IRIN Webspecial: A Decent Burial

Part Three: Creating a culture of impunity

Photo: IRIN Forensic experts describe finding human remains with "knotted loops of rope binding their wrists together behind their backs"

Barre took power in a military coup in 1969, and remained in power until his regime collapsed in 1991, following armed resistance in the northwest by the Somali National Movement (SNM) during the 1980s, and later by the United Somali Congress (USC) forces in the south.

According to the international human rights organisation Amnesty International, under Barre "a persistent pattern of political repression and gross human rights violations developed...[including] routine torture of political prisoners, thousands of detentions without charge or trial, grossly unfair political trials, many of which resulted in executions, and extrajudicial executions of thousands of civilians." [Somalia: Building human rights in the disintegrated state, November 1995]. Human rights abuses against Somalis were ubiquitous and many. In the northwest and some northeastern regions, said Amnesty, "thousands of civilians were killed because of their clan membership and consequent presumed support for armed opposition groups".

Barre was known to be a master of manipulation of clan loyalties and regional rivalries. People from all clans and all regions have recounted sufferings under his rule. Until 1977, his government was a close ally of the Soviet Union. Then, after the Soviet Union switched sides in the war between Somalia and Ethiopia in the Ogaden, he won strong backing from the United States - until criticism from the US Congress of the brutal counter-insurgency campaign in the north led to a suspension of US military and economic aid.

In humanitarian terms, the cost of the dictatorship was enormous and - if at first mostly hidden from view - was to become appallingly evident to the outside world. When the regime collapsed in 1991, Somalia was described by Andrew Natsios, the then director of the US Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA), as "the worst humanitarian disaster in the world today".

Inter-factional fighting in the capital, Mogadishu, and the south left an estimated 30,000 civilians dead, humanitarian agencies said. Humanitarian organisations and human rights groups believed that at least one million of the estimated nine million Somali population fled to neighbouring countries, with another estimated 1.7 million people fleeing to other Somali regions. In some areas, minority communities were killed, raped and forcibly expelled by the militia of clan-based factions.

"The carnage inflicted upon the civilian population by indiscriminate use of weapons of extraordinary force and by the failure on all sides to abide by minimum standards of international humanitarian law has already earned Mogadishu a special place in the annals of human cruelty," concluded a mission by PHR and Africa Watch in 1992 [No Mercy in Mogadishu: the human cost of the conflict and the struggle for relief, July 1992].

For the next decade, Somalia was without a central authority. Somalis suffered civil war, famine, displacement, and destruction of property and livelihoods. Factional and clan persecution was also played out in some cases within refugee camps in Kenya, Ethiopia and Djibouti. A huge international humanitarian intervention - including a military peace force spearheaded by the US - from 1992 to 1994 failed to put the country back on its feet.

The abuses and anarchy witnessed during inter-factional fighting in the 1990s were overwhelming; international attention struggled to get food and medical assistance to Somalis rather than try to grasp the concept of justice and prosecutions for war crimes. Atrocities committed by some of the faction leaders and their militia were "no less horrific than those committed earlier by state officials," said Amnesty. It said former military, security and political officials of the Barre government - who were responsible for or personally carried out the human rights abuses of the 1970s and 80s - had escaped justice. As a result, the culture of impunity already established by the previous regime became integral to the Somali social and political fabric, one human rights researcher pointed out.

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