Mass Graves Leave a Corner of Somalia Appealing for Justice

HARGEYSA, Somalia —  The anguish still penetrates the cloudy brown eyes of Abdillahi Deria Madar as he recounts his brush with death in 1988 at the hands of troops loyal to former Somali dictator Mohamed Siad Barre.

With the help of a sympathetic soldier, Madar managed to escape from a lineup of about 800 of his fellow Issaq clansmen who were destined for execution by firing squad. The former businessman, now 65, hid in a dog’s burrow and watched as scores of his compatriots--including his brother’s wife and several of their children--were tied together in groups of 10 and shot in the back.

It has never been doubted that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Somalis from minority clans in the country’s northwest region--which today calls itself Somaliland--were slain under the Barre regime, which lasted more than 20 years. But the reality hit home last year, when skeletons in several mass graves began to surface following torrential rains and flooding that ravaged Somalia’s northwest.

Today, residents of Somaliland, which in 1991 declared its independence from the rest of Somalia, want justice.

Authorities in Hargeysa, Somaliland’s capital city, are appealing to the international community to create a war crimes tribunal--similar to those set up for Rwanda and the former Yugoslav federation--to judge and punish those who killed and persecuted Somalia’s northern clans during the Barre dictatorship. The worst atrocities came between 1988 and 1991, according to survivors, after inter-clan fighting and the Somaliland rebels’ push for independence put the northwest under severe attack.

The Somalis’ plea comes at a time when the United Nations is convening a five-week conference on the establishment of an international criminal court that would bring perpetrators of crimes against humanity to justice.

But such a court would probably investigate crimes and try cases that occur only from its inception onward, one source said.

And though forensic experts and an independent foreign human rights investigator have confirmed that massacres took place in northern Somalia--and people were clearly tied together, lined up, shot and dumped in common graves--few believe that the people of Somaliland will ever get the consolation and compensation they seek.

Many blame a lack of interest on the part of the international community. “It always comes down to political will,” said a Geneva-based U.N. expert in international criminal law.

Few countries have had much sympathy for Somalia since a U.N. humanitarian peacekeeping mission there crumbled in 1992 after 18 U.S. servicemen were killed. The country remains divided among rival warlords and without a central government.

The constant threat of abduction and extortion that international relief workers face countrywide has not helped matters.

“Somalia is seen as a failed U.N. operation,” said Mona Rishmawi, the independent expert for the U.N. high commissioner for human rights who investigated the mass graves in Somaliland. “I don’t know if the international community is willing to invest more [there]. . . .

“The moment there is more stability and more security . . . then these chapters can be reopened,” she said. But since Somalia has made little progress toward a peace agreement and since the U.N. is unwilling to deal with Somaliland as a separate entity, the people here face an interminable wait.

With hopes that a judgment day will eventually arrive, authorities in Hargeysa established a war crimes committee in April to investigate and document alleged Barre-era human rights violations, including arbitrary executions, torture, rape, looting and destruction of property. Some of the alleged perpetrators still control regions of the country and have even been called upon by the international community to negotiate a settlement on Somalia.

Forensic experts have given the committee limited training in how to dig up mass graves, analyze the bones to determine cause of death, and carefully preserve the evidence.

And the committee has tracked down scores of witnesses and suspects--most significantly, the operator of the bulldozer that dug the mass graves.

Survivors queued for hours to register the identities of missing loved ones, most thought to be dead. So far, more than 1,000 names have been registered.

“People were very emotional,” recalled Hassan Aw Barakalle, a member of the war crimes committee. “Many cried, and asked about compensation, and why we were doing this, and whether the accused would be taken to court.”

The testimonies are gut-wrenching. Zahra Mahamed Muhumed, 25, believes that her stepson, Abdi Noor Naaleeye, was bled to death--a common form of execution, according to Somalis--in a local hospital after being captured by Barre soldiers in the spring of 1988.

The 20-year-old’s body, clad in blue jeans and a red T-shirt, was dumped in a mass grave on the banks of the Hargeysa River, Muhumed said. She was one of the hundreds who rushed to the shore upon hearing that the graves had surfaced.

Bones, shoes, watches and jewelry still litter the soft sand dunes that border the now-dried-up river. Rope, still in the shape of the loops that tied the wrists or ankles of the deceased, are a bitter indication that those killed had no means of escape.

Rishmawi, the U.N. investigator, estimates that up to 2,000 people were massacred and buried in common graves, primarily in a two-month period in 1988, when Hargeysa was constantly being shelled. The first site, excavated in December, contained about 200 bodies.

The people of Somaliland believe that the death toll is significantly higher, claiming that almost every family in this republic of about 4.2 million people lost at least one relative.

The victims may have included former Somali government soldiers from rival clans that opposed the dictator’s regime. In addition, Somaliland militias may have executed Ethiopian refugees who collaborated with Barre, as well as government loyalists captured immediately after the dictatorship was toppled in 1991. However, the vast majority of the dead are believed to be civilians.

Madar, the lucky escapee, is haunted by the memory of a woman holding her child above her head and begging the soldiers to spare the infant’s life. The soldiers shot her on the spot, and then her child.

Madar, the 11th man behind a lineup of 10, was pushed aside and told to wait, but the executioners kept ignoring him. A soldier standing guard, intrigued by Madar’s good fortune, allowed him to jump to freedom over a nearby wall.

Mohammed Ismail Ahmed, a former soldier in Barre’s army, said he watched from his cell window as prisoners were loaded onto trucks, their hands tied behind their backs. After the sound of gunfire, the trucks would return empty--or filled with new victims.

As Ahmed recalls, the procedure continued for 23 days--then stopped, a day before his own execution was scheduled, due to an unexplained order from the Somali capital of Mogadishu.

Today, Ahmed, a 38-year-old typist and mason in the Somaliland National Army, is thankful that the suffering of his countrymen will at least be documented.

“It’s of great importance to me because it will give a record of how people have been treated, how they have been killed, and it will give hope that one day the criminals will be brought to justice,” he said.

However, some observers believe that the authorities in Hargeysa want to exploit the war crimes issue for political ends--namely, as a way of justifying Somaliland’s separation from the rest of Somalia.

“They want to assert that they were persecuted and systematically killed, and this is why they can’t join [Somalia],” Rishmawi said.

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War Crimes Tribunal

Somaliland, the northwest region of Somalia that declared its independence from the rest of the country in 1991, is seeking a tribunal to investigate and prosecute atrocities committed against its minority clans under the rule of former Somali dictator Mohamed Siad Barre.