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For Anti-War.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
Introducing Leslie Levkow, she's Senior Researcher for Human Rights Watch's Africa Division, and has specialized expertise on Sudan, Ethiopia, and Kenya.
Thanks very much for joining us on the show today.
Thank you very much for having me.
Now I want to start off with all about the human rights situation there.
I mean, that's really what's most important, but also I guess I would wonder if you're well versed enough in all, who the different factions are, and who's fighting over what, that I can ask you those kinds of questions toward the end here.
You can try.
I'll give it a shot.
Okay, great.
I really want to know, and I try to keep up, but it's very difficult for me, too, so any help you could provide along that line is really important, but basically I think most people, at least that listen to this show, know the outline that America sponsored an Ethiopian invasion at Christmas of 2006, and the human rights catastrophe we're dealing with now is the results of that, so we can go through exactly what happened a little bit later on, but really what I want to know, what I want the audience to know is what it's like to be a Somali this week, and what that society is like right now as a result, or to whatever degree, as a result of America's intervention there.
Yeah, I mean, I think the thing about Somalia, say, over the last decade is that every time you think it can't get any worse, it does.
If you looked at the situation in Somalia five years ago, when the country was basically being torn apart by different warlords, fighting over different areas of territory, dividing the country, South Central Somalia, into different parts, what we saw then was the Somali civilians, you know, ordinary Somali people, being very much at the mercy of these warlords, struggling to survive in a country without a state, totally, you know, no government whatsoever, and there were enormous challenges for ordinary people, and yet, when you look now at the situation, it is far worse, and that's largely the result of almost continuous fighting over the last three years, or three and a half years, between different groups, and the conflict in Somalia really escalated very sharply in December 2006, when the Ethiopians went into the country to get rid of the Union of Islamic Courts that had taken control, and since then, things have just steadily deteriorated.
Mogadishu has been wrecked by fighting pretty much non-stop since December 2006, and we've seen almost more than a million people have been displaced from their homes in Mogadishu and other parts of the country, and some of these people, of course, have been repeatedly displaced over the last decade or more, so that has had an enormous impact on their ability to survive, you know, to set up the kind of networks and systems to even make any kind of a living.
So it's a horrendous situation, it's probably one of the worst human rights and humanitarian catastrophes in the world today, and the irony and the tragedy is that it gets very little coverage, of course, because it's enormously dangerous for journalists to work there.
Well, now, all these refugees, they really don't have anywhere to go as far as crossing borders into neighboring states, so they're just all strung out along the highway, or what?
Well, you've got two different patterns.
Basically, the people who still have a little bit of money, Somalis who still have a little bit of money, are moving north and south, either into the more stable parts of Somalia, in northern Somalia, called Somaliland and Puntland, or they're moving into Kenya.
And we've seen tens of thousands of Somalis coming into Kenya since late 2006, since the Ethiopian troops moved into Mogadishu, and that's been a very steady flow, and an enormous burden, actually, for Kenya.
Kenya now hosts one of the biggest refugee camps in the world, a set of camps called Badab, in northeastern Kenya, where we're seeing very serious humanitarian conditions, very big problems in terms of the ability of refugees to access water and shelter and food, because there's been such an inundation of refugees in the last couple of years.
The other place that Somali refugees are going to is to Yemen.
We are seeing smaller numbers of refugees crossing, they undertake a very dangerous crossing, often they're smuggled by people, smugglers and traffickers, across the Gulf of Aden to Yemen.
And then the people who don't have any money, who can't afford to pay smugglers to get them into Kenya or to Yemen, are the ones who are still displaced in Somalia.
They're the people who fled Mogadishu in the last couple of years, and have set up shanty, displaced camps outside of Mogadishu along the roads.
And they're some of the worst off, because as you know, humanitarian agencies face such problems, working in Somalia now, that it's very difficult for these folks who are still in Somalia to get access to food and other services.
I'm talking with Leslie Lefkow, she's Senior Researcher for Human Rights Watch's Africa Division.
Now they say that this is, maybe it's you guys that are the origin of this, they're Human Rights Watch, that this is officially the worst humanitarian crisis in Africa.
It's nothing compared to Iraq, or maybe it's not as bad as Iraq or Afghanistan, but even worse than Darfur, is that right?
I mean, it's always hard to rank, I think, crises, but I would say that Somalia, in terms of the numbers of people who are affected, it is right up there globally, along with other countries.
