Alright y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio, I'm Scott Horton and our guest on the show today is Leslie Lefkow, she is the Senior Researcher of the Africa Division of Human Rights Watch, their website is hrw.org.
She has specialized in expertise in investigating abuses in armed conflict, humanitarian crises, Sudan, and the Horn of Africa.
She has conducted investigations for Human Rights Watch in Sudan, I don't know how to pronounce that one, it's French sounding, Liberia, Somalia, Ethiopia, and Kenya.
Before joining Human Rights Watch, she worked for humanitarian organizations in Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Sierra Leone.
She's a graduate of Columbia Law School and Bryn Mawr College, I guess is how you say that.
Hi Leslie, welcome to the show.
Hi Scott, thanks for having me on the show.
Well thank you very much for joining us.
Okay, so let's talk all about the human rights situation in Somalia.
First of all, can you just kind of catch us up on the numbers of people who have been displaced by the current civil war going on there?
How many refugees?
How bad is the, I think the last time we talked, you spoke about the people who are at least technically hungry, if not technically starving, however I'm not exactly sure those definitions work out.
If you could just sort of go on about those things for a while, I'd appreciate it.
Sure.
I mean what we're seeing in Somalia is a crisis that's both a long term and a kind of a short term crisis.
We've seen, Somalia has had no government for almost 20 years now.
The government collapsed in 1991, the last central government, and it's been in a varying state of conflict ever since.
Not always the same level of conflict, but some degree of conflict.
And what we've seen in the last three years, and here's sort of the more short term or imminent crisis, is a whole new set of actors who came onto the scene in the conflict.
So you have the federal government, the transitional federal government, which is a very weak government that receives support from the U.S., from the U.N., from most of the international community, from Somalia's neighbors, Uganda, Ethiopia, Kenya.
But this government is extraordinarily weak.
It only controls a few blocks of Mogadishu, the capital.
It doesn't control most of the countryside.
And so most of the rest of Somalia is controlled by different armed groups, primarily a group called Al-Shabaab.
Al-Shabaab is an Arabic term that means the youth, and this group is a quite radicalized Islamic group who have grown out of the vacuum in Somalia, and they've grown out of some of the radicalization that has gone on in Somalia over the last, say, ten years.
And they are the ones who are responsible or who are claiming responsibility for the bombing in Kampala in Uganda just last week, which I'm sure you've heard about.
There were two bomb blasts in Kampala, the capital of Uganda, which killed more than 75 people who were watching the final of the World Cup in Kampala.
And this group is the one that has claimed responsibility for that bombing.
And the reason that they staged those attacks is because Uganda and Burundi, two African countries that are in the region of Somalia, have sent troops to Somalia to support this very weak government of Somalia.
So Al-Shabaab is fighting the government and essentially is trying to send a message and threaten that if Uganda and Burundi don't remove their troops, there will be more events like the bombings that took place.
Let me just add a little bit on the humanitarian situation, since you did ask me about that specifically.
What we're seeing in Somalia today, I think, is one of the most catastrophic humanitarian crises in the world.
There's very little information available about it, because a lot of media can't get in to Somalia, it's too dangerous.
But what we know is that probably up to two million people have been displaced in the last few years of conflict.
And some of these people were already displaced previously, from the previous years of conflict.
So most of those people are still within Somalia or have moved to northern Somalia.
But there are hundreds of thousands of Somali refugees in Kenya and Uganda, in Ethiopia, in Yemen, and some who've gone even further afield into Europe and of course in the U.S., people who've come in different waves of migration over the years because of Somalia's terrible crisis.
And what about the hunger situation?
I know that for a while there, the United Nations, maybe still to this day, had suspended food aid, because they said, you know, you say it's too dangerous for journalists to go there, it's too dangerous for the UN food aid people to go there.
And they say, I'm sorry, we can't distribute the food to the people who need it, so we're backing out of here.
Well, actually, the food aid situation is complicated, because the U.S. is also playing a role here.
The U.S. is the biggest provider of food, food aid to Somalia, or was, that is, and also provides a lot of food to the World Food Program, which is the UN agency that provides food aid to people around the world.
And the U.S. actually suspended food aid to Somalia last year because of the new, these new restrictions that they put, the U.S. put in place, where they don't want, their, the problem is, they say, is that agencies working on the ground can't be sure that all the food that is being given isn't actually being given to al-Shabaab.
So there's, the U.S. government is concerned about diversion of food aid from, you know, people who need it, in ordinary civilians, to al-Shabaab, to this Islamic group.
And you know, there may be a certain amount of food that gets diverted.
This is a, you know, this is not unusual, and especially in a conflict situation anywhere in the world, that it's impossible to ensure that 100% of all aid always is going to those who need it.
There's always a little bit of aid that may leak.
But the U.S. actually suspended all food aid to Somalia because of this concern that it couldn't, the aid couldn't be monitored 100%.
