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Looting troops prey on Somali refugees

Sam Kiley

During a lull in fighting in Mogadishu on Saturday, survivors picked their way through the post-apocalyptic landscape of Somalia's capital, quickly burying bodies. The floors and stairs of the filthy hospitals were crammed with injured civilians and slick with blood. Up to 3,50,000 refugees from fighting were camped in the bush — easy prey for armed thugs and warlords.

Almost two weeks of heavy fighting and indiscriminate shelling between Islamist militia and clan fighters battling Ethiopian and Somali government troops has turned Mogadishu into the front line in what Washington and Al-Qaeda both call the "clash of civilisations".

Somalia's recent agonies are a direct consequence of the American-backed invasion by Ethiopia four months ago to topple Mogadishu's Islamic Courts Union and install the weak and largely secular transitional federal government.

Golden age

But experts say Washington and its allies have driven many to look back on the recent times of Sharia law as a "golden age" amid signs that warlords are now looking to exploit refugees in a gigantic protection racket.

In 1992, after the civil war that deposed the dictator Siad Barre, militia leaders orchestrated the looting of food aid, charged aid agencies for delivering humanitarian assistance and prolonged a famine that claimed 3,00,000 lives.

According to the European Union's head of humanitarian aid, Louis Michel, Somalis fleeing the fighting have endured "systematic looting, extortion and rape by uniformed troops" — only the Ethiopian and government forces have uniforms.

And last week uniformed troops commandeered 12 trucks and helped themselves to tonnes of sugar and computers from the recently opened Coca-Cola factory in Mogadishu.

— © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

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