ARS, Somalia and their Enemies

Following the completion of the fruitful negotiations at Sanaa, and the declaration of the end of differences in ARS, it is necessary to shed some light on the tasks ahead. Unity in diversity within ARS is the means by which the leadership of the Alliance will offer the distressed Somalis a united and pacified Somalia to be engaged in the path of rehabilitation and development.

In fact, it must become clear beforehand that the path of ARS to political supremacy in Somalia is currently blocked. To unblock the path is the main challenge for the Alliance; foe identification is therefore vitally important.

Contrarily to what many believe, it is not Abyssinia that stands in the way; certainly, the tyrannical regimes of the Amhara and Tigray Monophysites (Tewahedo) have always contemplated and elaborated vicious, revengeful plans against Somalia, and tried ceaselessly to spread discord among different Somali tribes. But their effect was limited, and one should not exaggerate it. In fact, the Abyssinian invasion of the Somali South occurred after no less than 15 years of fratricidal war in Somalia. It is easy to imagine the Abyssinian army having withdrawn from Somalia, and the fratricidal war continuing for many more years.

One could then attribute the disastrous events to the bad side of the Somali character, the negative aspects of the Somali mindset and idiosyncrasy; in fact, all the peoples and all the nations have their strong and their weak points, their positive and their negative characteristics. However, in every people never do the negative characteristics eclipse the positive qualities, except in times of severe crisis. For the negative side of a nation’s traits to come to surface and prevail, a special stimulation and exacerbation must take place. It can be due to various socio-political developments or triggered through foreign involvement.

Various nations have been engulfed to fratricidal wars and conflicts; from the Paris Commune (1870) to the post-WW II division of several European nations, the number of paradigms is impressive.

What truly happened in Somalia?

Following an initially victorious war of liberation of the illegally occupied by Abyssinia Ogaden, Somalia lost a war against a superpower (USSR) and its satellites (Cuba, Czechoslovakia). Oddly enough, the Reagan administration did not show a great part of interest for a strategically located, Oil-rich, third world country that had just turned its back to the ‘Socialist Paradise’ and sought to get engaged in the path of liberal economy.

Odd, isn’t it?

Not quite if we notice that Siad Barre’s trip to Washington and other parts of the States (http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ho/15748.htm) occurred at the times of the ‘Falklands’ War (just 5 days before the Argentinean invasion of the Malvinas islands) when the pro-British part of the American establishment prevailed determinedly. Acting under British guidance, America disregarded a country that could be a brilliant ‘acquisition’ during the Cold War when South Yemen and Abyssinia were at the hands of Soviet Union. All this heralded ominous developments that the Somali president did not accurately anticipate. He found recourse at what could not be a recourse, namely oppression and tribal discrimination. This triggered further reactions; and perfidious England expected this in order to promote the evil anti-Somali plans.

But it takes more than bitter antagonism to turn a person like Abdullahi Yusuf from hero of the Ogaden War (he was decorated for bravery) to traitor in Abyssinia. In fact, Abdullahi Yusuf, along with some Majeerteen officers, organized in 1978 a failed coup, and fled to Kenya. No one could then imagine that he would proceed to Abyssinia where he also spent some years in jail. But Abdullahi Yusuf’s English friends did. Then started a long story of national shame for Somalia. As it usually happens, one traitor does not always realize the nature of his function and deeds, and brings in friends, associates and colleagues, causing even greater damage to his country.

This is precisely the stimulation and exacerbation of a nation’s negative traits of which I spoke earlier. And the really ominous conspiracy against Somalia was elaborated by the British colonials who always - since the times of the 19th century Orientalists and explorers - perceived Somalia in a most vicious and hateful way.

Why Somalia was a problem for Colonial England

Somalia did not fit in the customary realm of the African tribes that were lodged within meaningless borders that would ensure – after the so-called decolonization – either tribal and ethnic conflicts or a falsely devised multiculturalism that would prevent both, the proper nation-building effort and the formation of comprehensive national identities among many African nations. The reason was simple: the Somalis were an entire nation, a big African nation in terms of population and surface.

