Bartamaha (Nairobi):- The Kenyan government and African Union forces have engaged in or facilitated “unlawful” actions related to the conflict in Somalia, Human Rights Watch charges in a new report.
Kenyan officials directly co-operated with Somalia government military recruiters who conducted “a massive drive” in the Dadaab refugee camps last year, the report says. The recruitment aided by Kenyan authorities was carried out under “false pretences,” Human Rights Watch asserts.
It cites numerous sources who say the recruiters lied to potential conscripts about payments and told young teenagers to falsely state they were adults.
Kenya’s role in recruiting Dadaab residents to fight inside Somalia violates humanitarian principles and refugee law on which they are based, the report contends.The rights group calls on the Kenyan government to acknowledge that the recruitment effort was “unlawful.”
The African Union Mission in Somalia (Amisom), made up of 5,300 Ugandan and Burundian troops, has conducted “numerous mortar attacks against enemy forces in densely populated areas of Mogadishu without regard for the civilian population, causing a high loss of civilian life and property,” the report says. “The laws of war prohibit attacks that are indiscriminate,” it adds.
The report points out that in launching their own mortar shells from civilian areas, Islamist insurgents appear to be encouraging indiscriminate counter-attacks that “would kill civilians and thereby generate useful propaganda.”
Human Rights Watch urges the US government to stop supplying mortars and shells to the Transitional Federal Government until the TFG respects the laws of war. The report further suggests that Washington, the United Nations and African Union must stop “turning a blind eye to their allies’ abuses on the ground.”
Counter-productive role
By strongly supporting the TFG, these outside interests often play a “counter-productive” role in Somalia, Human Rights Watch observes.
Many analysts find it “simplistic” to base policy on the view that the TFG “represents a real chance at peace and good governance for Somalia, while al-Shabaab is the potential leading edge of international terrorism in the region,” the report states.
“The TFG remains a weak faction,” Human Rights Watch observes. And while some Shabaab leaders do have ties to al-Qaeda, the Islamist insurgency in Somalia is “far from a monolithic tool of Osama bin Laden.”

Source: The East African

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