Justice for the Atrocities
of the 1980s:
The Responsibility of
Politicians and Political Parties
By Rakiya A. Omaar
Like so many other Somalis, my life in the 1980s was marked profoundly by the
terrible human right situation under the regime of Mohamed Siad Barre. I was
one of the very lucky ones. I did not live in Somalia at the time, and no-one
in my family was killed or maimed when the government unleashed a genocidal
frenzy in Somaliland, then the Northwest region of Somalia. Being lucky
implied a responsibility: to let the world know what was happening, so it
could exert pressure to halt the atrocities. Fortunately, I had just begun my
career in human rights as director of the US-based group, Africa Watch. This
position gave me a platform from which I could speak and make my contribution.
I am, in particular, proud of one book I researched and
wrote while at Africa Watch, A Government at War With Its Own People:
Testimonies About the Killings and the Conflict in the North, published in New
York in January 1990. Unfortunately, the Ethiopian government of the time
refused us permission to interview the refugees in the Ethiopian camps. So the
research took me to Djibouti and to various cities in the UK which housed men,
women and children who had fled Siad Barre’s tactics of terror. I spent
months listening to harrowing testimony about a well-planned campaign to
eliminate an entire people. It is not possible to do justice to their stories
in an article, but this is the picture that emerged. I am writing about this
book now, 12 years later, because it has, once again, entered the political
arena.
Arguing that all Isaaqs were supporters of the Somali
National Movement (SNM), the guerrilla movement that sought to drive the
government out of the Northwest, life, as we know it, was denied to them in
their own homeland from 1981 to May 1988, It became, instead, a succession of
human rights abuses. Murder; detentions; torture; unfair trials; confiscation
of land and other property; constraints on freedom of movement and of
expression; a strategy of humiliation directed at family life, at women and
elders; the denial of equal opportunities; discriminatory business practices
and curfews and checkpoints became a daily affair. Both urban centres and
rural communities were targeted, but it was the nomadic population, regarded
as the backbone of the SNM economically and in terms of human resources, which
suffered the most. Their men and boys were gunned down, their women raped,
their water reservoirs destroyed and people, as well as livestock, were blown
up by landmines.
In late May 1988, the SNM attacked the towns of Hargeisa and
Burao. It was the start of a savage war against Isaaq civilians which drove
most of them into exile in the inhospitable desert of Ethiopia. Instead of
engaging the SNM militarily, the government used the full range of its
military hardware against unarmed and defenceless civilians, thinking perhaps
that the SNM would be too preoccupied with the chaos of mass civilian
casualties to fight back effectively. The assault knew no bounds: residential
homes were bombed, fleeing refugees were strafed by planes and men, women and
children perished by the thousands.
Mohamed Said Barre is not alone in his guilt for these
crimes against humanity, for which no-one has yet been prosecuted. Some of the
other key architects of this policy of annihilation, men like Mohamed Saeed
Morgan, Mohamed Hashi Gaani and countless other collaborators, continue to
wreak havoc in Somalia. Others, including Mohamed Ali Samater, live in
comfortable exile in the United States and elsewhere in the world. And then
others are right here in Somaliland. And they include President Dahir Rayaale,
who was head of the feared and powerful secret service, the National Security
Service (NSS) in Berbera. President Rayaale is named in A Government at War
With Its Own People.
The town of Berbera saw some of the worst atrocities of the
war, even though the SNM never entered Berbera in 1988. Elders and businessmen
were immediately arrested en masse after the SNM attack on Hargeisa and Burao;
between 27 May and 1 June, they were transferred to Mogadishu. The killings,
which were exceptionally brutal in Berbera, began shortly afterwards. Many of
the victims had their throats slit and were then shot. A series of massacres
which have been mentioned again and again took place, mainly in June, in
Buraosheikh, close to Berbera, when about 500 men were killed in groups of
between 30-40. Some of the victims were from Burao, Hargeisa and surrounding
villages who had come as temporary labourers to the port of Berbera. Others
were asylum seekers who had been returned from Saudia Arabia. The names of
some of these men are listed in the book. As head of the NSS in Berbera, Dahir
Rayaale bears a heavy and direct responsibility for their fate.
Witnesses who are alive also recall Rayaale’s contribution
to the war against civilians. One of the people I interviewed in Djibouti in
August 1989 and who is cited in the book is Abdifatah Abdillahi Jirreh. He was
only 14 at the time, but he remembered Dahir Rayaale.
One day in mid-August [1988], Dahir Rayaale, head of the NSS,
came to our ice plant and took my father away. They also arrested one of the
watchmen, an old man, Farah Badeh Gheedi. They were detained in the police
station, accused of talking about the prospects of the SNM coming to Berbera.
Rayaale is not the only man who has held a senior political
position in Somaliland whose conduct of human rights has been questioned. Many
former Isaaq members of the NSS and the HANGASH, the military police that came
to exert formidable power over civilians, today occupy key positions in
Somaliland in the NSS, re-established in 1995, and the Criminal Investigations
Department (CID). The people they tortured, interrogated and spied on, and the
people whose loved ones they killed, will, one day, no doubt give their own
account.
So the issue is not one of clan and community identity, but
of individual responsibility for grave injustices. These men, whether they are
Isaaqs or non-Isaaqs, must answer for what they did in their political and
professional capacity. And the political parties to which they belong must
investigate these accusations thoroughly and objectively and respond
accordingly. The three political parties who will contest the forthcoming
presidential elections—UDUB, Kulmiye and UCID—must ensure that they do not
recruit, let alone put forward as candidates, human rights offenders. Since
the accusations in the book became a matter of public debate, “witnesses”
have gone on television to say that Rayaale actually saved lives. That is not
the point; he may well have saved some people, but that does not prove that he
did not commit the acts of which he is accused.
The case about President Rayaale is especially serious
because he is a candidate in the first free presidential elections that the
country has known in more than 30 years. He became president, not through the
will of the people, but appointed by the House of Elders on the death of the
late President Mohamed Ibrahim Egal. But now it is a matter of choice. If he
wins, he will remain in power for five years. Justice for the victims is at
stake. But so is the future of Somaliland. The crimes of the 1980s is the very
reason why Somaliland decided to secede from Somalia in May 1991. The fact
that men like Morgan and Gaani retain considerable power in Somalia is a major
issue for people in Somaliland. Only a leader whose own hands are clean has
the legitimacy to speak for Somaliland on such major questions as the
prosecution of war criminals and to represent his people effectively
regionally and internationally.
The question will be asked: why has it taken so long for
this information to be widely disseminated and known, despite the fact that it
was documented as early as 1990? There are many factors, the most important of
which was the decision taken in May 1991 to pursue a policy of reconciliation
in Somaliland. But even then, the leading perpetrators of war crimes were
excluded and a committee named to pursue their case. But settling the internal
conflicts of the 1990s drained energy that might have been devoted to that
task. So justice took a back seat. But with the prospect of electing a
president who faces such serious accusations, Somaliland cannot afford to
remain silent. Keeping quiet means that tens of thousands of people died for
nothing. It means that an entire people became impoverished and stateless
refugees for nothing. It means that Hargeisa, Burao, Berbera and other towns
became roofless ghost towns for nothing. And it means that any attempt to
pursue the likes of Morgan and Gaani will be laughed out of court. It is time
to speak out and set the record straight.
Rakiya A. Omaar is the
director of the international human rights organisation, African Rights
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