On the other hand, Somalia did not fit the realm of the so-called Arabic speaking peoples which was the epitome of the devious colonial work in the area of the Ottoman provinces and the so-called Middle East.

The malignant colonial effort evolved around the demolition of the Ottoman Empire (the only country that rightfully existed in the vast area between Morocco and Iran) and the destruction of

1) the Berberic Kabylian identity of Northwestern Africa (which did not need either to speak Arabic or to be divided into pseudo-states like Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco and Mauritania),

2) the Coptic identity of Egypt (whereby the only possible national language for either Christians or Muslims is Coptic),

3) the Kushitic African identity of Sudan (whereby the Arabic speaking group, as descendents of the Ancient Kushites, should rather merge with the Oromos and progressively rediscover their national identity),

4) the Yemenite identity of Yemen (conditioned by the diffusion of the Pan-Arabism, but still maintained by the Mehris and the Socotris), and

5) the Aramaic identity of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Emirates, Jordan, and Palestine (which was targeted by the abnormal efforts of merciless arabization).

However, the alibi for the aforementioned efforts of the colonial academia and diplomacy was the existence of various Arabic-based idioms that they manipulated in order to create the confusion that would prevent the aforementioned nations from achieving national identity, and historical continuity, and cultural originality.

This trickery could not however happen in Somalia because Arabic was emphatically a foreign language spoken by an insignificant minority of religious authorities and merchants.

Somalia consisted therefore in a direct threat for Anglo-French colonialism because the possibility was there – in a world well versed into nationalisms as the late 19th and the early 20th centuries – for a Kushitic African nation to develop unhindered a solid nationalism, complete the nation building procedure (in the same way many European nations did), and achieve national identity, historical continuity, and cultural originality.

The arrival of Italy, as counterbalance to the evil and inhuman Anglo-French colonialism, in the Ottoman territories of the Red Sea (which had never been part of the mountainous, isolated and tiny Abyssinian kingdom) and in the Somali coast in the south of the Cape Guardafui (Raas Caseyr) limited England to the northern part of Somalia’s territory (that they for the first time called ‘Somali – land’), and confined France to Djibouti. England formed an alliance with Abyssinia that had two dimensions, namely
a) anti-Ottoman, anti-Islamic and anti-Somali, and
b) anti-Catholic, anti-Italian.

With the Italian occupation and colonization of the colonial state of Abyssinia, with the Italian defeat in Africa during WW II, the post-WW II agreements, and the decolonization, England tried to engulf Somalia into conflicts with neighboring states where important Somali populations were peremptorily enclosed (Kenya and Abyssinia); in fact both states are invalid. This led to further English involvement, and the Whitehall deployed all possible efforts to achieve the dissolution of Somalia.

Formation of Somali Traitors by England – the Obstacle in the Path of ARS

This effort had to be carried through specific use of Somalis who would be selected and ‘educated’ in a particular way so that they perform according to the English plans of Somalia’s destruction. These people are customarily called traitors either they are conscious of their role or not.

These people are not always easily identified; and if they are in some cases identified, little is known about their real link with the English state, and the forces behind the scene. Yet, these people are the real enemies of ARS and Somalia. It should be necessary for ARS to understand that it will take a plan, great persistence, and meticulous effort in order to eliminate these people and prevent their plans.

Before establishing a plan and pursuing the necessary efforts to cancel these persons’ plans, the Alliance must understand the rules of the political game, and play accordingly. With political opponents, one has to be close, monitor their deeds, detect their intentions, and avert their initiatives; frontal opposition is not possible at the present stage when England controls the TFG, supports the Abyssinian army’s presence, and mobilizes America against those who shamelessly denounces as ‘terrorists’ (as if there can be worse terrorist in the History of the Mankind than England itself).

Terminating this first article, I will republish three articles published in English and Somali media about persons around the TFG president who are the axes of the nefarious English influence in Somalia. The articles are very analytical in highlighting evident ties of these persons with Somalia’s worst enemy; however, what these reports do not reveal is how and why these persons tied their fates with England and became the main cause of Somalia’s destruction. In a forthcoming article, I will shed light on the other, dark, side of these persons’ connection with England, and the hidden forces that control the English establishment.

