Occupied Somalia

It is hardly more than a year since Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, fell to Ethiopian troops (December 28), and the occupation has been one of the most brutal on record. The resistance started at once, and Ethiopian counter-insurgency tactics are not gentle.

As early as last April, Germany’s ambassador to Somalia, Walter Lindner, wrote a public letter condemning the indiscriminate use of air strikes and heavy artillery in densely populated parts of Mogadishu, the systematic rape of women, and even the bombing of hospitals. By now, the Ethiopian army’s attempts to terrorize the residents of Mogadishu into submission have driven 600,000 of them — 60 percent of the population — to flee the city.

The Ethiopians and their local allies indignantly deny these figures, but they come from the United Nations aid coordinator for Somalia, Eric Laroche, and the makeshift camps along the roads leading away from Mogadishu are there for all to see. It is, says Laroche, the worst humanitarian crisis in Africa, worse even than Darfur. But “since it is in Somalia, no one cares”.

You will notice that some of the phrases used above do not appear in the agency reports about Somalia. The wire services do not talk about an Ethiopian occupation of Somalia, and they refer to the local Somali collaborators as the “transitional federal government” (TFG). This is mainly in deference to the United States, which organized and backed the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia.

The curse of Somalia is the clan system. It is the main point of reference for most Somalis, and it really became a crippling burden when the long-ruling dictator Mohammad Siad Barre was overthrown in 1991. In the pre-independence days and the early years afterwards, the clans were able to unite against their Italian and British colonial rulers, but in 1991 they had to create a new government without an external enemy. They couldn’t do it.