Abuses of Displaced People and Refugees

More than 1.1 million Somalis are internally displaced and each month thousands have sought asylum abroad in 2008. But for many, the decision to flee their homes represents only the beginning of a terrible ordeal. Hundreds of thousands of Mogadishu residents have fled the city to live in camps along the road to Afgooye only to find that the brutality they fled has followed them there. And those who choose to risk traveling further to seek asylum abroad must run a deadly gauntlet of abusive freelance militias, soldiers, police, and human smugglers.

Abuses in the Afgooye Corridor

Many of the 870,000 Somalis who fled Mogadishu have ended up in sprawling, makeshift IDP settlements along the Mogadishu-Afgooye road. The war in Mogadishu has expanded to follow them there, where the same warring parties have been responsible for many of the same patterns of abuse. One man who fled to the IDP camps in April 2008 told Human Rights Watch:

There was so much to fear there. The fighting took root again in the camp. Occasionally the wadaadada [insurgents] will cover and hide within the people and target the government soldiers and Ethiopian vehicles moving along the main road just next to the camp. The government [soldiers] and the Ethiopians could trace them and come into the camp and look for persons who have sustained injuries. Any injured person they could claim was part of the wadaadada and arrest him.[209]

Another man who fled Mogadishu after nearly being caught in a roadside bomb attack told Human Rights Watch that when he arrived at the camps in early 2008 there was no fighting in his immediate vicinity. But within a few months, he said, "The muqaawama started attacking guerilla-style the government forces in the area. Also they were planting mines along the major tarmac highway. In response, Ethiopian and government forces will spray bullets arbitrarily."[210] He fled the Afgooye corridor just as he had fled Mogadishu, after a bloody firefight erupted several hundred meters from his home when an ENDF convoy was ambushed. Several other examples of conflict-related abuses in Afgooye are described in previous sections of this report.[211]

International aid organizations seeking to deliver aid to the IDP populations around Afgooye have an extremely difficult task. One very serious challenge is that the TFG has no capacity to provide security for aid distributions in Afgooye-and some TFG officials have in the past been hostile to the idea of distributing assistance there at all.[212] As a result, agencies are forced to rely on local gatekeepers who can help carry out and guarantee the security of those distributions.[213] But the unaccountable militias of those gatekeepers have been implicated in serious abuses against the very people whose access to assistance they are meant to help secure.

Human Rights Watch interviewed one young woman named Samira who made a living selling qat while living in the camps along the Afgooye road. One day in March 2008 there was a distribution of non-food items nearby. A close friend of hers offered to go and collect both of their rations if she remained behind to sell both of their qat:

Soon I heard gunshots-I thought nothing of it-gunshots were as common as banging doors for us. But five minutes later a boy came running to me and asked, "Who is Samira? Who is Samira?" He said, "Your friend has been shot and she is dead."

She rushed to the scene and found her friend lying in a pool of blood, with her father and husband kneeling beside her. Onlookers told Samira that her friend had gotten into a heated argument with a militiaman guarding the food distribution site after the man refused to allow her to enter because she was carrying two different UNHCR ration cards-her own and Samira's. The man became enraged and shot her in the stomach. She was eight months pregnant at the time. Her baby was already lost when Samira found her, and she died in a Mogadishu hospital 18 days later.[214]

Violence along the Roads

The chaos in Somalia drove more than 80,000 Somalis to seek refuge in neighboring countries between January and September 2008. More than 45,000 Somali refugees crossed the border into Kenya and made their way to the refugee camps near Dadaab during that period.[215] UNHCR estimates that more than 23,000 Somali refugees crossed the Gulf of Aden into Yemen during the first nine months of 2008.[216]

These numbers are striking in and of themselves. But the figures are even more remarkable given the threats would-be refugees face along their way. Human Rights Watch interviewed refugees who were raped, robbed, beaten, imprisoned, or tortured while trying to reach the country's borders. Some saw their traveling companions murdered on the road.

The route south from Mogadishu towards Kenya is especially perilous.[217] Freelance militias prey upon minivans and trucks that are often loaded with refugees and their remaining possessions. Human Rights Watch interviewed several Somali refugees in Kenya who were robbed by these militias as they made the journey south. In some cases militias simply required each traveler to pay a specific amount of money and then allowed them to go along their way. But in other cases militiamen assaulted or raped their victims and stripped them of all of their possessions.