Feared Somali police chief packed peas for Tesco

http://www.hiiraan.com/news2/2008/May/feared_somali_police_chief_packed_peas_for_tesco.aspx

The man in charge of one of Africa’s most feared secret police services worked in Britain for Tesco until 18 months ago.

Mohamed Warsame Nur ‘Darwiish’, who has been accused of war crimes in conflict-ravaged Somalia, was employed through an agency to drive trucks and pack peas at the supermarket giant’s depot near Daventry, Northants, until late 2006.

Now he is General Darwiish, head of the National Security Agency (NSA), the Somali equivalent of the CIA, which is responsible for detaining and interrogating terrorist suspects.

The agency is accused of unlawfully imprisoning and torturing hundreds of citizens and launching many other repressive security operations.

An investigation by The Mail on Sunday’s Live magazine and a Channel 4 Dispatches programme discloses that his family still live in subsidised housing in Leicester.

The investigation found that he is one of several Somali leaders linked to allegations of war crimes who have close links to Britain.

Some members of the Somali government are believed to have even been given British citizenship, state benefits and a subsidised home in this country.

All regularly commute between Somalia and their homes in Britain, where their families remain while they fight for the UK-backed President, Abdullahi Yusuf, who is accused of waging a tribal war.

The president himself has links to Britain – in 1996, his life was saved by a liver transplant at London’s Cromwell Hospital. He comes back for regular check-ups, staying with relatives in Kilburn, North-West London.

Somalia’s deputy police chief, Ahmed Hashi Tajir, originally from the Netherlands, spent six years living in Birmingham, where he worked for a car parts firm.

His family remain in Spark Hill in Birmingham, where they receive child tax credit because his police salary – which is also subsidised by Britain, via a UN programme – is low.

He said: ‘I was in Birmingham for six years. It is more open than Holland. England more open, yeah. And I was getting very, very good pay – £1,500 every four weeks.

Plus attendance allowance. Plus quality bonus. Plus child tax credit.’

Former Somali interior minister Mohamed Guled Ga’amadheere is a British citizen, with a home and family in Leytonstone, East London.

In 2007, he ordered that no international aid was to be distributed without undergoing a government inspection, an action the UN claims unnecessarily obstructed more than a million refugees receiving food and medical care.

The former military chief of staff, the president’s spokesman and others are also thought to have families and homes in the UK.

General Darwiish was a forklift-truck driver at Tesco's Daventry depot, UK. He now terrorises Mogadishu

Amongst others: http://www.aayaha.com/viewpage.php?articleid=6900 and http://www.allsanaag.com/DetailsArticls.asp?id=701

Why is the family of Somalia's secret service chief living in a subsidised house in Leicester? Because 18 months ago, General Darwiish was a forklift-truck driver at Tesco's Daventry depot - and every little helps. Aidan Hartley reports on the UK-based Somalis governing a country on its knees.

Watch Dispatches tonight, Monday, 26 May 2008 at 8:00pm on Channel 4. Revealing how key politicians at the heart of the vicious fighting in Somalia enjoy incredibly close links to Britain.

There is a shockwave – no bang – and an explosion sucks air out of my lungs so violently I taste blood. I glance back through the truck’s rear window and see a whirlwind of black smoke and people running. My cameraman says, ‘Roadside bomb. A couple of the guys have taken shrapnel.’ He’s talking about the gun-toting security guards in the pick-up behind us, who defend us in case of ambush as we drive round Mogadishu. Their truck has taken the full blast. The bomb was probably triggered by an insurgent using a mobile-phone detonator.

In the back of the truck, a gunman is pulling at a limp body with a fist-sized hole in the neck, and there are pints of blood. It’s Abdi, 21, a guard; he was quiet, polite and had just become a dad. His eyes are open.

Two bystanders are lying in the road. One of them is face down, not moving. The other lies on his back, chest heaving, his guts hanging out. Nearby, a woman on her way back from the market carrying a can of cooking oil sits slumped in the dust, her arm hanging in bloody ribbons.

