“The combatants in Somalia have inflicted more harm on civilians than on each other,” said Georgette Gagnon, Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “There are no quick fixes in Somalia, but foreign governments need to stop adding fuel to the fire with misguided policies that empower human rights abusers.”
The full horror of these abuses can be captured only through the stories of Somalis who have suffered through them. Human Rights Watch interviewed teenage girls raped by TFG security forces, parents whose children were cut to pieces in their own homes by Ethiopian rockets, and people shot in the streets by insurgent fighters for acts as trivial as working as a low-paid messenger for TFG offices.

Among its recommendations, HRW calls for UN funding of the Somali National Police Force to be suspended until several conditions have been met, including

Commissioner of Police Abdi Qeybdid is suspended from office pending the results of an independent, impartial, and transparent investigation into patterns of widespread human rights abuse implicating officers of the Somali Police Force;

…and proper systems for monitoring abuse are in place. I have heard of at least one case where a local NGO complained to the United Nations Development Program about harassment by police funded by the UN, only for those same NGO workers to be arrested days later. In other words, staff at UNDP had passed on details of the complaints directly to the police.
In short, the whole system is currently a mess and western taxpayers’ money is a direct, contributing factor to the abuses. (My analysis of the problem is here.) For aid money to be going to a murderous thug like Qeybdiid simply beggars belief. Anyway, this is my latest story in full…
SOMALI police officers, funded with British and European taxpayers†money, are engaged in a campaign of looting, intimidation and extortion, according to witnesses in Mogadishu.
In one of the most blatant incidents, police armed with AK-47 rifles opened fire in a school in apparent retaliation for a mortar attack on the presidentâ€s motorcade in June.
A child in year 6 was seriously injured.
The police, dressed in khaki uniforms, smashed electrical equipment and tried to burn down the school by setting fire to piles of books.
“It was very frightening. We thought we were all going to die,” said a witness, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.
“Why would they do this to a school?”
The United Nations Development Programme which is responsible for delivering donor cash to the police has launched an investigation into the incident.
In dozens more cases, security forces – who cannot be identified because many wear the same types of uniform – are accused of raping, looting and arbitrarily detaining suspects.
Human Rights Watch will today(MON) launch a report detailing the full scale of abuse, and call for western government to reappraise their positions on Somalia.
Earlier this year, The Times revealed that Britainâ€s Department for International Development was one of the major donors backing attempts to bring law and order to Somaliaâ€s lawless land.
A weak transitional government took control of the capital Mogadishu last year after its Ethiopian allies defeated an alliance of Islamic courts. Since then ministers have relied on donor cash as they try to stop Islamist insurgents regaining control of the country.
The money is supposed to help build a community-based police service, trained in human rights, based on the success of similar projects in other “fragile states” such as Sierra Leone.
Without basic security, so the philosophy runs, it is difficult to channel development aid into lawless states.
The British Department for International Development (DfID) is the second-largest donor – behind the European Commission – to UN programmes supporting the Transitional Federal Government, having committed £11 million to date.
However experts warn the policy is going awry in Somalia.
Millions of pounds in police stipends, vehicles and equipment has been given to a force headed by General Abdi Hasan Awale Qaybdib, one of Mogadishuâ€s most notorious warlords.
A recent United Nations report showed the Somali police included members of his own militia, drafted in to collect donor-funded stipends, which are currently suspended.
Security experts in Nairobi believe Qaybdidâ€s police are acting in tandem with the feared National Security Agency, arresting suspects before delivering them to the an underground prison in Mogadishu.
The Times has spoken to three Somali journalists who were arrested by the Somali police force and held for weeks without charge in the dungeon before paying bribes to be freed.
One radio reporter was accused of supporting Islamist insurgents and tortured when he told his interrogators he knew nothing about al Qaeda.
“They ordered me to stand and put my hands on the wall and face them,” he said by telephone from Mogadishu. “Then they started to beat me. When I cried they took off my shirt and used cables to beat me until I was close to unconscious.”
A spokeswoman for DfID said Britainâ€s work in Somalia was under review because of the countryâ€s testing conditions.
“We condemn in the strongest possible terms any violation of human rights by the Somali police force. All UK-funded police training includes training on human rights. Somalia is an unstable country and the international community has a duty to remain engaged there, not just to reduce poverty, but also to build regional stability,” she said.
STOP PRESS
Britain’s Department for International Development tells me today it has stopped supporting the UN’s Rule of Law and Security programme, which has been the main target of human rights campaigners.
I’m also told, by one of my UN chums, that my report in The Times earlier this year and Aiden Hartley’s Dispatches documentary forced a rethink.