So the U.S. is actually a primary responsible for the cutoff of food aid in Somalia at the moment.
And it's very hard to know exactly what the impact has been.
Certainly, there's no doubt that there are many Somalis, civilians who are in desperate need of food right now.
Do you have any kind of ballpark numbers as to how many people may have died of starvation?
How do you guys at Human Rights Watch define the difference between people are going hungry and people are starving?
Starving means they're actually dying sometime in the next couple of weeks, or how does that work?
I mean, I believe there are different stages of food crisis and leading up to famine.
But you know, famine, obviously, yes, would be where people are actually dying of hunger.
And I don't, I just, I don't have the answer to that.
I mean, I think the problem is, is that the access for agencies is so difficult at the moment for all kinds of different reasons.
I mean, some agencies are continuing to be able to work in areas that are controlled by Al-Shabaab.
So it's not like all humanitarian aid has stopped.
But it is difficult.
I think there are some organizations like the International Committee, the Red Cross, that has had to start doing more food aid because other agencies are no longer doing it, because of, for example, the US suspension of food aid.
So there is a big problem.
The problem is also that we just don't know how big it is.
Well, as I think has really been driven home by the media coverage after the bombing in Uganda at the soccer game and the restaurant, etc., that it really drove home the point to me, all this media coverage, that this is the biggest story untold, is the history of American intervention in Somalia, even, never even mind the 80s or what have you, just between the era of Black Hawk Down, as the American people know it, and what's happened last week or earlier this week.
I mean, I think Somalia is the great sort of invisible crisis, and I think it has, I'll come back to that, I guess, after the break.
Yeah, yeah.
When we come back from the break, I want to ask you all about the politics of this, and I want to, if possible, I want to learn the names of some of these people who are in different positions of power and that kind of thing.
I really want to know this story well enough to teach it, and you're the best person I've talked to on the subject so far.
So everybody, we'll be right back with Leslie Lefkow from Human Rights Watch.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
Wrapping up anti-war radio for the day, I'm on the line with Leslie Lefkow from Human Rights Watch, and we're talking about what's going on in Somalia.
Of course, it's in the news this week that there was a big bombing in Uganda that killed at least dozens of people.
I forget the number.
I think it was less than 100, but many innocent people were killed.
And this has brought al-Shabaab and the civil war going on in Somalia back into the news.
And now, Leslie, I hope it's okay with you, and I think I kind of played this game with you before on the show, which is I try to outline my understanding of the situation in broad strokes, and then I let you correct me where I go off the story and talk about the truth, I mean to say, and then develop what you think is important from there.
And I'll try to give you free reign for the rest of the segment here.
But so here's the way I understand it.
Say the early 2000s, there was the least government Somalia had ever had, and comparatively speaking, it was the most prosperous time they had had in a long time.
Very low taxes.
The port of Mogadishu was humming, and there were cell phone companies coming up and all kinds of things.
And compared to life in the southern part of Somalia, as per usual, this was actually not too bad.
But America intervened and started supporting the warlords, including the son of the guy who they were after during the Black Hawk Down raid of 1993, and tried to support them to be the government of Somalia.
And what that ended up doing was solidifying support for what became the Islamic Courts Union, which was a pretty grassroots, minimalist government.
They were pretty strict, but not all that powerful.
And they were the first real monopoly on government power in Somalia there for quite a while, maybe a generation.
And then America supported the warlords even more.
And so then the Islamic Courts Union defeated them and kicked them out and drove them into Somalia.
And then America supported them even more by working with the Ethiopians to invade Somalia, to throw that Islamic Courts Union out of power in Mogadishu and install this transitional federal government.
Then they lost, because the Islamic Courts Union, in alliance with their brand new, never existed before allies, al-Shabaab, defeated the Ethiopian army and the transitional federal government basically, forced the army back into Ethiopia.
And then at that point, the Bush administration made a deal that said, you can be the government of Somalia as long as you, the Islamic Courts Union that is, as long as you inhabit the shell of the transitional federal government that we've created for you.
They made that deal.
Jim Loeb names a guy named Sharif in his article today about it, says, this is the guy from the Islamic Courts Union that the Americans agreed could go ahead and be the government that we invaded to overthrow, as long as he would inhabit the shell of their state.
But now al-Shabaab, which never existed before, the rebellion that won, is now fighting a civil war against our old enemies in the Islamic Courts Union, who now inhabit this government that the U.S. has created for them.
Is that even right at all?
And say whatever you want after that, please.
Well, thanks, Scott.
I mean, I'm not sure I would have put it in quite those words, but, you know, I think overall what, you know, what you're describing is a place where American, but also international intervention has often gone badly wrong, and I think that's absolutely right.
I think Somalia is a place where over the last 20 years there's been various different kinds of strategies by the Americans, but also by regional players like the Ethiopians, and most of them have gone badly wrong.
They've been counterproductive.
They've often created the opposite result to what people hoped to achieve.