Because we're talking about more than a million people who've been displaced, who've had to flee their homes within the last couple of years.
So these are huge numbers of people.
Yeah, well it just seems so incongruent to me to hear people say that the U.S. ought to do something to save Darfur, when all the worst humanitarian crises in the world are the result of American intervention, other than that one.
I mean, I think the irony of all the attention for Darfur and for other places is not lost on Somalis.
I mean, because Somalis are actually, despite all the problems, many Somalis have mobile phones, they do get access to the internet, so they see that what's happening in Somalia receives very, very little attention.
And that irony is not lost on them, that despite the scale and the enormous gravity of the human rights abuses that are taking place, you've got indiscriminate bombardment in Mogadishu, you have killings, rape, looting, on an enormous scale.
And yet despite all these atrocities, Somalia very rarely gets public attention, and when it does, piracy is one of the few things that bring it there.
You know, I hate to say it, but I think probably the most that anybody's learned about Somalia in this society, or the most people at one time who've learned anything really about Somalia, was probably when South Park did an episode a couple of months ago, where the boys decided that it would be great to go and be pirates in Somalia, the land of pirates, you know, in their imaginations, like a Disney movie version of Caribbean Pirates.
And they go there, and then the truth is that the Somalis are so desperate that they're willing to risk their lives in a dinghy on the open seas, trying to get a hold of a boat.
This is an act of the most desperate people.
And the Somali character in the show explains to the kids from South Park that, no, the thing is that if I don't go and be a pirate today, my mother and my brother are going to die.
And this is the only chance I have.
That's why I'm out on the high seas.
It ain't because Somalis are evil at their pirates, it's because they're starving to death.
Yeah, I mean, I think the piracy issue in Somalia, it's a symptom, of course, of, you know, the chaos on land, and the fact that for the last three years, Southern Somalia has been engulfed in this enormous crisis, you know, has led in some respects to this phenomenon of piracy.
And I think it shows that the attention really needs to be brought back to what is happening on land, and to what needs to happen to end the conflict, and even more importantly, to try to minimize the, you know, the horrendous impact of what's happening on ordinary people.
All right, so now I guess, you know, now that we've drawn the portrait of the nightmare that is Somali society at this point, can you address the case of whether there's such a thing as Somali society, and whether it has to be this way, and how it got this way?
It seems like, you talked about how there's no state, it seems like really all the fighting is over who's going to be the state, yeah?
Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, the conflict in Somalia goes back several decades, so it's obviously, you know, it's a long and complicated history, but I think to give the brief version in a nutshell, you know, what we're seeing over the last years is the evolution of different groups at different times, and for different motivations, struggling for control.
And what is different, I think, about what we're seeing now in the conflict, is that there is more of an ideological and a religious component to it.
You know, Somali society is based on clans, on the clan structure, you know, these are like different ethnic groups, and this is the foundation of Somali society.
And so in previous years, the conflict was about different clans struggling for control and for authority and access to resources.
Now, although the clan issue is still a part of the conflict, you also see, you know, this other layer of religious and ideological affiliation.
So, for example, what we see now, which we didn't see, at least not to the extent that it is now, five years ago or ten years ago, is the, you know, the conflict between a very new central government, the transitional federal government of Somalia, and a loose coalition of armed groups, armed factions, who are trying to, who are against this central government for all kinds of reasons.
For religious reasons, because they would like to impose a more hard-line Islamic state, but also for other reasons.
For example, the central government, the transitional government, is supported by a number of Western nations, including the United States, including the United Nations, including the European Union.
So, there is also an element of, you know, refusing to accept this central government because it's seen as a puppet of the West.
So, you know, there's a number of elements that have come together.
Another element, of course, is the fact that some of these hard-line groups, some of these armed factions, are alleged to have links to Al-Qaeda and to international terrorist networks.
It's thought that these are, you know, that the number of individuals is small.
It's a minority.
And most of the supporters of these factions are Somalis who really have a Somali agenda, not an international agenda.
But, you know, one has to acknowledge that there is an element also within this struggle that is linked to the international terrorism issue.
Well, you know, it just seems like such tragedy.
If you look at, you know, Osama Bin Laden's speeches and writings and interviews and things like that, going back, there's, I think, Michael Scheuer, the former CIA analyst, said, you notice he never talks about Turkey.
