Families want justice, ‘blood money’ for AU peacekeeper killings in Somalia

In Golweyn, where his large-scale farm provided maize, bananas, and jobs that helped sustain the community, Omar Hassan Warsame was a larger-than-life figure.

The 65-year-old and a contingent of up to a dozen of his employees would tend to crops on the plot in the Lower Shebelle region, some 110km (68 miles) southwest of the capital Mogadishu – which helped spare locals from the effects of the region’s recurring droughts.

Ugandan peacekeepers from the African Union (AU) converged on the farm on August 10, 2021. Renowned as a community representative, it was not uncommon for businessmen or officials to approach Omar. The soldiers opened fire on him and four of his employees, but it is unclear why.

“They killed them in cold blood”, Mohamed Abdi, a nephew of Omar’s, told Al Jazeera. He led the neighborhood. A kind, charitable man who provided for the poor and cared for all his neighbours. We were in complete mourning throughout the entire city.

Seven civilians were killed in the Golweyn massacre, which prompted outrage across Somalia. Demonstrators demanded the removal of foreign peacekeepers from Mogadishu and the nearby Lower Shebelle towns. Eventually, a Ugandan court martial sentenced two soldiers to death and three others to lengthy prison terms, before a Ugandan court threw out the death sentences.

The African Union Mission in Somalia, or AMISOM, was the organization that provided the peacekeepers. They were first deployed in 2007 to prevent a takeover of the country by al-Qaeda affiliate al-Shabab, which seeks to overthrow Somalia’s government. Civilians have been the victims of al-Shabab’s attacks despite its regular battles with peacekeepers and government forces. The armed group is estimated to have killed around 4, 000 civilians in shootings, suicide bombings and other forms of violence between 2008 and 2020.

AMISOM peacekeepers, made up of troops from various regions, were primarily charged with preventing al-Shabab’s influence, ensuring security in government-held areas, and coordinating with the newly formed Somali security forces.

Backed by the United Nations, United States and other donor states, the AU peacekeepers have played a critical role in countering threats posed by the armed group.

But reports about their involvement in abuses against civilians can be traced back to their initial years in the country. Families of victims claim that the AU owes them “blood money” – financial compensation for their suffering, having been renamed ATMIS (African Union Transition Mission in Somalia) in 2022 and planning an end-of-the-year withdrawal from the nation.

“They’re supposed to be peacekeepers, but they murder civilians”, Omar’s nephew Mohamed told Al Jazeera. What distinguishes them from al-Shabab, then?

Compensation for victims

Somalia has been plagued by internal conflict between rival strongmen and a weak central government since President Siad Barre’s overthrow in 1991. Following the rise of the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), a political and military entity established by local Islamic law courts to govern the country, troops from neighbouring Ethiopia entered Somalia and drove the ICU from power in late 2006. Resistance was sparked by the ICU’s splintering and Ethiopian troops’ presence, which were widely unpopular with Somalis because of war crimes committed during combat. Eventually, hardliner elements of the former ICU went on to establish al-Shabab.

The AU’s peacekeeping mandate was established in 2007 as a result of international efforts to stabilize the nation. Ethiopian troops withdrew the bulk of their forces by early 2009 but always maintained a troop presence in Somalia, before merging them&nbsp, with the AMISOM force by 2014.

The security apparatus in Somalia has received billions in funding from its international partners. The national army’s ability to independently take on al-Shabab has increased over time, and the once-looming threat of an al-Shabab takeover of the capital Mogadishu has diminished considerably.

However, swathes of the nation are still under al-Shabab control, and government security forces struggle to expand their reach despite the nearly two-decade-long presence of African peacekeepers, whose numbers have already reached 20, 000.

The group’s capacity to carry out deadly attacks on civilian and military targets has hardly waned. At least 32 people were killed when a suicide bombing and gun attack occurred in Mogadishu’s popular Lido Beach in August.

With little in terms of concrete results on the ground, donor fatigue has led to cutbacks, including a reduction of $60m last year by the European Union. By the end of the year, ATMIS plans to leave Somalia, according to reports.

