a weapon – restricting food aid deliveries to hundreds of thousands of civilians, who are also being charged to shelter under trees on the road out of the capital to Afgoye, 30km away. According to the European Union’s head of humanitarian aid, Louis Michel, Somalis fleeing the fighting have endured ‘systematic looting, extortion and rape by uniformed troops’ – only the Ethiopian and government forces have uniforms. And last week uniformed troops commandeered 12 trucks and helped themselves to tonnes of sugar and computers from the recently opened Coca-Cola factory in Mogadishu. Only after aggressive intervention from the Americans and EU did the government agree to allow enough food for 32,000, less than a tenth of the number in need, through its roadblocks heading west on Friday.” – The Observer, April 29, 2007
Again, in the UN report on the human rights situation in Somalia, things get curious because the report does not make judicious point on why the violence in Somalia as has increased significantly since December, 2006. This is because, in this report there is no mention of the December 2006 Ethiopian (Woyanne) invasion of Somalia and that April 2007 was bloodiest month of Somalia because of crackdown by the occupation forces against local resistance forces. The whole notion of Somalia as an occupied country appears nowhere in this report. If fact, there is a misleading suggestion that these atrocities were part of ongoing old civil war in Somalia!
The Observer reports:
“There have been widespread reports of indiscriminate artillery fire in the capital Mogadishu between December 2006 and April 2007, he said, and the wounded were blocked from fleeing or receiving aid and protection while the delivery of urgent relief supplies was impeded. Thousands of people are estimated to have been killed or injured during that period, and the UN has assessed that approximately 400,000 people had been forced from their homes in Mogadishu by the violence between February and May of this year, he noted.”
Again, the international media has no trouble either noting Somalia as an occupied country and naming the chief instigators of these mass human rights violations. Thus, in 18 May 2007, Newsweek front page feature report “Disaster in Somalia,” has no problem naming the warlords Gedi and Yusuf as the primary cause of the current crisis in Somalia. It also had no trouble showing how transitional federal government has been obstructing and undermining humanitarian efforts of the international relief workers to reach hundred of thousands of internally displaces refugees in Somalia.
“How bad is it in Somalia? Bad enough that people fleeing the capital have been reduced to renting trees for shelter. It’s the sort of thing that happens when drug-addled warlords roam the countryside, imposing taxes of 50 percent on aid recipients. And the sort of thing to be expected of a government whose prime minister, Ali Mohamad Gedi, has publicly accused the United Nations agency feeding the country of spreading cholera along with food deliveries. And that’s the internationally recognized government, which enjoys U.S. support, although it is widely unpopular in southern Somalia and the capital, Mogadishu. That’s not surprising, since the prime minister is from a clan that’s hostile to the clan that dominates the capital, and the president, Abdulahi Yusuf, is from Puntland, in northern Somalia, a breakaway region that is best known as the homeland of Somalia’s pirates, who once again are on the prowl, bedeviling aid shipments even further.” – Newsweek, May 18, 2007
Even though the the UN’s Human Rights Council briefing on Somalia’s human rights situation, was based on commissioned research by independent expert, it did not mention much report phenomenon of warlords menacing the civilians or obstructing aide delivers the displaced civilian population. Things just happens, it seems.
“Additionally, Mr. Alnajjar said that there are 400,000 more who are internally displaced and spread out throughout Somalia. These internally displaced persons (IDPs) exposed to being threatened, intimidated, robbed, assaulted and raped, and many of them are forced to take refuge in crowded camps where there is a paucity of water, food, sanitation, basic health services and shelter. Widespread harassment continued to plague human rights defenders, he said, often leading to targeted killings of such defenders, journalists, aid workers and public figures. Due to the violence, women and girls are now more vulnerable to sexual and gender-based violence, the Independent Expert said, and some children have been recruited as soldiers while school enrolment has dipped considerably.”– UN New, June 12, 2007
Why has the UN failed to name whose responsible for the death and destruction in Somalia? Perhaps, the UN has an emotive reason not to name Zinawi, Gedi and Yusuf as the ones wrecking death and destruction in Somalia? Perhaps, the UN is mindful that it did back the US sponsorship of the overthrow of Union of Islamic Court? Perhaps, the UN does not dare admit that continues backing the very warlords regime of TFG, as corrupt, violent and menacing and naming them will entail naming the UN’s own complicity of what is taking place in Somalia? Again, I will refer to mainstream media reporting out of Somalia to show the media has no difficult pointing the finger at the warlords and Zinawi’s occupation armies as main aggressors and violators of the human rights of the civilian population in Somalia.
