More conflict in the Horn of Africa

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Ethiopian Rebels Kill 70 at Chinese-Run Oil Field


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By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
Published: April 25, 2007

NAIROBI, Kenya, April 24 — Separatist rebels stormed a Chinese-run oil field in eastern Ethiopia on Tuesday, killing more than 70 people, including nine Chinese workers, in one of Ethiopia’s worst rebel attacks in years.

Dozens of gunmen crept up to the oil field at dawn and unleashed a barrage of machine-gun fire at Ethiopian soldiers posted outside, Chinese and Ethiopian officials said. After a fierce hourlong battle, the rebels rushed away, taking at least six Chinese hostages with them.

Ethiopia, a close ally of the United States, has been racked by separatist movements for years. But the severity of this attack seemed to unnerve Ethiopian officials, who usually minimize any threats to their control.

“It was a massacre,” Prime Minister Meles Zenawi said in a televised address on Tuesday night. “It was cold-blooded murder.”

The Ogaden National Liberation Front, a militant group fighting for control of eastern Ethiopia, immediately claimed responsibility, circulating an e-mail message that said, “We will not allow the mineral resources of our people to be exploited by this regime or any firm that it enters into an illegal contract.”

The front said that its primary target was the Ethiopian soldiers guarding the oil field and that the Chinese workers had been killed by explosions during the fighting.

Given China’s drive to extract oil wherever it can be found, Chinese workers are often dispatched to conflict zones, and several have been kidnapped in the volatile Niger Delta region of Nigeria. In other parts of Africa, like Zambia, China’s investments have brought resentment from local politicians and residents.

As for the workers kidnapped on Tuesday, the rebel group’s statement said: “O.N.L.F. forces rounding up Ethiopian military prisoners following the battle came across six Chinese workers. They have been removed from the battlefield for their own safety and are being treated well.” But the group did not say anything about releasing them.

Ethiopian officials, who confirmed that 65 government soldiers had been killed, said they were rushing reinforcements to the area and vowed to crush the rebels. But the country’s military is stretched thin.

Thousands of Ethiopian troops are bogged down in Somalia, where they face increasingly intense resistance. On Tuesday, a suicide bomber attacking Ethiopian troops killed seven civilians in Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital, the second time in a week that suicide attacks were used. More than 1,000 people, mostly civilians, have been killed in the past month in heavy shelling between Somali insurgents and Ethiopian-led troops.

Ethiopia, with covert American help, intervened in Somalia in December to prop up Somalia’s weak transitional government and defeat Islamist forces that had controlled much of Somalia and were widely suspected of sheltering anti-Ethiopian rebel groups like the Ogaden National Liberation Front.

Ethiopian troops in Somalia recently rounded up dozens of suspected rebels, and human rights observers say the Ethiopians have also imprisoned — and tortured — innocent civilians.

Such tactics, analysts say, may now be coming back to haunt the Ethiopians.

“This is the rebels’ response,” said Ted Dagne, a specialist in African affairs for the Congressional Research Service. “They are fighting a classic guerrilla war against the government, and those widespread detentions became another one of their grievances.”

The Ogaden region of eastern Ethiopia is a hot and inhospitable place, home to Somali-speaking nomads who have always identified more with neighboring Somalia than with Ethiopia. Part of the reason is religion. Ethiopia’s leaders have traditionally been Christian, while Ogadenis are almost all Muslims.

The Ogaden National Liberation Front, formed 23 years ago, was briefly aligned with the current Ethiopian government but broke away in the mid-1990s after it was clear that the Ogaden region would not be given autonomy.

Western military analysts say the front has a few thousand lightly armed fighters, who get their weapons and training from Eritrea, Ethiopia’s neighbor and bitter enemy. In the galaxy of rebel groups roaming nearly every corner of Ethiopia, these fighters have been considered a midlevel threat to the government.

Oil, though, seems to be its new focus. In August, the Web-savvy front issued an electronic threat against a Malaysian oil company that was contemplating drilling in Ethiopia.

The oil field that the rebels raided Tuesday was run by a division of China’s government-owned energy giant, the China Petroleum and Chemical Corporation. According to Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency, the Ethiopian rebels briefly seized control of the oil field before kidnapping seven Chinese workers, who were among the 37 Chinese and 120 Ethiopians employed there.

In Jijiga, a nearby city, residents said Ethiopian soldiers were mustering for a huge counterstrike.

“There are federal soldiers and city police everywhere on the streets,” said a businessman named Biruk. “People are scared.”

Last month, the Ogaden National Liberation Front accused the Ethiopian government of burning an Ogadeni village to the ground. It said that government soldiers had gone after civilians, not fighters, and that “the O.N.L.F. will respond swiftly and decisively to this barbaric act.”

 

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GALKAYO, Somalia — Beyond clan rivalry and Islamic fervor, an entirely different motive is helping fuel the chaos in Somalia: profit.

The New York Times

Profiteers in cities like Galkayo see the government as a threat.

A whole class of opportunists — from squatter landlords to teenage gunmen for hire to vendors of out-of-date baby formula — have been feeding off the anarchy in Somalia for so long that they refuse to let go.

They do not pay taxes, their businesses are totally unregulated, and they have skills that are not necessarily geared toward a peaceful society.

In the past few weeks, some Western security officials say, these profiteers have been teaming up with clan fighters and radical Islamists to bring down Somalia’s transitional government, which is the country’s 14th attempt at organizing a central authority and ending the free-for-all of the past 16 years.

