Massacre in Mogadishu—war crime made in the USA

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/apr2007/moga-a28.shtml

By Bill Van Auken

28 April 2007

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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