One married couple told Human Rights Watch that in May 2008 they were intercepted by a group of armed militiamen between the towns of Belethawa and Garisley while traveling to the border town of Dhobley.[218] The husband told Human Rights Watch:

I together with the rest of the passengers was robbed of all my personal belongings and money. I asked them, "Why are you doing this?" and one of them picked up some soil and said, "This is our soil. No one else can rule us here." They beat some men who tried not to give them their mattresses, watches and the good shirts they were wearing. They beat them with guns and sticks. One beat my wife in her chest with the butt of a gun because she refused to give up our mattress, saying she wanted to use it for our children.[219]

Highwaymen linked to local clan militias have raped many Somali women along the roads south towards the Kenyan border. One 23-year-old woman told Human Rights Watch that she was robbed and raped while traveling south past Kismayo near a place called Kunyaboro:

Militamen waylaid our car. They stopped our driver forcefully by use of gunshots and threatened to kill him if he did not stop. He complied. They ransacked all of the passengers. There were only three [young] women out of the fourteen on board-the rest were all children and older people. All three of us were raped. They took us to some bushes near the highway. The militiamen were five in number. Two kept watch and forced the driver not to go anywhere, while three of the butchers took us to a nearby thicket and raped us. Each of them went for one of us.

I did not suffer too much bodily harm other than kicks and blows and slaps. I gave in because I heard stories of girls who tried to resist being frightened by having bullets shot between their legs or by other ways. From there we were brought back to the car. They took our personal belongings and disappeared into the bush.

She was two months pregnant at the time of the rape-three months later she believed that her pregnancy had been unaffected by the ordeal.[220]

Human Rights Watch interviewed other refugees who were robbed while fleeing in the opposite direction, northwest towards Somaliland and Djibouti. In addition, Human Rights Watch encountered three different young men from Mogadishu who said that they were arrested in Garowe, the capital of the semi-autonomous region of Puntland in northern Somalia. Each of them said that they were questioned repeatedly by Puntland government security officials; one said that his interrogators repeatedly accused him of being on his way to Eritrea to receive training and weapons from the ARS-Asmara. Two of the young men said that they were beaten during the course of these interrogations.[221] Each was freed after several weeks in detention when they were brought before a judge who ordered their immediate release.[222]

Leaving Somalia

Somali asylum seekers who reach their country's borders or the port of Bosasso still have daunting obstacles to surmount. Kenya's border has been closed since January 3, 2007. Once refugees have reached the three camps surrounding the town of Dadaab they seek registration by UNHCR. Once they have been registered they are not at risk of deportation. However, the border closure has meant that the UNHCR transit camp at Liboi-just across the border from the Somali town of Dhobley, the most popular point of crossing for Somali refugees-has been closed since January 3 (except for six weeks between March 15, 2008 and early May 2008). Refugees are left to their own devices to find a way to traverse the 85 kilometers of desolate brush between the border and the camps without being caught by the Kenyan police.

Human Rights Watch interviewed refugees in Dadaab who traveled from the border to the camps by foot, many moving only at night or away from main roads to avoid detection by the Kenyan police. Others were able to raise funds to engage the services of smugglers who transported them in vans across the border and then to the camps. Some were arrested by Kenyan police along the way but eventually released-in some cases after paying a bribe to the police who arrested them.[223] Some of those who could not or would not pay the bribes demanded were deported in violation of the principle of non-refoulement, which prohibits the return of refugees to countries where persecution threatens their lives or freedom.[224]

Once in Dadaab, refugees must contend with the same problems affecting the camps' other 220,000 refugees.[225] The camps are currently the largest concentration of refugees in the world.[226] They are filled well beyond capacity and are unable to provide adequate resources to existing refugees.[227] New arrivals must sometimes wait weeks to be registered and be eligible to receive food assistance. Many cannot access the registration system at all. Violent crime, sexual violence in particular, are rampant in the camps.[228]

Daunting as these challenges are, they pale in comparison to the risks taken on by Somalis attempting to seek refuge in Yemen. Yemeni authorities accord prima facie refugee status to all Somalis who arrive there but the journey itself is perilous.[229] Most cross the Gulf of Aden with the assistance of smugglers based out of the port of Bosasso in Puntland. According to estimates by UNHCR officials, 261 Somalis died between January and September 2008 while attempting the crossing.[230]  Some boats have capsized, drowning many of their passengers.[231] In other cases, smugglers have forced refugees off the boats and into the sea rather than risk capture themselves. In September, 52 Somali refugees perished when smugglers abandoned them at sea aboard a broken-down ship without food or water.[232] In the second week of October 2008, smugglers forced some 150 Somali refugees overboard a full five kilometers from the coast. Only 47 managed to swim to shore; the others were believed to have drowned.[233]  And at the beginning of November another 40 people drowned when smugglers forced them overboard in deep water off the coast.[234]