They are attacking government troops, smuggling in arms and using their business savvy to raise money for the insurgency. And they are surprisingly open about it.

Omar Hussein Ahmed, an olive oil exporter in Mogadishu, the capital, said he and a group of fellow traders recently bought missiles to shoot at government soldiers.

“Taxes are annoying,” he explained.

Maxamuud Nuur Muradeeste, a squatter landlord who makes a few hundred dollars a year renting out rooms in the former Ministry of Minerals and Water, said he recently invited insurgents to stash weapons on “his” property. He will do whatever it takes, he said, to thwart the government’s plan to reclaim thousands of pieces of public property.

“If this government survives, how will I?” Mr. Muradeeste said.

Layer this problem on top of Somalia’s sticky clan issues, its poverty and its nomadic culture, and it is no wonder that the transitional government seems to be overwhelmed by the same raw antigovernment defiance that has torpedoed earlier attempts at stabilizing the country.

Granted, many of the transitional leaders acknowledge that they have made mistakes and that they have not played the clan politics as deftly as they could have. But they say they believe that there are some Somalis — actually, many Somalis — who will never go along with any program.

“Even if we turned Mogadishu into Houston, there would still be people resisting us,” said Abdirizak Adam Hassan, chief of staff for Somalia’s transitional president, Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed. “I’m talking about the guys bringing in expired medicine, selling arms, harboring terrorists. They don’t have a clan name. They’re a congregation of people whose best interests are served by no government.”

In the past month, the resistance has intensified and more than 1,000 people have been killed or wounded as the country has sunk into its deepest crisis since the famine days of the early 1990s.

Most of the victims are civilians, like Amina Abdullahi, who recently fled Mogadishu with two small children holding her hands and a baby tied to her back.

“I don’t understand why this is such a problem,” she said. “If people don’t like this government, can’t they wait until there is an election and vote them out?”

American diplomats had mostly shied away from Somalia since the infamous “Black Hawk Down” episode in 1993 when Somali militiamen shot down two American helicopters and killed 18 United States soldiers. But now the Americans are involved again, driven by a counterterrorism agenda and armed with a pledge of $100 million to rebuild the country.

And it is exactly this kind of hefty support that is fueling the resistance’s urgency, because the opportunists sense that this transitional government, more than any other, poses the biggest threat yet to the gravy days of anarchy.

Somalis are legendary individualists, and when the central government imploded in 1991, people quickly devised ways to fend for themselves.

Businessmen opened their own hospitals, schools, telephone companies and even privatized mail services. Men who were able to muster private armies, often former military officers, seized the biggest prizes: abandoned government property, like ports and airfields, which could generate as much as $40,000 a day. They became the warlords. Many trafficked in guns and drugs and taxed their fellow Somalis.

Beneath the warlords were clan-based networks of thousands of people — adolescent enforcers, stevedores, clerks, truck drivers and their families — all tied into the chaos economy. Ditto for the freelance landlords and duty-free importers.

Over the years, prominent members of the Hawiye clan, Mogadishu’s biggest, have tried to cobble together a government and end this system. But they have failed every time. Though Somalia is notoriously fragmented among dozens of rival clans and subclans, and has been that way for centuries, clans alone did not seem to be the problem.

“It was the opportunists who didn’t see a role for themselves in the future,” said Mohammed Abdi Balle, an elder here in Galkayo, a city about 450 miles north of Mogadishu.

Not all opportunists had the same agenda. Many in the business community became fed up with paying protection fees to the warlords and their countless middle-men.

Business leaders then backed a grass-roots Islamist movement that drove the warlords out of Mogadishu last summer and brought peace to the city for the first time in 15 years.

The Islamists seemed to be the perfect solution for the businessmen. They delivered stability, which was good for most business, but they did not confiscate property or levy heavy taxes. They called themselves an administration, not a government.

“Our best days were under them,” said Abdi Ali Jama, who owns an electrical supply shop in Mogadishu.

But then a radical wing took over, and the Islamists declared war on Ethiopia, which commands one of the mightiest armies in Africa. The Ethiopians, with covert American help, crushed the Islamist army in December and bolstered the authority of Somalia’s transitional government in the capital.

Many residents initially welcomed the transitional government. But then it made some questionable calls that cut across clan and business lines. It abruptly closed ports and took over airfields belonging to Hawiye businessmen, denying them revenue they had been accustomed to receiving for years. Many Somalis began to worry that the transitional government, which includes elders from all of Somalia’s clans, was being pushed around by the Darod, the clan of the transitional president and a historic rival to the Hawiye.

At first, just a few Hawiye sub-clans — mainly those connected to the Islamists — took up arms. But as the government has moved to curtail the profiteering, business leaders say that more and more clans are embracing the rebel cause.

For many Abgal, an influential subclan of the Hawiye, the last straw came in mid-March when the government raised port taxes by 300 percent. Mr. Ahmed, the olive oil exporter and an Abgal, said that after that, there was a mass Abgal defection to the insurgency. “The government is trying to destroy business as we know it,” he said.

Despite attempts at a cease-fire between insurgents and government forces, the violence has raged virtually unabated in Mogadishu.

And once again, the opportunists have stepped in. In some areas, displaced people are forced to pay a “shade tax” to local residents for resting under their trees.