So, for example, you know, the Ethiopian intervention in Somalia in 2006 actually created more hostility towards the West, towards the U.S., certainly towards Ethiopia, and helped generate recruits for al-Shabaab because many Somalis who aren't necessarily, you know, not necessarily Islamists, who don't necessarily support hard-line religious edicts, were so antagonized by the Ethiopian intervention that they were sometimes pushed into the arms of groups like al-Shabaab.
So I think what, I think the lesson learned is that many, most of the strategies have not worked, and that the international community and Somalia's neighbors as well need to be extraordinarily careful about how they intervene, who they pick as partners and allies, and how they support them.
There's just so many examples of the things that have gone terribly wrong.
Just to give you one example, sort of with U.S. policy, you know, for the last three years, we've seen a horrendous conflict in Mogadishu.
So in the heart of an urban, you know, in an urban city, the heart of a densely populated city, we've seen mortars being used totally indiscriminately, all sides.
The insurgency groups, the al-Shabaab, the African Union military, the Somali government, everybody has been using mortars in totally indiscriminate ways.
What does that mean?
It means they just shoot off these mortars in the middle of a city, which then, you know, destroy people's homes, usually when families are in them.
You get just horrendous rates of civilian deaths and injuries from these kinds of attacks.
So this has been going on for three years.
It's been well documented.
We've put out a number of reports on it.
Other groups have put out lots of reports on it.
What did the U.S. do last year?
They sent 40 tons of mortars and other weaponry to the Somali government, you know, their allies, with no monitoring put in place.
There was no way that the U.S. government could know that these weapons would actually be used by the Somali government and wouldn't be sold in the market.
Well, I think it was in the press immediately that that's what happened, that al-Shabaab was walking around with American weapons like the next week or something.
Well, I mean, this is the thing, no monitoring.
And these weapons probably were used just as, you know, all these other mortars were documented in a totally indiscriminate way that ended up killing Somali civilians.
So these are the kind of mistakes and problems in the policy of the U.S., but also of others, that I think we should be changing.
You know, these are mistakes that are, these are obvious lessons learned.
I mean, this is not to say that there is an easy solution to the problem of Somalia.
There isn't.
Well, I have bad news for you, Leslie.
The headline today, Jim Loeb at IPS News and Antiwar.com, is Obama says U.S. will redouble efforts against al-Shabaab.
And they're treating this like history began, you know, just the other day, and that for some reason these al-Shabaab people just hate soccer so much that they're terrorists.
And so we have to go and defeat them by starting the policy that you and I have been talking about has been going on.
I mean, I think this is worrying, and I hope that the U.S. government will think deeply.
I mean, I think when you have incidents like this bombing in Kampala, sometimes the instinct is to react very quickly and strongly because, you know, it's a terrible incident.
We shouldn't, you know, everybody I think would agree this is a simply horrendous attack.
But the question is, how are we going to solve the problem in Somalia?
Is it going to be through military means?
You know, I think we have our doubts.
But certainly if we continue to support, we as in the U.S., continue to support groups that commit abuses and, you know, who are targeting civilians indiscriminately, that's not going to help towards a solution.
We've seen that already.
Well, and as you pointed out, the people who at least claimed responsibility for the bombing in the name of al-Shabaab said very clearly, Uganda out of Somalia.
They're talking about not Ugandans, they're talking about the Ugandan military occupying their country.
They didn't say they hated soccer.
I mean, I'm sorry to have to say make such a silly point, but that's what TV says that they hate.
Yeah, I mean, I think the issue is with al-Shabaab is also that it's not it's not a group with one voice.
I mean, there are different interests here.
And I'm not a I'm not a politician.
I'm not a military strategist.
But probably what what what, you know, governments that that that are that are that want to combat al-Shabaab need to do is to think about how to how to try to engage with some of the more moderate elements, because it's not just one group.
It's not just one set of interests.
You know, you have certainly probably some individuals who are very hardcore, who have, you know, aims that are linked to al-Qaeda.
But then you have others whose interests are really about in are in Somalia.
They're very local interests.
So I think there you know, there's there's probably clever ways to try to approach these these these this group in a in a in a more nuanced way.
Would you agree with me that perhaps a policy would be just leave Somalia alone and let these poor people work out their problems that maybe no Democrat or Republican in D.C. can be trusted to settle their affairs for them?
Well, I think that's I think that's unlikely to happen.
I mean, I think that that that, you know, that sort of beside the point, right?
It's not just a question of of U.S. you know, direct U.S. interests in in Somalia.
It's also an issue that, you know, some of these neighbors of Somalia are allies.
Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia.
So there is broader interest, I think, in Washington.
All right.
Listen, I really appreciate your time on the show today.
A lot.
Leslie.
Oh, well, my pleasure.
Thanks a lot, everybody.
That's Leslie Lefkow from Human Rights Watch.
That's the antiwar radio for today.
See you all tomorrow.
