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

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Omar Hassan Warsame was a larger-than-life figure in the Somali town of Golweyn, where his sizeable farm provided maize, bananas and jobs that helped sustain the community.

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.

On August 10, 2021, African Union (AU) peacekeepers from Uganda converged on the farm. Renowned as a community representative, it was not uncommon for businessmen or officials to approach Omar. But, for reasons that remain unclear, the soldiers opened fire on him and four of his employees.

“They killed them in cold blood,” Mohamed Abdi, a nephew of Omar’s, told Al Jazeera. “He was a community leader. A kind, charitable man who provided for the poor and cared for all his neighbours. The whole city mourned with us.”

Seven civilians were killed in the Golweyn massacre, which prompted outrage across Somalia. Demonstrators took to the streets in Mogadishu and towns in Lower Shebelle demanding the withdrawal of foreign peacekeepers from the country. 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 peacekeepers belonged to the African Union Mission in Somalia, or AMISOM. 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. While al-Shabab frequently engages in battles with peacekeepers and government forces, civilians have borne the brunt of its attacks. 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 – composed of troops from countries in the region – were primarily tasked with countering al-Shabab’s influence, providing security in government-held areas and coordinating with fledgling 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.

Ugandan peacekeepers with the African Transition Mission in Somalia (ATMIS)

But reports about their involvement in abuses against civilians can be traced back to their initial years in the country. Rebranded as ATMIS (African Union Transition Mission in Somalia) in 2022, and now planning an end-of-the-year withdrawal from the country, families of victims say the AU owes them justice and “blood money” – financial compensation for their suffering.

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

Compensation for victims

Since the overthrow of President Siad Barre in 1991, Somalia has been plagued by internal fighting between rival strongmen, with a weak central government. 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. The splintering of the ICU and the presence of Ethiopian troops, widely unpopular among Somalis for war crimes committed during fighting, fomented resistance. Eventually, hardliner elements of the former ICU went on to establish al-Shabab.

International efforts to stabilise the country led to the establishment of the AU’s peacekeeping mandate in 2007. Ethiopian troops withdrew the bulk of their forces by early 2009 but always maintained a troop presence in Somalia, before merging them with the AMISOM force by 2014.

Somalia’s international partners have invested billions into upgrading the country’s security apparatus. 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.

But despite the nearly two-decade-long presence of African peacekeepers whose numbers have previously reached 20,000, swaths of the country remain under al-Shabab control, and government security forces struggle to expand their reach.

The group’s capacity to carry out deadly attacks on civilian and military targets has hardly waned. In August, a suicide bombing and gun attack targeted beachgoers at the popular Lido Beach in Mogadishu, killing at least 32 people.

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. Funding shortages are reportedly among the reasons ATMIS plans to depart Somalia by the end of this year.

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.

“Out of courtesy, I met with [family members] and explained that the consensus is that ATMIS is struggling financially to the point where we had to consider terminating the mission,” Comorian diplomat and current ATMIS political head Mohamed El-Amine Souef explained in a voice message sent to Al Jazeera.

“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.”

Souef did not respond to follow-up questions on how a joint initiative between two governments whose bilateral ties are currently at their lowest in decades – over Ethiopia’s controversial plans to recognise the breakaway republic of Somaliland – was made possible.

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. These cases include killings, as well as critical and minor injuries, but the AU has not specified how many of each.

Who can be held accountable?

On August 12, 2017, following a battle with al-Shabab in the city of Garbaharey, 450km (280 miles) west of Mogadishu, Abdullahi Osman Ige, 77, Ahmed Hussein Elmi, 71, and Abdullahi Ali Hussein, 19, were shot and killed by Ethiopian AMISOM troops, according to local police and media reports.

The three were unarmed pastoralists out in search of water for their camels. Al Jazeera obtained medical documents, which show that the teenage Abdullahi was running away when he was shot in the legs and left to bleed to death.

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

“The concept of blood money payments is deeply entrenched in Somali society and has cultural and religious connotations,” explained Dalmar Gure, chief editor at prominent Somali news portal Hiiraan Online.

“Before centralised governments ruled Somalia, disputes over murder or grazing land for instance, could be solved with blood money payments. Governments have tried to stamp it out and direct 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 payments, without accepting responsibility for the killings, and stated 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 said last October, following the expiry of Madeira’s mandate, he paid a visit to Souef, Madeira’s replacement, in Mogadishu.

“He is aware of the Garbaharey case,” Duale said. “But when I asked him about compensation, he said that this wasn’t ATMIS’s responsibility, but Ethiopia’s. He also said that ATMIS could offer development projects and employment contracts as compensation instead. As we are talking about human lives, this is insulting.”