Despite the financial woes, the EU successfully delivered $200m in funds meant to compensate the families of the estimated 3, 500 AU peacekeepers who have died in Somalia since 2007.

But there is nothing earmarked for victims of peacekeeper violence, something ATMIS officials have tried to explain to the families.

In a voicemail to Al Jazeera, Comorian diplomat and current ATMIS political head Mohamed El-Amine Souef stated, “I met with]family members] and explained that the general consensus is that ATMIS is struggling financially, to the point where we had to consider terminating the mission.

“As such, the matter of compensation is being jointly dealt with by Addis Ababa and Mogadishu and a technical team that deals with judicial and compensation-related matters”.

Following inquiries, Souef did not respond to how a joint initiative between two governments, whose bilateral ties are currently at their lowest in decades, were made possible due to Ethiopia’s contentious plans to recognize the breakaway republic of Somaliland.

Last year, Souef told Voice of America that ATMIS needed at least $2m from donors to cover compensation requests in almost 80 cases of peacekeeper violence against civilians. The AU has not specified how many of these cases involve killings as well as serious and minor injuries.

Who can be held accountable?

According to local police and media reports, Ethiopian AMISOM troops shot and killed Abdullahi Osman Ige, 77, Ahmed Hussein Elmi, 71, and Abdullahi Ali Hussein, 19, after a fight with al-Shabab in the city of Garbaharey, which is 450 kilometers (280 miles) west of Mogadishu, according to local police and media reports.

The three were unarmed pastoralists out in search of water for their camels. The teenage Abdullahi was shot in the legs and left to bleed to death, according to medical records obtained by Al Jazeera.

In the years that followed, local clan elders in Garbaharey repeatedly requested “blood money” payments from AMISOM/ATMIS for the families of the three.

According to Dalmar Gure, chief editor of the well-known Somali news website Hiiraan Online, “the idea of blood money payments is deeply ingrained in Somali society and has cultural and religious connotations.”

“Before centralised governments ruled Somalia, disputes over murder or grazing land for instance, could be solved with blood money payments. Governments have attempted to resolve the issue by referring disputes to formal courts. But with the fall of the government]in 1991] the practice made a resurgence”.

In March 2022, more than four years after the Garbaharey killings, the clan elders received a letter from AMISOM’s political head at the time, Mozambican diplomat Francisco Madeira. Madeira acknowledged the request for blood money donations, but she denied being responsible for the killings and claimed that the matter had been forwarded to AMISOM’s “strategic headquarters” in Addis Ababa for a final decision.

“That was the last time they responded to our letters”, Duale Ali, a local clan leader from Garbaharey, told Al Jazeera.

Duale claimed to have visited Souef, Madeira’s replacement, in Mogadishu last October after his mandate expired.

“He is aware of the Garbaharey case”, Duale said. However, when I asked him about compensation, he replied that Ethiopia’s responsibility was not ATMIS’s. He also said that ATMIS could offer development projects and employment contracts as compensation instead. This is insulting because we are talking about human lives.

With local Somali courts having no jurisdiction to try the peacekeepers, Duale has nowhere to turn.

When Al Jazeera reached him, Souef denied making these assertions. “I spoke outside of the topic of compensation, and notified them that in the context of their religious customs they could submit proposals for what is referred to as a ‘ Quick Impact Project ‘ related to water, electricity or building schools that could benefit from funding by allied countries or the UN. Never was it a question of compensating with project contracts, he said.

If Duale’s only avenue for compensation is through Ethiopia, the odds for any atonement are slim, according to one expert.

One cannot realistically expect Ethiopia to provide justice or compensation in this case either, according to Goitom Gebreleul, a researcher and political analyst on the Horn of Africa. “Ethiopia has a terrible human rights situation, and given its track record of dealing with its domestic human rights violations. “Secondly, with the diplomatic fallout between the two countries, Ethiopia wouldn’t have any diplomatic incentive to deliver compensation for its victims in Somalia”.