Soldiers arrive, shooting wildly in the air, and I realise that we’re sitting targets for a possible secondary attack. We duck down an alleyway and a man comes up to me, yelling. ‘We want peace!’ He holds his head. ‘Peace and life! You know? Peace. Life. I don’t want the fighting.’

A call comes through minutes later, as we’re racing to Medina Hospital and I’m holding another of our guards, who is groaning and bleeding from a leg wound. ‘Praise be to Allah, we have killed two Russian spies,’ says a voice on the phone to my translator. It’s the militant Islamic insurgents. Our translator spits back, ‘You stupid idiots, these are journalists.’

General Darwiish: head of Somalia's National Security Agency

In Mogadishu, you hear Improvised Explosive Device (IED) explosions all the time: while in the shower, eating your lunch, interviewing sources.

You hear the BOOM! And then ask what the target was and how many died.

There is nothing you can do about roadside bombs. It makes emerging on to the streets an incomparably terrifying experience.

My cameraman Jim Foster and I continue working. Mogadishu is like Baghdad, except there’s no Green Zone or friendly military bases in which to take refuge; we are the only Westerners here.

In Medina Hospital, surgeon Mohamed Yusuf and his team manage to save the woman – named Faduma – whose arm was smashed in the blast. ‘Shelling is continuous,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘The bullets are continuous. Continuous, continuous, continuous.

I had 165 injuries come in on one afternoon.’

The Somali doctors work for subsistence pay, sometimes doing 18-hour shifts. On his way to hospital today, Mohamed was waylaid by armed men in uniform, robbed and almost killed. Despite this, he still turned up to work.

Medina Hospital is always busy; it has the only functioning trauma ward in the south of the Somali capital.

Thousands are dying in street fighting and there’s been a mass exodus from the city. Things are the worst I’ve seen in 17 years of covering the civil war here, which explains why UN officials have designated Somalia as ‘Africa’s worst humanitarian crisis’.

Why is it so bad? And why should we care?

The answer to both questions is because we in the UK are directly fuelling this mess.

British taxpayers’ money is helping to bankroll one side in this vicious conflict, and several Somali leaders who have been linked to allegations of war crimes against countless civilians are living double lives in Britain.

Extraordinarily, some members of the Somali government have even been given British citizenship, state benefits and a subsidised home in this country.

Until late 2006, Mohamed Warsame Nur ‘Darwiish’ was packing peas and driving forklift trucks for Tesco at its depot near Junction 18 of the M1 near Daventry.

Now he is General Darwiish, chief of the feared National Security Agency (NSA), the principal counterterrorism arm of Somalia’s government – the Somali equivalent of the CIA. The NSA is accused of interning hundreds of people on trumped-up charges in the notorious Barista Hisbiga dungeons, where it’s said they are tortured and ordered to obtain ransoms, often from overseas relatives, sometimes from Britain.

Meanwhile, Darwiish’s family continue to live in safety in a housing association property in Leicester, where rents for similar, subsidised homes from the same organisation are just £80 per week.

Deputy police chief Ahmed Hashi Tajir is from Sparkhill in Birmingham. A Dutch passport holder, he came to Britain from the Netherlands because it offered better job opportunities – and the opportunity to benefit from child tax credit.

He is right to be thankful to his British sponsors. Even his police force is backed by the UK – Britain has helped pay, via a UN programme, the salaries of Somali policemen

Former Somali interior minister Mohamed Guled Ga’amadheere is a British citizen, with a house and family in Leytonstone, east London.

In 2007, he ordered that no international food or medical aid was to be distributed without first undergoing a government ‘inspection’, threatening ‘bad consequences’ for those disobeying him.

He claims this was to ensure the food was safe to eat; the UN, however, claims this action unnecessarily obstructed efforts to reach more than a million refugees facing starvation, and that aid workers were subjected to ‘systematic harassment’.

During my investigations in Mogadishu, I was startled to discover that the men I mention here may not be the only leaders in Somalia with strong British connections.