“In the past month Ethiopian troops supporting Somalia’s deeply unpopular Government have pounded residential areas controlled by insurgents. The civilian death toll has reached four figures. Thousands more have been maimed and injured. An estimated 320,000 inhabitants — nearly a third of Mogadishu’s population — have fled in terror. In five days spent in and around a city reverberating with the constant thud of mortars and bursts of gunfire, The Times saw burnt-out slums, huge refugee encampments, hospitals overflowing with the sick and injured, and enough misery to last a lifetime. It is hard to overstate the suffering of this forgotten country. Last year Somalia tasted peace for the first time in 15 years of bloody civil war when the Islamic Courts movement drove out the warlords who had made their country a byword for anarchy and mayhem. But Washington saw the Courts as a new Taleban sympathetic to al-Qaeda, so it conspired with neighbouring Ethiopia to remove them as part of its War on Terror.” – Times, April 26, 2007
It is pertinent to ask why is the UN’s Council of Human Rights avoiding naming the warlords of the transitional government and the Zinawi’s occupying Tigre army or even the UIC insurgents and clan militias? After all, the UN has authorized US sponsorship of the Ethiopian invasion of peaceful Somalia in the name of war against terror. Thus, in the place of clarity and judicious placing the blame of who is causing the current mayhem in Somalia, the Zinawi’s Tigre army and with the thuggish warlords of Gedi and Yusuf, the UN’s Human Rights Council is resorting to silence, obfuscation and doublespeak in the faces of utter death and destruction in Somalia. We also know that there are no Al Qaida terrorists and training camps in Somalia, despite Bush’s continues insistence there are Al Qaida terrorists in Somalia. A recently published report by the U.S. Military’ Combating Terrorism Centre at West Point concludes that Al Qaida has failed to gain a foothold in Somalia.
Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda has failed for more than a decade to establish an operational base in Somalia due to the country’s austere environment and inhospitable clans, a new U.S. military report says. Fears that Somalia, on the Horn of Africa and accessible by land and sea, is ripe to become an al Qaeda hub have so far failed to materialize. “Al Qaeda found more adversity than success in Somalia,” states the report by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point “In order to project power, al Qaeda needed to be able to promote its ideology, gain an operational safe haven, manipulate underlying conditions to secure popular support and have adequate financing for continued operations. It achieved none of these objectives. – Scarborugh, Rowan, May 1, 2007
It is equally pertinent to ask why 6 days after the European Parliament has issued a damning communiqué of Meles Zinawi’s gross human rights violations against his own citizens, that he name has not been mentioned either on the 6 June communiqué by the Contact Group for Somalia or the 12 June 2007 Press report on human rights situation in Somalia by the UN’s Council for Human Rights? In its 5 June 2007 communiqué, European Parliament states that, even though it was accused of committing gross human rights violation, Zinawi’s government did not bother sending representative to attend the EU Parliament meeting on Ethiopia’s human rights situation.
“The lack of democracy and the large-scale human rights violations in Ethiopia were condemned by MEPs on Tuesday at a hearing held by the EP’s Development Committee and the Human Rights Subcommittee. The Ethiopian Government’s refusal to send a representative to speak to MEPs was also criticised. “The human rights situation has deteriorated since 2005 with the imprisonment of members of the opposition and human rights defenders who still await trial”, said Josep Borrell (PES, ES), chair of the Development Committee, at the start of the meeting. The former President of the European Parliament expressed disappointment at the refusal to attend the meeting by the ambassador of Ethiopia to the EU, Ato Berhane Gebre-Christos. In a letter addressed to MEPs, the Ethiopian foreign minister stated that the invitation could not be accepted, partly because “the list of invited speakers to this hearing does not indicate any intention to try and reach a balanced or accurate assessment of the stage of democratisation in Ethiopia today.” – European Parliament, June 5, 2007
In fact, is an illegitimate leaders and usurper of political power by arresting, killing and maiming his political opponents; ruthlessness which he duplicated in Somalia.
Referring to the parliamentary elections of May 2005, which were marred by fraud, the chair of the Human Rights Subcommittee, Flautre (Greens/EFA, FR), emphasised “the importance of envisaging follow-ups to election observations”. “By acting as if there was nothing wrong, we strip the European Union’s policy in this area of all credibility”, she said. Judge Woldemichael Meshesha Damtto, former vice-chair of the commission of inquiry set up following the protests which took place in June and October 2005 against the election results, said the members of the commission had been pressed by Prime Minister Meles Zenawi to alter their findings. “The civilians used no weapons, the forces used excessive violence, 193 people were killed, 760 were injured and 20,000 were arrested and held in military camps”, he said. – European Parliament, June 5, 2007
Thus, rather than facing crude human rights record of Zinawi’ and thuggish Somali warlords currently in power, thanks to the Bush administration, Security Council and African Union, the UN’s Human Rights Council is using spin, omission and obfuscation tactics to manage what is nothing short than a catastrophic humanitarian crisis in Somalia. It is no secrete that the Bush administration is determined to turn Somalia to a client state. Thus, Zinawi’s capacity for ruthlessness is now being deployed to kill, terrorize and maim the Somali population. As a result, in the face of overwhelming unmitigated death and destruction against the civilian population in Somalia since the arrival of Zinawi’s Tigre army and the Somali thuggish warlords of Gedi and Yusuf, the UN officials can only resort to vague language, deliberate obfuscation, double speak and silence. It is only in this obscene context that we can make sense the UN recommendation for giving more powers and moral legitimacy to the warlord regime of Gedi and Yusuf and for be silent about Ethiopia’s illegal occupation of Somalia.