And that's because, really, the Bin Ladenist ideology is a very Arab nationalist thing.
And Islam and being an Arab are kind of one and the same thing, in his mind.
And so the Turks he really doesn't care that much about because they're this different ethnicity and that kind of thing.
And yet, here America just fans these flames and proves him right.
Even when he's just making things up, like in the summer of 2006, he said, look out, all true believers, look out, the Americans are coming to Somalia.
Six months later, we sponsor the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia and send in our special forces in their C-130s to kill Somalis.
And now, here, this criminal, this murderer, gets to become, in at least, you know, metaphorical terms, the hero of the resistance.
He gets to be, or at least take partial credit for the resistance that these other people are doing in their own country.
It seems, despite the tragedy of it, it seems really dumb.
Well, I think there's been, you know, there's been a lot of mistakes with Somalia.
And there's no question that, unfortunately, Somalis, I think, are the ones who tend to pay the price for those mistakes, be they committed by, you know, the United States, or by the Ethiopians, or by India, the other many states who are meddling in Somalia, and have meddled in Somalia in the past.
You know, I think it was predictable that when the Ethiopians went in, that their presence would cause a movement against them, like the one that happened that we've seen.
And there's no question, I think, that the situation in Southern Somalia is worse today for most Somalis than it was three years ago.
And that's really the tragedy.
And, you know, I think it is a complex situation.
There's no quick fix to the problems in Somalia, even if we were to see all of the international meddling and interference disappear today, there is still a problem and a governance crisis that Somalis have to figure out themselves.
But I think the hope would be that if we saw that kind of, you know, withdrawal of all the international meddlers, that Somalis might then have an opportunity to work things out in a way that they haven't.
And that's, you know, that's one of the huge problems is Somalia is, it's not just a Somali crisis, it's also in a regional crisis, it's an international crisis.
And unfortunately, most of the actors involved are not necessarily helping to find a better solution.
I think, you know, that the problem is, of course, is that everyone looks at Somalia through a very narrow lens.
So, for example, you know, I think the Ethiopians and the United States both had interests in Somalia.
They're not necessarily the same interests.
I mean, the U.S. has an interest in a few individuals in Somalia.
These, you know, these few individuals who were alleged to have been responsible for the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya, for example, and Tanzania.
And that's really the main interest, has been the main interest of the U.S. Although, to be fair, the U.S. has also been in the past a big provider of humanitarian aid to Somalis.
Is that really it?
Is that really it?
Because I know that the Washington Post said that, I mean, what this is really about is there are three suspects wanted for questioning by the FBI.
And so that's why we're doing this.
It seems like they sure have radicalized a lot of people and hurt a lot of people in the process.
And what, did they arrest one of the three or something like that?
Is that really all it is?
I mean, when I look at my map and I think like an admiral, I think, well, this is the pointy part of East Africa.
Maybe America wants to own Somalia from here on.
I mean, I'm just making that up and speculating.
Do you see any of that?
Or this is, what is this?
I think that the main interest is in those individuals.
I mean, the U.S. has carried out a series of airstrikes in Somalia over the last few years where they've been trying to target these guys with one success and mostly failures that hit civilians largely.
So, you know, I think that has been an interest.
For the Ethiopians, the interest is not necessarily the same.
They don't have some, their interest is more about, you know, a very volatile neighbor that could spread chaos into Ethiopia and also, you know, cause enormous problems domestically for Ethiopia.
And that's really their main concern.
So the interests are not always aligned.
I mean, I think on the issue of the U.S. supplying humanitarian relief, it absolutely has.
The U.S. has been a major donor in the past.
Having said that, we are seeing at the moment a crisis on the food side because the U.S. put one of the most radical of the societies in the Somali, you know, armed groups on the terrorism list last year.
And they are now requiring that humanitarian agencies, including the World Food Program, which distributes most of the food to civilians in Somalia, they have to guarantee that no food will go to al-Shabaab or to its members in any way before they can distribute food, which is very, very difficult to do.
It's very difficult to guarantee that in any situation, that 100% of food or of relief, you know, won't be, you know, that not even 10% of a percent could be diverted.
So they've actually put a block on all food aid for the moment.
And there are concerns that if this block is not listed in the coming weeks, that we may be seeing actually famine in parts of Somalia by the end of the year.