Legesse Tulu, the communications minister in Ethiopia, did not respond to requests for comment via text message.

International human rights professor Chidi Odinkalu, a professor of international human rights law at Tufts University, explained that prosecuting international organizations like the AU is frequently impossible due to host country agreements regarding immunity.

“There isn’t a universally observed mechanism for peacekeeping operations in place, but immunity is typically agreed upon, making prosecution unlikely”, he said, pointing to a suit filed by Haitian lawyers against UN Nepali peacekeepers and a suit against Dutch peacekeepers in the Balkans as examples.

There are two options, both theoretically and practically. One would be where troop-contributing states retain jurisdiction and thus individual state mechanisms of accountability would come into play. The offending soldier acted outside the commanding officer’s control and assumed an egregious failure of command, he explained, in the case of individual criminal responsibility under international human rights law.

In Somalia’s case, immunity was agreed upon when AMISOM began its mission in 2007, as the status of mission agreement between the two details.

No one has accepted responsibility, they say.

Human Rights Watch has repeatedly called for Ethiopian troops to be withdrawn from international peacekeeping missions, citing their involvement in numerous atrocities the group has documented in recent years, including what some legal experts say was a genocide of the country’s Tigrayan minority. Ethiopia has for its part refuted accusations of ethnic cleansing and war crimes.

The AU, meanwhile, has publicly acknowledged the importance of enforcing accountability and compensating victims to build trust in the communities they operate in.

AMISOM agreed to establish the Civilian Casualty Tracking, Analysis and Response Cell (CCTARC) in 2012 at the UN’s recommendation. Tasked with keeping tabs on victims of AMISOM violence to ensure accountability, the CCTARC began its work in 2015.

However, the CCTARC does not make data available about the injuries and deaths of AMISOM civilians. In 2018, it was reported as being underfunded and staffed by AMISOM military officers. A communique from ATMIS last year revealed that CCTARC employees had successfully trained in human rights issues, with the trainees mostly clad in military gear.

With the lack of transparency and independent oversight, it is unclear how efficient the body has been at tracking abuses in areas of ATMIS operation. Is it also unclear whether the CCTARC has documented reports of civilian casualties being killed in ATMIS airstrikes, sometimes in al-Shabab-held territory?

The mandate of the UN Assistance Mission in Somalia (UNSOM) is set to expire this month. It used to track some Somalia abuses. In 2017, it released a report which attributed 95 killings of civilians from January 2016 to October 2017 to AMISOM. Kenya criticized that report as “extremely sensational and carries unqualified allegations that have serious implications for the Kenyan Defence Forces as a professional force,” which was UNSOM’s final detailed report highlighting peacekeeper killings. Since then, there have been occasional mentions of AMISOM killings in UNSOM “monthly briefs”, but none in more than two years.

AMISOM had previously promised to look into a 2021 airstrike that claimed the lives of a mother and her child in the Gedo region before eventually exonerating the Kenyan air force, whose soldiers were charged with any wrongdoing.

El Adde, a grandfather of al-Shababs and a local school administrator, is about 60 kilometers (37 miles) from the Kenyan border, where Abdirahman Sheikh Abdullahi, 75, was born. In July 2023, his home was hit by separate Kenyan air attacks nearly two weeks apart, according to his son Omar Abdirahman and medical reports sent to Al Jazeera. The Kenyan air force was also implicated in the attacks, according to Somalia and Kenyan media reports.

Abdirahman and a bystander in the neighbourhood were killed on July 6. On July 18, injured people gathered to mourn the second attack.

The family’s home was destroyed. Seven others were hurt, including the 11-month-old granddaughter and Abdirahman’s wife.

“No one has taken responsibility for my family’s suffering”, Omar explained. “Everyone in the house was a civilian,” said one of the homeowners.

Omar sent Al Jazeera footage and photographs of his family’s demolished home, which showed what he said were remnants of the explosives dropped on the building.

