Good afternoon, and thank you for including me in these proceedings.
I'd like to make a few opening remarks underscoring some of the broad trends and patterns of human rights violations in Somalia.
The first observation is that human rights violations remain a major chronic and widespread threat that touch almost every Somali household. It is difficult to be fully protected from human rights violations in the country. Impunity is one of the greatest problems in Somalia. It is a country where human rights violations of all sorts are routinely perpetrated, and rarely are the perpetrators held to account.
State authorities are weak. The federal government of Somalia is still nascent. Its capacity to provide protection to its population is very limited. Worse, some state authorities, particularly in the security sector, are sometimes a major source of human rights violations perpetrated against some members of the population. These violations include assassinations, rape, looting, and torture.
Al Shabaab is the single greatest source of human rights violations across the countryside. It engages in major terrorist attacks that are indiscriminate in their targeting. It engages in daily assassinations. It engages in forced conscription, forced marriage, and imposition of draconian interpretations of sharia law on the populations under its control.
Assassinations are not the sole domain of al Shabaab. One of the major human rights problems in Somalia today is that clan and political actors are also engaged in a dirty war against one another. This includes assassinations. It includes threats. One of the most disturbing patterns we've seen in Somalia in recent years is the degree to which political, clan, and business actors will play out their rivalries through the use of lethal force against one another, often outsourcing that violence to al Shabaab itself. That makes it quite difficult in some circumstances to know exactly who is behind some of the human rights violations that we see in the country. This points to another related problem of collusion. These actors who are ostensibly fighting one another, the government, and al Shabaab are in fact colluding in a variety of ways. Again, this makes it very difficult to pinpoint who is to blame for specific acts of terrorism and violence.
Certainly included among those vulnerable populations in Somalia are the 1.1 million internally displaced persons crowded in slums in the major cities of the country. They are not only without power socially and economically, but are also often very weak in terms of their clan affiliation, and, hence, very vulnerable to routine human rights violations and predatory behaviour, particularly against the women.
Other groups of real concern in Somalia continue to include journalists. Somalia is one of the most dangerous places in the world for journalists to operate. Many have been killed, many more threatened. Anyone who speaks frankly and critically about the government, or about the business community, or about al Shabaab runs the risk of retaliation. Prominent citizens are often also targeted in retaliatory attacks. Thus, despite the fact they can protect themselves reasonably well, they are among some of the most vulnerable. Anyone who refuses to pay extortion money to the armed groups, especially al Shabaab, is at risk of attacks.
All this points to an unpleasant reality when it comes to citizen security in Somalia in the context of a still very weak, semi-collapsed state. Security has been thoroughly commoditized in Somalia. Those who can pay for it, generally are able to afford greater protection from human rights violations. Those who can't must find alternative measures, whether through neighbourhood watch groups or the patronage of a more powerful clan nearby, or whatever they can can find to protect themselves.
The UN Human Rights Council's recent report, issued in September, did note some progress in Somalia, but continues to note major challenges to the human rights situation there as well. The progress they flagged had to do with the successful indirect elections that took place earlier this year, which held the promise of a new administration coming in that was committed to combatting corruption and improving good governance. That has not been very effective to date. The government has struggled with a lot of internal problems. The challenges that the report articulated included drought, al Shabaab, and the African Union peacekeeping force's planned redeployment. I'd like to reflect on this for a moment.
The 22,000-man African Union peacekeeping force that has been in Somalia now for 10 years has been both a source of protection and human rights violations. We have documented cases of African Union forces engaging in predation, sexual assault, and other crimes against the Somali people. Those have been flagged. Promises have been made to investigate them. That's been a very unfortunate part of that long peace operation.
Now that we know that the African Union peacekeeping forces are going to withdraw in a phased way over the next few years, and are already beginning to withdraw from some strategic areas of the country, the new concern is that this is going to create a political and security vacuum that al Shabaab will exploit. It will conduct, as it routinely does, retaliatory measures against anyone they suspect of having colluded with AMISOM or with the federal government. As al Shabaab advances in some of these areas, we can expect to see human rights violations grow in those places.
I have a couple of final points to make. To the extent that human rights violations are sometimes orchestrated at fairly high political or economic levels, we have to acknowledge the unfortunate reality that many of the political and commercial elite in Somalia are holding multiple passports. They are citizens of second and third countries, including Canada, Sweden, the U.K., and the U.S. One of the important topics that I think needs to be pursued when we address the issue of impunity is to hold accountable to the laws of these countries people who hold citizenship in other countries. They must not go back to Somalia as Canadian or U.S. citizens and plan and execute assassinations of other Somalis. To the extent that we can use the reality that many of the political and social elites in Somalia are diaspora members, and remind them that they are beholden to the laws of the countries to which they have become citizens, we may have an angle or some leverage to try to reduce some of the human rights violations.
My final point is to remind all of us of something that I think most of us who work on Somalia know well, which is that while we see the state of chronic instability, state weakness, and impunity as a problem to be solved, important constituencies in Somalia see it as a desirable condition in which they can continue to profit from illicit behaviour. We don't always have partners in all quarters in Somalia to combat this, and identifying the spoilers and cartels that work in these conditions is a very important first step toward any action to address it.
Thank you.