Well, we know that they can't control where the guns go, at least from the mainstream accounts.
I believe it's the Washington Post said Obama has sent 80 tons of weapons.
And then they all just ended up on the market everywhere and all sides got them.
Well, exactly.
So I don't know why they ought to be able to choose who gets the food or not once they get it.
So I guess they just won't.
There is a certain irony in that.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Because as you say, the US did get an exemption to send arms and there has been a pattern of the Somali government soldiers and also the African Union soldiers who are there selling their weapons and the weapons ending up on the open market.
So the tracking and the monitoring clearly has some flaws, serious flaws.
Now, can you comment at all about the supposed intervention of the Eritreans?
Because Hillary Clinton made a special point of threatening them that they might be next if they keep intervening on behalf of the rebels.
Yeah, I mean, I think there is evidence that the Eritreans have supported members of Al Shabaab, have also supported other armed groups in Somalia in the past.
There is evidence of that.
Having said that, I think it's important to point out that Eritrea is only one of a number of countries that are involved in Somalia in supporting the armed insurgent groups or supporting others.
Well, the thing is, Ethiopian intervention, good.
Eritrean intervention, bad.
Yeah, in a way, that's absolutely right.
And I think the bigger picture when you look at Eritrea, you know, part of the reason for Eritrea's policies in Somalia is because there's an ongoing cold war between Eritrea and Ethiopia because of a conflict that took place there some years ago that's never been resolved.
And Eritrea has become very, very isolated internationally with its own human rights problems, very, very serious human rights problems.
I think one has to ask whether sanctions are going to achieve the effect that one would want, which is to see Eritrea reverse some of these, you know, very unhelpful policies.
You know, there's no question that Eritrea's role is not a helpful one in the region.
But, you know, the question is whether this will really help, whether it will just isolate the country more, and also whether, you know, Eritrea could rightly say, well, why are we getting sanctioned when all these other countries that have been involved in violating the arms embargo on Somalia are not being mentioned?
Okay, now, what exactly is al-Shabaab?
Because, you know, I hate all these terms because you never know really what they mean, and they seem to mean whatever the people who use them want.
But I bet you have a particular sort of definition.
As I understand it, it means the youth in Arabic.
And it started, say, three or four years ago as a very fringe armed military wing of one part of the Islamic courts.
So it was quite a minority element three or four years ago.
And what we've seen over the last three years with the Ethiopian intervention, with, you know, everything that's evolved since then, is that it has grown in, I think, in size and support.
It's not, from what we understand, you know, and it's not easy to find out all the inner workings of this group or to find out exactly how many members they have.
But it seems more like a coalition of different groups, some of them based on clan, some of them perhaps really more belonging to the group because of ideology, others because they're offering money.
I mean, there's been a lot of recruitment by this al-Shabaab, by these groups, including among youths and children, sometimes forced.
And so it's a kind of an alliance, really.
And I think that if, you know, if we saw a situation, for example, where the central government disappeared altogether, right now the transitional federal government, the central government, really retains control over a very tiny part of Mogadishu, and that's all.
It's actually al-Shabaab that controls most of rural southern Somalia and parts of Mogadishu, as well as some other armed groups.
There's another group called Hizbul Islam, for example, that controls other areas.
And what we're seeing at the moment is, as al-Shabaab and these other groups have consolidated their control of these large areas of southern Somalia, some of these authorities have imposed very harsh Islamic punishments on ordinary Somali civilians.
You may have seen, for example, some of the stories of women being stoned to death for adultery or beheadings or other kinds of very harsh punishments, usually without any kind of proper process.
And what we're seeing now, we just had researchers in Kenya, in the refugee camps, is we're seeing more people actually fleeing not just the incredible violence in Mogadishu, but also fleeing some of these horrendous abuses in the al-Shabaab-controlled areas.
Okay, now I'm going to start this question by asking your forgiveness.
Basically, what I want to do is try to reconstruct my understanding of the history of the past couple of years here as simply as I can, and then I'd like to give you the opportunity to correct me or fill this out however you like.
But basically, the way I understand it, and partly based off of what you just said, the al-Shabaab, the most radical and extreme in their Islamism or whatever, were this minor part of the Islamic Courts Union.
And then in Christmas of 2006, America sponsored this Ethiopian invasion to overthrow the Islamic Courts Union.
