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Since people cannot reconcile with each other, it is best to forcefully expel [them] from the city... You have seen what happened in the last onslaught. Whoever has survived that will be exterminated in the one to follow."
The scene is Mogadishu, capital of Somalia. The man talking in a speech broadcast on radio 12 months ago is Salad Ali Jalle, former minister in the current Somali government.
In the year since Jalle's speech, roughly 7,000 civilians have been killed in city battles between pro-government forces and Islamist insurgents.
Nearly a million have fled the military 'onslaughts', ending up in camps stalked by hunger and sickness. On a recent visit to Mogadishu, witnesses told me they blamed both the insurgents and the government for the suffering.
I have seen the effects of the conflict on civilians: victims with limbs and guts blown
out by explosions; a makeshift famine ward full of skeletal babies; camps extending to the desert horizon; heavy gunfire day and night - and rubble-filled streets where government forces beat and pillage civilians.
Incredibly, the government side, which still includes men like Jalle, enjoys extremely close links with Britain. British taxpayers' money goes towards paying their salaries.
Leading figures in the regime are British or EU passport holders. Some have homes in Britain and return regularly to visit their families here. The President, Abdullahi Yusuf (left), often comes for medical check-ups in London, where his life was saved by a liver transplant from a British donor.
Yet the president stands accused of overseeing the indiscriminate bombardment of civilian districts where insurgents lurked. "Any place from which a bullet is fired, we will bombard it, regardless of whoever is there," he vowed in a broadcast days before one of the 'onslaughts' his deputy Jalle promised. Hundreds were later killed.
Another key figure in the leadership - who has a house in Leicester - commands intelligence forces alleged to
have imprisoned hundreds without charge. The police forces, whose salaries are partly sponsored by the UK, are linked to extortion, torture and even extra-judicial killings.
The deputy police chief has a home in Birmingham.
And some leading officials - one of them a former minister who is a British citizen with a home in London - are accused of obstructing the delivery of humanitarian food aid and medicines desperately needed by refugees in the camps.
How it all went wrong is the latest instalment in the familiar story of the disastrous US-led 'war on terror'.
Seventeen months ago, Ethiopian forces seized the city from Islamist militants and installed the new government. Washington - together with Britain and most of the world community - supported this military solution to Somalia's long-running civil war, even though it meant the intervention of outside forces.
During Islamist rule, Mogadishu had experienced its most peaceful spell since 1991. But the West wanted the new regime to hunt down al-Qaeda and its allies in the region.
The police, whose salaries are partly sponsored by the UK, are linked to extortion and torture
killed perhaps two senior al-Qaeda-linked targets - and many Somalis argue the hunt for a handful of individual terrorists hardly justifies plunging a nation into chaos.
And instead of just fighting 'terrorists', government forces - who are from rival clans to the majority of Mogadishu's current population - are alleged to have also set about prosecuting a tribal war.
Government leaders I spoke to denied all allegations made against them, though when I showed Jalle the radio transcript quoted above, he admitted he had said "some of it".
Like other theatres in the 'war on terror', solutions in Somalia get harder to find as time passes. Fresh attempts at peace talks collapsed this month. A small African Union mission has failed to fully deploy and is seen by the insurgents as a target, which does not bode well for fresh UN promises to beef up peace-keeping operations.
In Mogadishu, clan elders repeatedly told me they wanted Britain's help to sort out their mess. But they said the fact that Britain finances a government that is linked to serious human rights abuses only makes things worse.
Aidan Hartley reports from Somalia for Channel 4's 'Dispatches', 8pm, Monday May 26.
Source: firstpost
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