The former military chief of staff, the president’s spokesman and others are thought to have families and homes in the UK. One government minister revealed to me that at least half of the cabinet are British.

All these men regularly commute between Somalia and their homes in Leicester, Birmingham and east London, where their families are left to survive as best they can while the men are away fighting for their leader, President Abdullahi Yusuf.

He too has strong links with Britain. In 1996, his life was saved by a liver transplant at London’s Cromwell Hospital. The organ donor was a young British motorcycle-accident victim. Yusuf comes back for regular check-ups, staying with relatives in Kilburn, north-west London

Under his rule, up to a million civilians have fled the bombardments in Mogadishu; they now live in tents made of plastic and twigs. Mogadishu is a killing zone half-reduced to rubble.

Both sides may be at fault, but we appear to be helping to fund a government led by a president who publicly condones the bombardment of civilian neighbourhoods in his pursuit of terrorists. The question is, how on earth did it come to this.

‘[Darwiish] used to work at Tesco near Northampton, picking, packing – normal warehouse work,’ a young British Somali man called Dahir told me outside a Leicester community centre.

‘He was on minimum wage, about £800 a month.’ (Tesco cannot elaborate – a spokesman told Live the high turnover of agency staff makes it almost impossible to track down their employment records.)

Dahir said he wasn’t surprised by General Darwiish’s rapid elevation. ‘It must be tribal. The president and him are the same tribe, but he and his family got asylum over here.

The UK’s 200,000-strong Somali community arose as a result of Somalia’s 1992 famine. One of the worst events in Africa’s troubled history, it saw waves of refugees coming to Britain and Europe. By the early part of this decade, Islamists back in their homeland were being accused by the US of providing sanctuary for Al-Qaeda agents.

The US began working with Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, viewed as a lone Christian ally in a sea of unfriendly Islam.

In 2006, Ethiopian forces installed President Abdullahi Yusuf as leader of a pro-Western Somali government. To help form his government, Yusuf brought in several colleagues settled in the UK. Although on the face of it they are leading the ‘war on terror’ in Somalia, with support from the US and the UK, some claim that Yusuf and his cronies are essentially fighting a tribal conflict.

Darwiish’s NSA is responsible for the detention and interrogation of terrorist suspects and delivering them to the Ethiopians and Americans.

It has imposed martial law and curfews and launched security operations that have driven countless civilians from the city. It’s also accused of raiding and closing radio stations.

NSA agents raided the UN World Food Programme’s offices in Mogadishu, detaining its top official. The NSA is alleged to have imposed ‘taxation’ on relief supplies destined for the refugee camps.

Victims also claim it arrests hundreds of people on trumped-up charges of being linked to the insurgency. I meet a man in Mogadishu, also called Dahir, who is one of those who has been thrown into one of the NSA’s dungeons. He says that cells built for five inmates held more than 20 and there was neither light nor air. ‘They blindfolded and handcuffed me,’ he tells me.

‘They came in a battle wagon with a dozen security guards. I don’t know why they arrested me. They asked me questions. They asked me if I was trained in Afghanistan. I said I didn’t know where that was.

‘The brutality of that prison I cannot describe. Many inmates were tortured and you could hear their screams from upstairs. I saw people paralysed. They pulled out fingernails. I saw this with my own eyes.

‘I never committed crimes against the government. I have been [to the dungeons] for nothing. Without seeing a judge. I don’t know why I was arrested. I was between life and death. I thought if I was freed I could become a suicide bomber.

He says the torturers were Ethiopians and Somali NSA agents, and that some inmates vanished on rendition flights. The NSA guards had other plans for Dahir.

‘After 60 days the guards offered to negotiate. They gave me a mobile phone and told me to call my family.’

He tells me the NSA demanded a ransom; money had to be raised from Dahir’s family. They paid out $1,800 in cash, and finally, after 97 days, he was freed.

What has Darwiish to say about all this? I don’t know where to find him in Mogadishu – though the government claims to be legitimate, it relies entirely on 15,000 Ethiopian occupying troops, so I drop by the house of their proconsul, a man called Gebre.