And in overthrowing the Islamic Courts Union and fighting this war against them, this al-Shabaab movement ended up, in their alliance and helping the rest of the Islamic Courts Union fight against the Ethiopian and U.S.
-backed so-called transitional government or what have you, they ended up becoming more and more powerful to the point where the Bush administration decided, well, I guess we have no choice but to let the Islamic Courts Union be the government of Somalia.
And then they struck a deal that said, you can be the government as long as you're the government within the shell of the transitional government that we created and installed here.
You're not allowed to be your Islamic Courts Union, but you, the Islamic Courts Union, can be the government we created here.
Now the enemy is the group, the radical people who like to stone women to death, who have gone from this marginal movement to the resistance against the American intervention, which is now on behalf of the guys that we intervened to overthrow in the first place.
And now I'm sure I must have that wrong.
Well, I wish I could say that the elements in there were totally wrong, but I think you've mainly got it right.
I mean, there would be some fine points I would argue with here and there, but yeah, largely that's correct.
The head of the transitional government now, Sheikh Sharif, was a former more moderate official in the Union of Islamic Courts, and he is now the head of the transitional federal government.
And the transitional federal government, it has come to power through a process of peace negotiations in Djibouti, but the Shabab never participated in that, and they have steadily, they and some of these other hardline groups, have steadily taken control of more territory in the last couple of years, partly because they appealed to Somalis.
You know, there's a long history of enmity between Somalia and Ethiopia.
There were wars fought in the 70s over Eastern Ethiopian territory.
So the Ethiopian intervention engendered a lot of resentment, and I think helped to radicalize some Somalis, and that is one of the problems we're seeing now.
I think the other issue though here is of course that, you know, I'm not quite sure it's accurate to say that the Americans sponsored the Ethiopian intervention in the first place.
I think they certainly, the U.S. certainly did not send any signal that the Ethiopians shouldn't go in, and they're...
Well, they flew gunships in with them, I mean...
They took, and they certainly took advantage of the fact that the Ethiopians were going in.
I mean, I think the full story of whether or not the U.S. actually, you know, funded the Ethiopians, I don't think that story has yet been totally told.
I don't think we know all the details on that, but certainly the U.S. supported the intervention.
But I think it is important to say that, you know, the Ethiopians had their own reasons for going in.
They had a very clear agenda for going in.
You know, if the U.S. had said, don't go in, would that have stopped them?
Possibly.
Certainly they were never asked not to.
Well, we know that those...
You know, it certainly suited the U.S. interests at the time for the Ethiopians to go in.
Well, when they kidnapped people, they sent them to Ethiopia.
Exactly.
They renditioned them to Ethiopia.
Yeah, yeah.
There were more than a hundred people who were picked up and detained when they fled Somalia in late 2006 and early 2007, and dozens of them ended up in Addis Ababa.
We actually did a lot of research on this at Human Rights Watch and followed these cases very closely.
And this group of more than a hundred people included, you know, more than a dozen women, children, some as young as nine months old, who were held in Ethiopian prisons for months, incommunicado, secret, you know, no access to consular officials, no access to lawyers, no access to their family members, until finally there was enough attention brought to push the Ethiopians to admit that they were holding them.
And how many people was that?
Well, there were more than a hundred picked up in Kenya.
There were more others who were picked up directly in Somalia and sent over.
We'll probably never know the total number, but the Ethiopians admitted holding about 43, 45 people, and there were certainly far more than that.
Most of them were released, at least the non-Somali and non-Kenyan nationals.
So there were, you know, there were individuals who were from a whole range of countries, including the U.S., including the United Kingdom, including Denmark, Sweden, you know, a whole host of countries.
Americans renditioned from Kenya to Ethiopia by the CIA?
Exactly, yeah.
And, well, by the Kenyans, and then they were interrogated.
There was absolutely clear U.S. involvement in the whole operation, because we had a number of witnesses, you know, who described to us being interrogated by FBI or CIA interrogators in Addis Ababa.
And do we know what kind of standards for interrogation were used?
There were allegations of ill treatment.
Those were sometimes hard to corroborate, and they varied a little bit, depending on the people.
But in general, being detained in Ethiopia is not a pleasant experience.
The prisons are overcrowded.
There are routinely reports of torture and some of them beatings.
So it's not an experience I think one would want anyone to go through.
