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Somalia: Ethiopian troops killing civilians, raping women - Amnesty
Tue. May 06, 2008 09:22 am.- By Bonny Apunyu. -
(SomaliNet) Ethiopian troops who support Somalia's UN-backed government are killing civilians, slitting people's throats and gang-raping women, Amnesty International said Tuesday calling on the international community to intervene to halt the bloodshed.
Amnesty released a report Tuesday containing chilling witness accounts of indiscriminate killings - and even the intentional targeting of civilians - in the Horn of Africa nation. The accounts single out Ethiopian troops for some of the worst violations.
In reaction, Ethiopia's government said the report was unbalanced and "categorically wrong."
Somalia's shaky transitional government invited Ethiopian forces into the country at the end of 2006 to help it battle Islamic insurgents. In addition to the insurgency, Somalia has been rent by years of violence between the militias of rival clan warlords.
The human rights group says it has scores of reports of killings by Ethiopian troops that Somalis have described as "slaughtering like goats."
In one case, "a young child's throat was slit by Ethiopian soldiers in front of the child's mother," the report says.
Such victims often are left to die in the streets, lying in pools of blood until fighters retreat and their bodies can be recovered, the report says.
"It's totally unfounded," Ethiopia's Information Minister Berhanu Hailu told The Associated Press in Addis Ababa. "Normally when they report they do not balance it out.
They have to go and see the reality for themselves. They shouldn't report from abroad saying this is happening."
Ethiopian officials last month denied an Amnesty report that accused its troops of the "targeted killing of civilians," particularly in a deadly raid on a mosque. The April 19 raid on Al-Hidaya Mosque killed 21 people, some of whom had their throats slit.
Amnesty's report says some 6,000 civilians were reported killed and more than 600,000 people forced from their homes in the Somali capital last year. Some people are being buried in the grounds of schools because it is not safe to reach cemeteries, it says.
"The people of Somalia are being killed, raped, tortured. Looting is widespread and entire neighborhoods are being destroyed," Michelle Kagari, Amnesty's deputy director for Africa, said in a statement from Nairobi accompanying the report.
"The testimony we received strongly suggests that war crimes and possibly crimes against humanity have been committed by all parties to the conflict in Somalia and no one is being held accountable," Kagari said.
The situation requires immediate and effective action by the international community, the report says, calling for intervention particularly from the United Nations, the African Union, the Arab League and governments in the International Contact Group for Somalia, which includes the United States.
"The international community must bear its own responsibility for not putting consistent pressure on the TFG (Somali government) or the Ethiopian government to stop their armed forces from committing egregious human rights violations."
Amnesty also called for more than 2,000 African Union peacekeepers in Somalia to be given a mandate to protect civilians.
The peacekeepers' key mandates include protecting government officials and key institutions and training Somali security forces. -AP
News Category: Somalia
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