I give him two bottles of whisky as a sweetener and ask if he can help me line up a meeting with Darwiish.

‘Yeah. He’s here having breakfast,’ Gebre says, grabbing the bottles. We go into the dining room and he tells Darwiish to talk to me.

Between mouthfuls, Darwiish confirms that he lived in Leicester for seven years and knew all about Britain. He tells me to visit him the next day.

We duly turn up and are just taking our shoes off as we enter his house when the atmosphere becomes tense. As Darwiish chain-smokes and chugs espressos, I can see he’s very angry that Gebre has forced him to see us.

‘Not on camera,’ he orders. ‘I’m in intelligence and we don’t have pictures of our faces.’ (Nevertheless, we did manage to get a picture of him for this story).

I ask him about the stories I have heard of unlawful imprisonment and torture. ‘That is ridiculous!’ he says. ‘It’s not true. We are not torturing people. We are not killing people. But if you see someone who is really thinking the wrong way, we tell him, "Please stop." If he say no, if he say "I am fighting", then we arrest him.

'Then, after a few days, we’ll say to him, "Please, why you are fighting? Tell us. Why you are killing your brothers?

'Why you are killing and destroying your country? We came from Western country. We want to build our country, we want to offer you the way of life."’ I ask him about claims that the NSA detains people for months without charge. ‘It’s not like that. You get misinformation. Sorry. It’s not like that’.

The general also denies taking bribes and tells me nobody pays him a salary: ‘I’m working for free at the moment.’ He says he’s applying lessons he learned from living in the UK for seven years and wants to make Mogadishu as good a place to live as Leicester.

Later, a waiter called Yusuf comes to see me after being released from 28 days of detention in a police cell around the corner from our hotel. He wants to talk because he’s so angry. ‘They [the police] don’t care if you’re alive or dead. All they care about is money’.

The UK-subsidised pay of deputy police chief Ahmed Hashi Tajir is $900 a month. He quips that this is better than nothing. I ask how he cares for his family back home. ‘They are getting Child Tax Credit, because I get low income.

He denies that the police rob or arrest innocent civilians. ‘We are very careful,’ he says. ‘The UNDP [United Nations Development Programme] pays us and they don’t like to see any human-rights violations.

But in the streets outside our hotel, we watch police and government army troops regularly shoot the place up, and steal mobile phones and money from passers-by. We even see them hijacking two vehicles.

I ask Tajir about his British background, and why he moved from the Netherlands to Birmingham, where he says he used to work for a car parts firm. ‘I was in Birmingham for six years. It is more open than Holland. England more open, yeah. And I was getting very, very good pay. £1,500 every four weeks. Plus attendance allowance. Plus quality bonus. Plus child tax credit.’

Gunmen cruise the streets in their 'Technical', a converted pick-up truck with a heavy machine gun mounted on its back

The children of Mogadishu, a city that’s now a byword for African-style chaos, are in desperate need of help.

I enter a children’s feeding centre and the crying, the smell, the sight of skeletal babies is overwhelming. Hundreds of malnourished infants are turning up daily at feeding centres in the camps outside the city. They’re not dying yet. But by the time you see dramatic signs of famine – skeletal bodies, distended bellies – it’s almost too late to stop mass death. This is a famine caused by men, not global warming.

Since the UK-backed government seized power, Somalia’s coastline has become the world’s number one spot for pirate attacks, strangling the delivery of food supplies.

And when UN aid ships do manage to get through, they have to deal with men such as Mohamed Guled Ga’amadheere.

In the refugee camps I find little Weiliyo, aged ten, who months ago was blinded in one eye by shrapnel.

Her lower leg was smashed, and although she didn’t lose her foot, the bone inside has disintegrated.

She moans with pain as she hobbles along, her leg wounds weeping pus. She’s just a few kilometres from Medina Hospital, but since it’s too dangerous to get there she’s still a million miles from care.

In a deserted street I ask a man, Maadey Suufi, why he doesn’t flee. ‘No money to run with,’ he says.