The footage was reviewed for Al Jazeera by Trevor Ball, a former US Army employee who worked in the explosives disposal unit. “The fragments indicate two guided aircraft bombs, and not artillery projectiles”, Ball explained. The bombs don’t go along with typical US/Western or USSR/Russian/Eastern Bloc construction. It is likely that they are produced domestically in Africa”.

Emails to Isaac Mwaura, spokesman for Kenya’s Ministry of Defense, and Isaac Mwaura, government spokesman, were unanswered.

I “felt betrayed by my country,” the statement read.

Despite their role in overseeing the odd court martial, AMISOM has previously clarified that it would be the responsibility of troop-contributing nations to determine how to properly compensate victims of peacekeeper violence.

At a press conference held in October 2021 to address the Golweyn massacre, former mission head Francisco Madeira stated that “in accordance with its obligations under the memorandum of understanding signed with the African Union, the Ugandan government will talk with the bereaved families to discuss ways to make amends for the lives of those killed.” Uganda’s government and army spokespeople did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.

Particularly gruesome were the seven farmers’ killings at Golweyn. According to court martial documents, Ugandan soldiers, who refused to express remorse during their trial, shot the victims and then desecrated the bodies by blowing them up with explosives.

The victims were identified in medical records from Mogadishu’s Madina Hospital, which were later identified by Al Jazeera, and contained gruesome images of some of their uncovered remains. They were then transported to the hospital in burlap sacks.

The Ugandan troop contingent spent months negotiating compensation with the victims ‘ families, before quietly delivering a lump sum of $100, 000 to be split among the seven families, in an agreement that stipulates that the families “have unanimously forgiven Uganda and will not ask for anything from the UPDF (Ugandan Peoples ‘ Defence Forces)”.

The Somali and Ugandan governments have signed agreements, according to documents obtained by Al Jazeera. Signed on behalf of the families, the signature of Mohamed Abdi, nephew of Omar Hassan Warsame on whose farm the killings took place, is visible. He claimed to have been coerced into signing the agreement because his family rejected it and that he had been.

“None of the families have forgiven anyone for what happened, and nobody agreed to such a meagre compensation. The loss of harvest to the community itself wouldn’t be covered by that money, Mohamed said, because no farmers would care for the farm.

Mohamed, a British citizen and a long-term resident of London, claimed that Ugandan and Somali officials had misled the family about the terms of the deal. When the families were hesitant about signing, their lawyer was arrested. Abdullahi Mohamed Nur, the then-Minister of Security, whose own name and signature are also visible on the agreement, prompted Mohamed to sign it after what he perceived as an implicit threat.

“I honestly feared for my life”, Mohamed recalled. He called and harassed us repeatedly. He warned that the Ugandan army was threatening to pull out, and he would hold me responsible if al-Shabab attacked Mogadishu. I begged my relatives to leave the country because they were afraid of it.

” Our own government sided against the families. I personally experienced my country’s betrayal.

Abdullahi Mohamed Nur, who currently serves as an adviser to Somalia’s President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, ignored Al Jazeera’s phone calls and texted requests for comment. Farhan Jimale, a spokesman for the Somali government, did not respond to an email from Al Jazeera.

While ATMIS plans to end its mandate this year, the AU has already pledged to replace it with a new force it has dubbed AUSSOM (African Union Support and Stabilization Mission in Somalia).

Egypt will offer to send troops to the new force, but Somalia is determined to expel Ethiopian forces following a dispute between the two nations over a contentious memorandum of understanding Addis Ababa signed with the breakaway republic of Somaliland.

But Dalmar Gure of Somali news outlet Hiiraan Online believes any new force will struggle to instil trust within local communities if victims of previous killings are denied compensation.

The main avenue of atonement in Somali society, which is ignoring blood money, “sends a terrible message to victims who frequently have to live close to the murderers of their loved ones because those soldiers may still be stationed in their communities,” Gure said.

” This adds salt to their wounds, “he feels”, and replacing ATMIS with another force next year won’t inspire confidence among Somalis. “

Source: Aljazeera