Massacre
In Mogadishu—War Crime Made In The USA
By Bill Van Auken
30 April, 2007
World
Socialist Web
The
brutal military siege against the Somali capital of Mogadishu constitutes
a war crime for which the US government bears the principal responsibility.
While the mass media in the
US itself has largely averted its eyes from the carnage, Ethiopian military
units, backed and advised by Washington, have unleashed an intense bombardment
of Mogadishu’s crowded and impoverished urban neighborhoods, killing
and wounding thousands and turning hundreds of thousands more into homeless
refugees.
This latest round of fighting
has pitted the US-backed Ethiopian forces and, in a lesser role, forces
loyal to the so-called Transitional Federal Government (TFG) of former
warlord Abdullahi Yusuf against supporters of the Union of Islamic Courts
(UIC), which had administered the city and much of southern Somalia
before the US-backed Ethiopian invasion last December. The siege follows
a similar Ethiopian offensive against Mogadishu three weeks ago in which
more than 1,000 people were killed, the great majority of them—then
as now—civilians.
Long-range artillery, tanks
and helicopter gunships have conducted ceaseless and indiscriminate
shelling of the city for nearly a week and a half. Much of the capital
lies in ruins, while hospitals, schools and housing have not been spared.
On Wednesday, four Ethiopian
rockets tore through the SOS Children’s Villages hospital in Mogadishu,
one of them destroying a ward housing 20 people previously wounded in
the attacks.
“We deplore the indiscriminate
shelling of a medical facility,” UNICEF Representative in Somalia
Christian Balslev-Olesen said in response to the attack. “It is
an action that is totally unacceptable and one for which no justification
can be given. Where is the accountability in this conflict? Every day
thousands of displaced people—most of them women and children—are
living a nightmare of violence.”
Reports from the city tell
of rotting corpses littering the streets, with people unable to collect
the dead for several days because of the constant threat from the shelling.
Only on Friday, during a lull in the fighting that followed the apparent
seizure of Mogadishu’s northern suburbs by the Ethiopian forces,
could residents begin to retrieve the dead.
Meanwhile, at least 350,000
people—a number that could swell to more than half a million—have
fled the fighting, many of them camping outside Mogadishu without adequate
water, food or medicine. Relief officials warn that the outbreak of
epidemics could claim many more lives. Reportedly, at least 600 have
died already as a result of cholera and other diseases.
Ali Mohamed Gedi, the prime
minister in the US-backed transitional government, claimed Friday, “We
have won the fighting against the insurgents,” meaning that the
Ethiopian forces that are the TFG’s central of pillar of support
had conquered the city. Western diplomats and other observers were skeptical
of this claim, predicting that fighting will continue as long as the
Ethiopian troops remain.
Gedi claimed that Ethiopian
and pro-government forces were now working to suppress “pockets
of resistance” and vowed, “We will capture any remaining
terrorists who have escaped.”
The TFG and its Ethiopian
backers routinely refer to those resisting them as “terrorists”
and elements of al-Qaeda, a claim that serves to justify the atrocities
being carried out in Somalia as part of the US-led “global war
on terror.”
In reality, the fighting
has largely erupted along clan lines, with members of the Hawiye clan—the
majority population in the capital—resisting the imposition of
the TFG, dominated by the Darod clan of its president, Yusuf, by the
army of his long-time ally, the repressive regime in Ethiopia.
The Islamic Courts administration
had won wide popular support by restoring relative peace and security
to the Somali capital after the sporadic violence that has dominated
the country since the overthrow of the dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in
1991. The courts had driven out the warlords responsible for much of
the mayhem, and now they are returning with US and Ethiopian support.
Hostility to the Ethiopian
forces runs deep, stemming from the brutal 1977 war between Somalia
and Ethiopia over the disputed Ogaden region, which inflicted heavy
casualties and turned millions into refugees.
Washington backed the Ethiopian
invasion last December on the grounds that the Islamic Courts represented
the spread of radical Islamist forces in the strategic Horn of Africa
and were harboring al-Qaeda activists implicated in the 1998 US embassy
bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.
US warplanes carried out
bombings in southern Somalia under the pretext of attacking “terrorists.”
While these raids killed a number of civilians, there is no evidence
that anyone linked to al-Qaeda was struck in the attacks.
US Special Forces troops
were also sent into Somalia to direct Ethiopian operations. These American
forces remain embedded within the Ethiopian military, making Washington
directly and intimately responsible for the bloodbath that has been
carried out over the past several weeks.
The French press agency AFP
quoted Mogadishu residents reporting that joint patrols of Ethiopian
troops and pro-TFG gunmen are sweeping through the northern neighborhoods
of the city rounding up young men as suspected insurgents.
“They are moving from
house to house arresting people,” said Ibrahim Sheikh Mao, a resident
of the Suuqahoola area where much of the fighting took place. “I
imagine they have arrested hundreds of people because they started the
operation early in the morning.”
Shamso Nur, a woman in the
al-Kamin area added, “All the men are fleeing the houses because
Ethiopian forces are arresting them. I have seen three men near my house
being taken by Ethiopian forces. I do not know if they were fighters,
but they looked like civilians.” AFP said that its reporter in
Mogadishu had seen 20 Somali men being herded into an Ethiopian military
truck.
Clearly, there is an immediate
threat of bloody reprisals against Mogadishu’s inhabitants.
Hundreds of those detained
so far in the conflict have been shipped to the Ethiopian capital of
Addis Abba. As the Washington Post reported Thursday, “More than
200 FBI and CIA agents have set up camp in the Sheraton Hotel here in
Ethiopia’s capital and have been interrogating dozens of detainees—including
a US citizen—picked up in Somalia and held without charge and
without attorneys in a secret prison somewhere in this city....”
Human rights groups have described the operation as a kind of “decentralized
Guantanamo” in the Horn of Africa, and undoubtedly the same kind
of abuses and torture used elsewhere in the “war on terrorism”
are taking place there as well.
The bloody events in Mogadishu—which
have provoked little if any controversy in Washington—are another
warning that the war in Iraq is only one front in a global eruption
of US militarism, as the American government employs armed force to
seize control of strategic resources and regions.
The recklessness and brutality
of this campaign threatens to ignite a far wider regional war, which
could well draw in US combat troops. Already, the State Department has
fingered the government of Eritrea—which is in a tense border
dispute with Ethiopia—as a supposed “state sponsor”
of those resisting the Ethiopian occupation of Somalia. Fighting within
Somalia itself has spread to Kismayo, where rival clans have battled
for control of the city.
Some 160,000 refugees have
poured into Kenya, further destabilizing the situation there. And, on
Tuesday, Somali minority rebels carried out a deadly attack on an oil
installation in the Ethiopian-controlled Ogaden region, killing 74 people,
including 9 Chinese.
The government of Ethiopia
has claimed that it wants to withdraw its 20,000 troops and hand over
security operations to a multinational force organized by the African
Union. The AU, however, has proven incapable of mobilizing more than
a handful of troops, and few African governments appear willing to send
their armies into this dubious US-instigated conflict.
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