Somalia rocked by worst violence in fifteen years

Workers and residents carried the dead from the rubble of battle in the Somali capital Mogadishu on Apr. 4, the third day of a truce after the heaviest fighting in the city in 15 years. Ethiopian troops and the soldiers of a would-be Somalian transitional government battled over four days with remnants of the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC), which controlled the capital for six violence-free months in 2006, and their allies. More than 1,000 civilians have been killed or wounded in the latest fighting in Mogadishu, and tens of thousands fled their homes after heavy artillery and mortars pounded residential areas. Since February, 96,000 refugees have swelled the ranks of Somalia's 400,000 internally displaced persons. Regional, religious and tribal conflict The UIC was driven from power in December by Somali and Ethiopian soldiers with the help of US air strikes, intelligence and logistical support. This allowed the widely disavowed transitional government, established in 2004, to expand its area of nominal control. But since arriving in Mogadishu in December, the Ethiopian troops have faced an increasingly hostile and well-armed public. Many residents now say they were better off under the UIC. Somalia is 99.9 percent Muslim; Ethiopia, a longtime rival, is predominantly Christian. Ethiopian officers sat down last week with elders of the Hawiye clan, the most powerful clan in Mogadishu and one widely believed to be fueling the insurgency. The two sides hammered out a truce, and according to Hawiye elders, the Ethiopians agreed to stay out of their neighborhoods. But on Mar. 29, at dawn, residents said a phalanx of Ethiopian tanks and troops rumbled into central Mogadishu. Masked insurgents rushed into the streets to greet them. Pitched battles followed, with Ethiopian helicopters firing missiles. The main hospital in the Somali capital of Mogadishu was overwhelmed by the number of injured people only two days into the carnage. "Our capacity to handle the number of people coming for treatment is being stretched," the hospital's director said on Mar. 30, adding that almost all the injured were civilians. The hospital's beds were full and people were being treated in the corridors or under trees even as insurgents shot an Ethiopian helicopter gunship out of the sky and mortar shells slammed into another hospital, leaving corpses piled in the streets and wounding hundreds of civilians. Hunger, too, fueled the mass exodus from the city. "All the commercial areas have closed, all the markets, all the stores.... Where can we buy food?" said Farah Hassan, a 50-year-old resident. The interim government's president, Abdullahi Yusuf, is due to hold a national reconciliation conference in Mogadishu on Apr. 16, but its success is doubtful. Aside from the regional and religious conflicts underlining the latest fighting, the Hawiye allege that President Yusuf has consolidated political power in the hands of his own clan, the Darod. Roots of the conflict Yusuf's administration is the 14th attempt at imposing central rule on the Horn of Africa nation, in chaos since warlords including Yusuf helped topple Maj. Gen. Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991. Siad Barre assumed control of the country in a coup in 1969, bringing an end to constitutional democracy in Somalia and ushering in an era of ideological and economic dependence on the Soviet Union. Barre reduced political freedoms and used military force and terror against the Somali population to consolidate his political power base. Following the overthrow of the Ethiopian emperor in 1975, Somalia invaded Ethiopia. But the new Ethiopian government shifted its alliance from the West to the Soviet Union, which supplied Ethiopia with troops and military advisors, shifting the advantage to Ethiopia and resulting in Somalia's withdrawal. US involvement in the crisis Somalia then turned to the West for military and economic aid. An agreement was concluded that gave US forces access to military facilities in northwestern Somalia. Somali officers of the National Armed Forces were trained in US military schools. With US help, the Barre regime violently suppressed opposition movements and ethnic groups, using the military and elite security forces to quash any hint of rebellion. But by the 1980s, an all-out civil war developed in Somalia, and by the decade's end, armed opposition to Barre's government, fully operational in the northern regions, had spread. By his last days in power, Siad Barre had leased nearly two-thirds of Somalia to four US-based oil companies: Conoco, Chevron, Phillips and Amoco. The land was believed by geologists to contain substantial quantities of oil and natural gas. But Barre's effective territorial control was reduced to the immediate areas surrounding Mogadishu, resulting in the withdrawal of external assistance and support, including from the United States. In January 1991, armed opposition factions drove Barre out of power, resulting in the complete collapse of the central government. The oil giants' exclusive concessions to explore and drill were worthless in the absence of a viable government to enforce their claims. Citing famine in Mogadishu and in the southern part of the country, and an urgent need to restore order, then-US President George H. W. Bush sent in the Marines. The US embassy, established a few days before the Marines arrived in Mogadishu, was located in the Conoco corporate compound. On May 7, 1993, the Canadian press reported that elite US commandos had tortured and murdered a civilian teenager. Other reports of murder followed. On Oct. 3, a team of Delta Force Rangers in Mogadishu were surrounded by angry crowds. In the massacre that followed, between 500 and 1,000 Somalis, many of them women, children and old people, were killed. Eighteen Rangers also died. War crimes and CIA interrogations US involvement in the current violence poses new problems. An outraged Somali working for the United Nations accused the US-backed Ethiopian troops of committing "war crimes." "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 [Zimbabwe's president Robert] Mugabe now? This is ethnic cleansing dressed up as a war on terror," he said. The US has defended its support of Ethiopia's incursion by claiming that the UIC is harboring agents of al-Qaida. Meanwhile, CIA and FBI agents have been interrogating refugees and terrorism suspects held at secret prisons in Ethiopia, a country notorious for torture and abuse. 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. Some were swept up by Ethiopian troops in the struggle to oust the UIC. Others have been deported from Kenya, where many Somalis have fled the continuing violence in their homeland. John Sifton, a Human Rights Watch expert on counter-terrorism, said that the United States has acted as "ringleader" in what he labeled a "decentralized, outsourced Guantánamo." 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 US special forces advisers. A further 200 people, also captured in Somalia, were mainly Ethiopian rebels who backed the Somali Islamic movement. Lawyers and human rights groups argue the covert transfers to Ethiopia violate 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 US security agents have routinely interrogated people held incommunicado."