Bush administration supports war crimes in Somalia

This March 2008 video is called FREE SOMALIA – END ETHIOPIAN OCCUPATION.

By Bill Van Auken:

Massacre in Mogadishu—war crime made in the USA

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.

Salim Lone in The Guardian daily: The only way the US can prop up its client regime in Somalia is through lawlessness and slaughter.

Mohamed Dheere: here.