On a recent evening Maadey went to buy some batteries at the shops, leaving his wife and four children at home. Minutes later he heard explosions and returned to find his entire family blown to pieces.

Near the derelict National Theatre, I meet Ahmed, who says his son was mortally wounded by artillery fire.

Cradling his broken child, he ran to the hospital.

On the way he met government soldiers, who shot him in both legs at point-blank range. His boy died and he is now paralysed. Ahmed’s neighbour Abdullahi has lost four children and his left leg in a mortar blast. Both of these men are now starving.

Fresh US air strikes against militant leaders this month are the latest of several signs that America is still intent on assisting Yusuf’s government

In the skies over Mogadishu, a US spy plane is visible in daylight, the throb of its engines audible by night.

'Millions have fled the bombardments - Mogadishu has been reduced to rubble'

In a now familiar tale of how the US-led ‘war on terror’ has gone badly wrong, heavy-handed tactics have stoked the insurgency, now being fought by a coalition of extremist Muslims, nationalists, criminal gangs and civilians out for revenge.

‘They have created their own enemy,’ says Ahmed Diriye, a clan elder in Mogadishu. This old man looks a wreck, and no wonder – he’s only just been released after 84 days in detention, without charges, in a prison he says had no roof.

‘If an Ethiopian tank kills your family and you take up an AK-47, are you a terrorist?’ he asks. ‘Or are you merely defending yourself?’

On our way out of Somalia, at the airport, an NSA agent demands a $200 bribe, threatening to prevent us from getting on the ancient DC-9 aircraft that’s about to fly out. Naturally, we pay.

Back in the UK, I go to see some of the Somali leaders’ families.

When I visit Darwiish’s house in Leicester, Somali men and women spill out of the front door and begin shouting at us.

A woman opens a window and screams at my British Somali friend in their language, ‘You’ll regret this, you ********!’

They call the police, and while the officer stands talking to them they continue to hurl abuse in Somali. They promise to smash our camera.

They threaten to throw bottles and rocks at us. They take a photo of my Somali friend, and later he hears a rumour the general’s family are asking around the British Somali community, trying to find out who he is.

I then go to Birmingham and knock on Tajir’s front door to tell his wife I saw her husband and he looked well. She says, ‘Well, I’m not well. I’m tired. I’ve got six children to care for and he should be here helping me.’ She strongly disagrees with what Tajir is doing back in Mogadishu.

I’ve met President Yusuf before. I interviewed him a couple of years ago. He said, ‘I like Britain.’ Then he patted his stomach, indicating his liver. ‘In fact, a part of me is British’.

Next I visit British Somali Zahra Abdullah, who lives in Birmingham. In 2005, she won a High Court civil action for costs and damages of £30,000 against President Yusuf for the killing of her husband in Somalia.

The court found Yusuf was ‘the head of an armed militia in a civil war, retaining the presidency by force’. Although the judgement makes clear there wasn’t enough evidence to find Yusuf personally responsible, it goes on to say, ‘It appears the killing was carried out by those acting under his authority.’

Yusuf offered ‘blood money’ for her husband’s life and promised an investigation.

Nothing happened. Zahra wants Yusuf arrested, as General Pinochet was, on a visit to Britain.

She’s written to Tony Blair, Ken Livingstone, Jack Straw, Frank Dobson, Glenda Jackson and many others.

They told her to contact the Foreign Office, which she did. The Foreign Office never replied. Nor did Scotland Yard. I ask if she expected more.

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Justice. No more than that. I feel helpless, then every day I turn around and hear this news of what’s happening to [Somalia’s] people.’

Officials within the UN and the EU have expressed concerns about the commission of war crimes in Mogadishu and questioned why they’re supporting President Yusuf’s government and his Ethiopian allies. Britain has expressed no such concerns.

Finally, I meet Lord Malloch-Brown, Minister for Africa, Asia and the UN, at the Foreign Office.

Describing the president and his team as ‘a small [shaft] of light or a way out of this living hell that is modern Somalia’, he seems unaware of many of the allegations described here.

