"The current western-backed Ethiopian approach to Somalia will lead to a mountain of civilian deaths and a litany of abuses. ...

Washington, London and Brussels are in a blind alley in Somalia.

They should rethink a policy which is encouraging serious abuses, and come up with one which prioritizes the protection of civilians." - Tom Porteous, Human Right Watch, London

The latest situation report from the United Nations (June 22) estimates that as many as 117,000 of 400,000 people displaced from Mogadishu earlier this year have now returned. The large confrontations between February and April have been replaced with intermittent bombings and clashes. The scheduled "reconciliation" conference has been postponed again, now scheduled for mid-July as a new curfew goes into effect in the Somali capital. But with Ethiopian troops still the major support for the unpopular Somali government, despite an announced withdrawal, the prospects are for increased instability. The U.S.-backed Ethiopian military intervention, as predicted by critics, has accentuated instability and civilian suffering rather than promoting stability.

Ghanim Alnajjar, the independent UN expert on human rights in Somalia, told the Human Rights Council in Geneva on June 12 that the situation was much worse than when he reported in September 2006, before the Ethiopian invasion.

This AfricaFocus Bulletin contains several recent reports and analyses on the situation in Somalia: one from the director of the Human Rights Watch office in London, one from former UN official Salim Lone, and a third from a presentation by former U.S.

Ambassador to Ethiopia David Shinn. References to additional recent updates are also included. .

For previous AfricaFocus Bulletins on Somalia, and related background links, see

http://www.africafocus.org/country/somalia.php

Somalia: a failing counter-terrorism strategy

The west's policy in Somalia is fuelling rather than resolving a devastating conflict.

By Tom Porteous, London advocacy director for Human Rights Watch May 14, 2007

Human Rights Watch

When Ethiopian troops defeated Somalia's Islamic Courts Union (ICU) in Mogadishu last December and January it looked like a cakewalk.

But since then the armed opposition to Ethiopia's presence in Somalia - and to their Somali allies - has grown. In April 2007, Mogadishu was hit by the heaviest fighting in fifteen years.

Getting reliable information from Somalia is difficult and dangerous. But a clear pattern has emerged of serious violations, including indiscriminate use of heavy weapons in densely populated civilian areas and obstruction of humanitarian assistance to displaced, injured and vulnerable civilians.

Since fighting dramatically escalated at the end of March, hundreds of civilians have been killed and at least 300,000 displaced, according to United Nations estimates. Many of those forced to flee are living in desperate circumstances without sufficient food, water, shelter or medical supplies, easy prey to extortion and abuse by the warring parties.

Abuses have been being perpetrated by all sides in this complex conflict: Ethiopian forces, Ethiopia's Somali allies in the transitional federal government (TFG), and those resisting the Ethiopian intervention, including militias loyal to the Hawiye clan and groups aligned to the ICU. But it is the Ethiopians with their superior weapons who are doing much of the harm in Mogadishu.

Ethiopia has also participated in a regional programme of arbitrary detentions and unlawful renditions of individuals of interest to Addis Ababa and their allies in Washington. With Kenyan cooperation, Ethiopia has rounded up scores of "terrorism suspects" who fled the initial Ethiopian intervention in Somalia in December 2006-January 2007.

These "suspects" include many women and some infants as young as seven months. Although Ethiopia recently admitted holding forty-one people, mainly foreign nationals, and released five people, there are many more individuals languishing in Ethiopian jails without access to legal counsel or independent monitors.

Ethiopia is also using the crisis as a pretext to clamp down on its own domestic insurgents, lumping together its armed opponents in Somalia and Ethiopia alike in the convenient catchall basket of terrorism.