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

Souef denied making these comments when reached by Al Jazeera. “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. There was never a question of using project contracts as compensation,” he said.

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

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

Ethiopian Communications Minister Legesse Tulu did not respond to Al Jazeera’s calls or text requests for comment.

When asked if there were avenues for the AU or individual states to be held accountable under international law, Chidi Odinkalu, an international human rights law professor at Tufts University, explained that with immunity often agreed to by host countries, prosecuting international bodies like the AU is often impossible.

“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.

“Doctrinally and practically, there are two avenues. One would be where troop-contributing states retain jurisdiction and thus individual state mechanisms of accountability would come into play. The other would be in the case of individual criminal responsibility under international human rights law, where the offending soldier acted outside of the commanding officer’s oversight and assumes an egregious failure of command,” he explained.

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 taken responsibility’

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. For its part, Ethiopia has rejected accusations of war crimes and ethnic cleansing against it.

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

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

But the CCTARC does not release data for civilians killed and injured by AMISOM forces. In 2018, it was reported as being underfunded and staffed by AMISOM military officers. Last year, ATMIS published a communique announcing that CCTARC staffers had completed a human-rights-related training session, with the trainees photographed largely in military attire.

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. Also unclear is whether the CCTARC documents instances of ATMIS air attacks that have killed civilians, 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 abuses in Somalia. In 2017, it released a report which attributed 95 killings of civilians from January 2016 to October 2017 to AMISOM. That report, which was the last detailed one by UNSOM highlighting peacekeeper killings, was widely criticised by Kenya which described it as “extremely sensational, and carries unqualified allegations which have serious implications on the Kenyan Defence Forces as a professional force”. 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 investigate a 2021 air attack that killed a mother and her child in the Gedo region, before eventually exonerating the Kenyan air force, whose soldiers were accused, of any wrongdoing.

Abdirahman Sheikh Abdullahi, 75, a grandfather and local school administrator, resided in the al-Shabab-held southwestern Somali town of El Adde, some 60km (37 miles) from the Kenyan border. 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. Somali and Kenyan media reports also implicated the Kenyan air force in the attacks.

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

The family’s home was destroyed. Seven other people, including Abdirahman’s wife and 11-month-old granddaughter, were injured.

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

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.

Trevor Ball, a former US army explosive ordnance disposal technician examined the footage for Al Jazeera. “The fragments indicate two guided aircraft bombs, and not artillery projectiles,” Ball explained. “The bombs aren’t consistent with typical US/Western or USSR/Russian/Eastern Bloc construction. It is likely that they are produced domestically in Africa.”

Email requests for clarification sent to Kenya’s Ministry of Defence and government spokesman Isaac Mwaura went unanswered.

‘I felt betrayed by my country’

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.

“It is envisaged that in accordance with its obligations under the memorandum of understanding signed with the African Union, the Ugandan government will reach out to the bereaved families to discuss how to atone for the lives of those killed,” former mission head Francisco Madeira said at an October 2021 presser addressing the Golweyn massacre. Uganda’s government and army spokespeople did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.

The killings of the seven farmers at Golweyn were especially gruesome. 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.

Medical documents from Mogadishu’s Madina Hospital viewed by Al Jazeera identified the victims and included gruesome photographs of some of their identified remains, brought 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)”.

Al Jazeera obtained documents confirming the agreement signed by signatories from both the Somali and Ugandan governments. 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 told Al Jazeera the families rejected the agreement, and he was effectively coerced into signing it.

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

Mohamed, a longtime resident of London and a British citizen, claimed that Ugandan and Somali officials misled the family about the nature of the agreement. When the families were hesitant about signing, their lawyer was arrested. Mohamed said he only signed after what he felt was an implicit threat from the then Minister of Security Abdullahi Mohamed Nur, whose own name and signature are also visible on the agreement.

“I honestly feared for my life,” Mohamed recalled. “He kept calling and harassing us. He warned that the Ugandan army was threatening to pull out, and he would hold me responsible if al-Shabab attacked Mogadishu. My relatives were also afraid and begged me to sign and flee the country.

“Our own government sided against the families. Personally, I felt betrayed by my country.”

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. Somali government spokesman Farhan Jimale did not respond to Al Jazeera’s email query.

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).

It is unclear what the makeup of the new force will look like, with Egypt volunteering to contribute troops to the new force, and Somalia eager to expel Ethiopian forces following a fallout between the two states over a controversial memorandum of understanding Addis Ababa inked 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.

Ignoring blood money payments, the main avenue of atonement in Somali society, “sends a terrible message to victims, who often must live near the killers of their loved ones, as those soldiers may be still 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.”

Additional reporting by a journalist in Jijiga, the capital of Ethiopia’s Somali region.

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