Now, again, please forgive me, but I forgot, as part of my very vague understanding of the history, the recent history here, when the Ethiopians invaded, it was to install a government that had been created by the U.S. really under the auspices of the United Nations, right, a government in exile.
And wasn't it made up of the warlords, including the son of the guy who was the bad guy during Black Hawk Down, Adid?
That's right.
I mean, that was an earlier government.
You know, there's been a number of efforts to create a new government.
That was like early 2007.
That was the initial attempt to install a government, was to back Adid's son.
And, well, the president at the time was a man named Abdullahi Yusuf, who was quite notorious for his past in Somalia.
I think the interesting thing was that the U.S. actually was not particularly supportive of that government until the Ethiopians went in.
And then, you know, then there was a need to bolster the government against the Islamic courts.
So that's when you saw more support coming in for that government.
But previously, you know, there hadn't been really that much interest.
The main U.S. involvement was there was actually a CIA operation before 2006 where they were actually handing over briefcases full of money to the warlords in Mogadishu to try to pick up some of these individuals that they're interested in, these people that were involved in the embassy bombings.
That failed.
That actually strengthened the Islamic courts, you know, because people saw that as the Americans backing the warlords.
So, you know, in a way, I think what is...
This again kind of loops back to what I was saying about international interference in Somalia often making things worse.
What you see, you know, even if you just take the U.S. as one example, you see this pattern over the years of just misguided policy that is often very short term, very narrow, narrowly focused on, you know, for example, trying to get these three individuals.
And each time it's almost the same mistakes are being made.
Different administrations think that they can pick a number of warlords or, you know, or other leaders to back and give them arms and give them money.
And then these, you know, regardless of the fact that many of these individuals have committed serious crimes in the past, have been serious human rights abusers in the past.
And you sort of see this pattern over and over again, where there seems to be very little memory of history and how these kind of interventions have failed and have often made things worse for thought Somalis.
You mentioned before about how dangerous it is to be a journalist in Somalia, and I don't think there's been too much coverage of that, but I guess I've seen it here and there.
Would you like to comment on that further?
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, Somalia is, I think, according to some of the media organizations that monitor these things, Somalia is one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a journalist today, if not the most dangerous, I guess probably next to Iraq.
There have been, I believe now, at least a dozen Somali journalists who've been either killed or wounded over the last couple of years.
There was an attack actually just a few days ago, and thankfully the correspondent for the Voice of America survived.
He was shot.
And this has been a symptom, I think, of both sides in the Somali conflict going after the media and going after civil society, going after human rights activists, going after people who are independent voices.
And it's been an enormous problem because, not only for those individuals, but because one of the few bright spots in Somalia over, say, the last three, four, five years has been the fact that media and civil society have been flourishing, and you've seen a real growth in the number of very committed and courageous individuals doing this kind of work.
And media in particular has taken an enormous hit, and of course that also means that the coverage of Somalia suffers because most international journalists don't go into Somalia because it's too dangerous and the risks of being kidnapped are enormous.
You know, there are actually two international journalists who have been kidnapped for more than a year.
They're being held for ransom, and a number of others who've been kidnapped and released.
So a lot of the bulk of the work that has been done in reporting on what's happening there has been in the hands of Somali journalists.
You know, a small number of very committed people who have, you know, taken enormous risks to cover the daily diet of bombings and shootings and killings in Mogadishu and elsewhere.
So this is a huge tragedy, and it's a terrible legacy of this conflict for Somalia that, you know, this group of people has been hit so hard by the way this conflict has evolved over the last couple of years.
Well, you know, most of us are stuck with Jeffrey Gettleman at the New York Times, and then if we're lucky we know about Chris Floyd's great blog where he covers Somalia issues, and of course there's Human Rights Watch, but where can people find this great journalism that you speak of?
Well, there are Somali websites that actually have English versions.
VOA actually has a very good VOA Somali service, also has English versions if there are English speakers, and of course for Somalians.
I'm sure most of the Somali speakers out there know all the websites already, but there's also the BBC generally tries to cover online on Somali issues, and then there's a couple of websites called like one www.garowe.com that carries a lot of Somali news.
So those are good places to look, and of course, you know, as you said, Human Rights Watch, we try to cover things, but those websites I think are a good start for anybody who's more interested in looking at things in more detail every day.
That's Leslie Lefkow, Senior Researcher for Human Rights Watch's Africa Division.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today.
Thank you so much, Scott.