He now promises to have British officials look into them. ‘If the circumstantial evidence is strong enough, we certainly will not [do business] with them,’ he tells me. ‘I’ll give you that assurance now.’

But at this time there are no plans for the authorities to investigate President Yusuf, General Darwiish, Ga’amadheere, Ahmed Tajir and their colleagues for making the UK a base from which to prosecute a vicious war in Africa.

Britain and the Bloodshed in Somalia

http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/37518,features,britain-and-the-bloodshed-in-somalia

Aidan Hartley reports on links between the UK and 7,000 dead on the streets of Mogadishu

Since people cannot reconcile with each other, it is best to forcefully expel [them] from the city... You have seen what happened in the last onslaught. Whoever has survived that will be exterminated in the one to follow".

The scene is Mogadishu, capital of Somalia. The man talking in a speech broadcast on radio 12 months ago is Salad Ali Jalle, former minister in the current Somali government.

In the year since Jalle's speech, roughly 7,000 civilians have been killed in city battles between pro-government forces and Islamist insurgents.

Nearly a million have fled the military 'onslaughts', ending up in camps stalked by hunger and sickness. On a recent visit to Mogadishu, witnesses told me they blamed both the insurgents and the government for the suffering.

I have seen the effects of the conflict on civilians: victims with limbs and guts blown out by explosions; a makeshift famine ward full of skeletal babies; camps extending to the desert horizon; heavy gunfire day and night - and rubble-filled streets where government forces beat and pillage civilians.

Incredibly, the government side, which still includes men like Jalle, enjoys extremely close links with Britain. British taxpayers' money goes towards paying their salaries.

Leading figures in the regime are British or EU passport holders. Some have homes in Britain and return regularly to visit their families here. The President, Abdullahi Yusuf (left), often comes for medical check-ups in London, where his life was saved by a liver transplant from a British donor.

Yet the president stands accused of overseeing the indiscriminate bombardment of civilian districts where insurgents lurked. "Any place from which a bullet is fired, we will bombard it, regardless of whoever is there," he vowed in a broadcast days before one of the 'onslaughts' his deputy Jalle promised. Hundreds were later killed.

Another key figure in the leadership - who has a house in Leicester - commands intelligence forces alleged to have imprisoned hundreds without charge. The police forces, whose salaries are partly sponsored by the UK, are linked to extortion, torture and even extra-judicial killings.

The deputy police chief has a home in Birmingham. And some leading officials - one of them a former minister who is a British citizen with a home in London - are accused of obstructing the delivery of humanitarian food aid and medicines desperately needed by refugees in the camps.

How it all went wrong is the latest installment in the familiar story of the disastrous US-led 'war on terror'.

Seventeen months ago, Ethiopian forces seized the city from Islamist militants and installed the new government. Washington - together with Britain and most of the world community - supported this military solution to Somalia's long-running civil war, even though it meant the intervention of outside forces.

During Islamist rule, Mogadishu had experienced its most peaceful spell since 1991. But the West wanted the new regime to hunt down al-Qaeda and its allies in the region.

Yet US air-strikes since the invasion have killed perhaps two senior al-Qaeda-linked targets - and many Somalis argue the hunt for a handful of individual terrorists hardly justifies plunging a nation into chaos.

And instead of just fighting 'terrorists', government forces - who are from rival clans to the majority of Mogadishu's current population - are alleged to have also set about prosecuting a tribal war.

Government leaders I spoke to denied all allegations made against them, though when I showed Jalle the radio transcript quoted above, he admitted he had said "some of it".

Like other theatres in the 'war on terror', solutions in Somalia get harder to find as time passes. Fresh attempts at peace talks collapsed this month. A small African Union mission has failed to fully deploy and is seen by the insurgents as a target, which does not bode well for fresh UN promises to beef up peace-keeping operations.

In Mogadishu, clan elders repeatedly told me they wanted Britain's help to sort out their mess. But they said the fact that Britain finances a government that is linked to serious human rights abuses only makes things worse.

Aidan Hartley reports from Somalia for Channel 4's 'Dispatches', 8pm, Monday May 26.