In this part of the world it doesn’t take long to spot the problem with international aid to Africa. Or maybe I should rephrase things. In this part of the world it doesn’t take long to spot the problem with British aid to Africa. In the past decade Britain has pumped millions of pounds into new governments in Uganda, Ethiopia and Rwanda. A new breed of leader has been welcomed with the financing they needed to rebuild governments, states and institutions.
Only Messrs Museveni, Meles and Kagame turned out to be not quite so progressive as first though. Museveni abolished term limits so that he could stay in power. Meles had to rely on police marksmen to shoot dead dozens of unarmed protesters after flawed elections in 2005. And Kagame pocketed British cash while sending his soldiers into someone else’s civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Don’t take my word for it. The select committee on international development raised questions about this aid a couple of years ago. It looked at all these examples and, while pointing out the difficulties of helping states as they emerged from conflict, concluded:

DFID should ensure that it is not excusing wrongful acts as aberrations in an otherwise successful development partnership.

So what on earth has DfID – the Department for Internation Development – got itself involved with in Somalia. British cash is being used to prop up an unpopular government accused of human rights abuses and of blocking the delivery of humanitarian aid. Money is being used to equip, train and pay a police force, which is run by warlords and militia leaders and packed with their men.
You don’t need to know much about Somalia to know that Abdi Hasan Awale Qaybdib might not be the man you want running a police force. Fifteen years ago he was battling US and UN forces in Mogadishu. He was a key target of US forces as they detained lieutenants of Mohamed Farrah Aideed in the run-up to the Black Hawk Down episode. Then two years ago he was put on the US payroll to battle Islamist militias, as part of a warlord coalition that brought only misery to Mogadishu. A short time later he was arrested in Sweden on suspicion of genocide but later released.
Not great credentials for a man supposed to be running a civilian, community policing service. And no-one really believes his police force is anything other than a counter-insurgency outfit.
Funding a military operation would breach DfID’s own rules. The department is supposed to spend money only on “poverty reduction” and military spending is outlawed.
So what’s going on? The argument is broadly that donors have to work with whoever is available. To rule out gunmen, warlords and gangsters in Somalia would mean the international community would have to turn its back on the country altogether just as it is sliding into famine. For my story I spoke to countless aid workers and diplomats who said things like: “We know there are problems but there is little we can do about it. There is no plan B.”
Yet there are some astonishing breaches of commonsense in Somalia. The police wear a khaki uniform making it impossible to distinguish them from the other militias and government security arms. Odd for a supposedly civilian police force. The reason? That’s what Somalia’s police chiefs wanted. As a donor said to me: “Without Somali ownership nothing will get done.”
That view was not unanimous. Another diplomat said: “Whoever made the decision to give them military uniforms should be sacked immediately.”
It seems in the rush to apply standard developmental thinking no-one has remembered that this is Somalia. Policies are being implemented that would have been risky in fragile states emerging from war, the Ugandas, Rwandas and Ethiopias. But Somalia is no longer a fragile state or even a failed state. It is a post-failed state, with its own mechanisms and institutions for survival. These institutions – the warlords and their militias predominantly – are now exploiting the cash that is arriving in bucketloads to maximise their positions ahead of the expected collapse of the Transitional Federal Government. The latest report by the UN’s monitoring group on Somalia spells out the concerns and warns that donors are not monitoring where their cash is going. On the security sector it says:

The transformation of the security organisations of the TFG such as the Somali Police Force into clan-based forces armed with weapons obtained from caches and from the demobilisation programme defies national objectives, and those behind the transformation can be viewed as active spoilers of the reconciliation process.

Helping Africa’s impoverished countries to develop is fraught with difficulty. Security is one way to kickstart things. But in areas where it is impossible to monitor whether pick-ups have been “technicalised” – turned into battlewagons sporting heavy machineguns – there has to be a plan B. Aid Effectiveness – Opening the Black Box, by Bourguignon and Sundberg (2007), frames the question and suggests an answer (with thanks to Siphoning Off a Few Thoughts):

How should aid be given if policy and governance quality is very weak, and the
risk of resource diversion is high? These are often some of the worldâ€s poorest countries.
Clearly need must also be an important allocation criterion. For these fragile states, aid
must be managed differently, possibly bypassing government to channel resources
directly to end users through reliable NGOs, and/or limiting aid to humanitarian
assistance.

There is a plan B, but it seems that DfID with its dogmatic attachment to channelling cash through governments can’t see it.