In The Valley Of Death: Somaliland’s Forgotten Genocide

THE HUMAN CONSEQUENCES

Three tumultuous decades later, the genocide still haunts survivors. Somaliland has one main tribute to the victims: In the middle of a traffic island in Hargeisa, the rusting shell of a MiG fighter jet shot down by the SMN sits perched on top of a wall with murals of mass slaughter. The central figure in one painting is a man with blood spurting from the stumps where his arms and legs have been chopped off.

For survivors like Yusuf Mire, the trauma depicted on the murals is still fresh. During a crackdown in 1988 by Barre’s forces in the city of Burao, Somali troops hacked off his left arm and abducted and killed his family.

Mire has dedicated his life to uncovering the truth of what happened in the Valley of Death. He works with survivors and families of the disappeared, helping those who, like him, had loved ones that never returned from Barre’s killing fields. Mire told us that the United States is simply not interested in digging up the past or funding forensic investigations in Somaliland. Given the US role, he said it would prefer to prop up the government in Mogadishu and for the truth to remain buried.

Ismail Abdi is another survivor who works with vulnerable children in Somaliland for a British humanitarian NGO based in Hargeisa. As a young teen, Abdi ended up at the Hargeisa Orphanage. Then, in May 1988, from the orphanage window, he watched Barre’s military personnel execute a family; he still remembers the screams of dying children. Abdi sent us a photo taken by a Dutch woman who had worked at the Hargeisa Orphanage in 1988. The photo, which Abdi asked us not publish, showed the bodies of a woman and her children covered in blood.

We met him in the garden of a swanky hotel in the center of Hargeisa; men sat nearby on plastic chairs eating goat curry and drinking mango juice. Abdi lamented that young people now do not know what happened, and said he wants “justice for our people.” Abdi said he wants the evidence he has collected about this one family to be used to bring those responsible to justice. But like most Somalilanders, he does not have the money to pursue those responsible in the courts either internationally or in Somaliland, a country that does not officially exist.

But there is an organization Abdi is hoping can help bring those responsible to justice. In the mid-1990s, Somaliland’s first president, Mohamed Haji Ibrahim Egal, established the Somaliland War Crimes Investigations Commission to find and unearth the mass graves, offer proper burials to victims, and bring the judicial action against those responsible for the killings. The US government has offered no help.

Without international support, the commission is woefully underfunded, according to the Khadar Ahmed, its chairman. It lacks the necessary resources to properly investigate or collect the evidence needed to bring about prosecutions.

The commission usually gets tip offs from locals about the mass-grave locations after rains expose new bones. Then staff members place piles of stones with red marks on them adjacent to the graves to alert the community. The commission is tasked with investigating these graves, but with such tight budgets, graves are identified but few are ever dug up. Since it was founded, the commission has exhumed 11 mass graves and reburied 318 skeletons, including a recent ones in Hargeisa and another in Berbera.

Ahmed said he’s upset that the United States and other Western powers have taken so little interest in the genocide: “As Somaliland Republic, we are expecting to hear from the UN to establish a tribunal like Rwanda.” But their requests have been met with silence. Ahmed said that many of the killers are now hiding in plain sight in the United States, Kenya, Canada, and elsewhere. Because it’s not a recognized state, Somaliland does not have the power to push for a UN-backed war-crimes tribunal, like in Yugoslavia or Sierra Leone.

As time passes, evidence gets lost. In the Valley of Death, rainfall reveals new skeletons, but it also erodes and washes away the bones. Thankfully, while the US government has not provided any support, the San Francisco–based Center for Justice and Accountability (CJA) has stepped in, and introduced the commission to the Peruvian forensic anthropology team Equipo Peruano de Antropología Forense (EPAF), led by Franco Mora. Since 2012, EPAF has been excavating the mass graves in the Valley of Death and other parts of Somaliland, identifying and recovering as many bodies as possible. They are also helping the commission provide proper burials. “Our work is only humanitarian; we try to recover and identify the disappeared and to bury them with dignity,” Mora told us.

Ahmed said that the commission has to pay the EPAF to dig up the graves, but complained that the Somaliland government can only afford to do this, at most, twice a year. With an estimated 200 sites, “we don’t have the capacity to carry out the work ourselves,” he said.

The commission hopes the remains unearthed by the EPAF team can be used not only to get a better idea of what happened, but also as evidence to convict or hold genocidaires accountable. But this will be tough. Mora said his team is only, “recording the injuries and establishing the most probable cause of death.” He said to establish a legal case you would need not only information retrieved from the bodies and graves but also historical information and documentation, which is nearly nonexistent because so many government records were destroyed during the war. The only reliable documents about the Barre regime’s genocidal campaign are held by countries like the United States or international human-rights groups.

There have been a few successful attempts to hold perpetrators accountable, but to expand beyond the handful of cases requires funding and for the United States to release more of its records. In 2012, the CJA helped a group of Somalis living in Virginia secure a $21 million judgment in a US federal court against Mohamed Ali Samantar, who served as prime minister under Barre. The court ruled that he was responsible for planning the torture and killings of Isaaq clansmen.

In 2016, a CNN investigation publicized another Somali who arrived in the United States after allegedly participating in the genocide. Yusuf Abdi Ali stands accused of committing war crimes while a colonel in Barre’s regime during in the 1980s. He was head of the Somali army’s Fifth Brigade, which is said to have tortured clan members and burned down villages. For 20 years, he had lived near Washington, DC, and worked as a security guard at Dulles Airport (he was suspended after his identity was revealed).

The CJA brought a lawsuit against him in 2004. The CJA is representing Farhan Warfaa, who was nearly killed by Ali during an interrogation in 1987. In a 2016 ruling, the Fourth Circuit court dismissed Warfaa’s claims of war crimes and crimes against humanity, but upheld claims of torture and attempted extrajudicial killing. In June 2017, the Supreme Court allowed the CJA to continue pursuing Warfaa’s claims under the US Torture Victim Protection Act.

But the US government has not been as keen as the CJA to help. Ali’s background had been revealed as far back as 1992 when Canadian broadcaster CBC News uncovered that he had worked as a security guard in Toronto after fleeing Somalia in 1991. The US authorities knew his record but nevertheless did not prevent him from settling in the United States and living for decades a suburban American life.

Of course, not all the Somali perpetrators headed to the United States. Last year, General Mohammed Said Hersi Morgan was filmed watching Farmajo’s presidential inauguration in Mogadishu, apparently as a guest. Morgan, known as the “butcher of Hargeisa,” has lived freely in Kenya since the collapse of the Barre government in 1991. Many Somalilanders hold him responsible for carrying out the Isaaq genocide; in 1988, he’s reported to have ordered his troops “to kill all but the crows.” Yet he still gets invited to political events in Mogadishu.

One thing Somalilanders are adamant about is that no one involved with the Somali government in 1988 can claim they didn’t know. “I think everybody was aware of what was happening,” Saad, the foreign minister, told us. “Perhaps they didn’t have the full picture of what was happening, but the fact that the Siyad Barre regime was undemocratic and brutal and murdering many civilians was well-known.… But sometimes superpowers look the other way.”

Somaliland is now asking for the United States to pay attention to these crimes that they funded. The people of Somaliland say they need help to reckon with the bloody history that remains buried underneath their feet.

Ismail Einashe

Ismail Einashe is an investigative journalist based in London and a Dart Center Ochberg Fellow at Columbia University Journalism School.

Matt Kennard

Matt Kennard is an investigative journalist working for the Latin America Bureau in London. He is the author of two books,  Irregular Army and The Racket.