Looting troops prey on Somalia's refugees

During a lull in fighting in Mogadishu on Apr. 28, survivors picked their way through the post-apocalyptic landscape of Somalia's capital, quickly burying bodies. The floors and stairs of the filthy hospitals were crammed with injured civilians and slick with blood. Up to 350,000 refugees from fighting were camped in the bush–easy prey for armed thugs and warlords. Almost two weeks of heavy fighting and indiscriminate shelling between Islamic militia and clan fighters battling Ethiopian and Somali government troops has turned Mogadishu into the front line in what Washington and al-Qaida both call the "clash of civilizations." Somalia's recent agonies are a direct consequence of the US-backed invasion by Ethiopia four months ago to topple Mogadishu's Islamic Courts Union and install the weak and largely secular transitional federal government. But experts say Washington and its allies have driven many to look back on the recent times of Sharia law as a "golden age" amid signs that warlords are now looking to exploit refugees in a gigantic protection racket. In 1992, after the civil war that deposed the dictator Siad Barre, militia leaders orchestrated the looting of food aid, charged aid agencies for delivering humanitarian assistance and prolonged a famine that claimed 300,000 lives. 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, about 19 miles away. According to the European Union's (EU) 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 tons of sugar and computers from the recently opened Coca-Cola factory in Mogadishu. Only after aggressive intervention from the US 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 Apr. 27. "There is a great deal of extortion and bribery of armed men on the way to delivery," said a senior aid worker. "If we can't get real deliveries through… we'll have a humanitarian catastrophe on our hands. We're hoping that the government doesn't see this as a chance to get rid of their clan enemies permanently."