Who is funding terrorists to the tune of $100 per month per person?

Dear Patriotic Global Citizens and Friends of Ethiopia/Africa:

Re: Who is funding and nurturing terrorists in the Horn? Eritrea, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Egypt?

It is becoming evident day by day, that there is, a highly organized terrorist network, that funds the youths at the rate of $100 per month, with excellent benefits compared to what the youths of the region can afford in this very vulnerable part of the world.

No body seems to ask where does such level of funding come from? Who can afford to pay these delinquent youths to the tune of $100 per month with highly supportive benefits in the region? It is clear non of the local governments nor charities can afford that, even for their civil servants or their soldiers.

Who has that amount of money to spend so freely? No one has done any research or even intelligent speculations. Why?

In all the reports that come from the region, especially the so called journalists and researchers, do not expose the cause, nor the funding sources ; but just describe the scene as is. Any photo-journalist can d
that, and I some times wonder why they waste their words on print. Looks like an entertainment enterprise that just describes human sufferings and carnage and does not suggest solutions.

The United Nations, the Arab League, The African Union, The East African League or IGAD and all the series of self appointed Non Profit organizations those funded by the UN as well as churches and mosques and temples and all those philanthropic groups including the counter intelligence networks of all global groups under the banner of Journalists, doctors, lawyers, judges and charities without borders and the series of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty Groups, etc, non have suggested a solution on how to prevent the carnage nor discourage the funding and facilitation of this disaster in the Horn.

The only civilization or sane institution or civil society who tried to curb or stop the terror network, was and continues to be misunderstood , and even reported as the negative influence in the region, when it is actually defending its sacred national interests. The US is the only nation that has made overt and covert support for Ethiopia's effort to stem the tide. No one except Uganda and Burundi supported this effort.

Now, we have a rather sad and callous reporting by the economists, as though they are from Pluto or another Galaxy for a short Christmas Visit and making an observation of a dysfunctional globe ready to be overtaken by the aliens, as they are so incompetent to look after their own. What ever their own is.

The so called John Penderghast of the Enough Project and Human Rights Watch before that and the loony left Guardian newspaper before that even campaigned for the outgoing Bush Administration not to prevent
the funding and training of the terrorist that the Shabia criminals are facilitating with the support of the Egyptians and other loony governments in the region.

Imagine, Human Rights Watch and its loony organizations supporting the terrorist network! Whose Human Rights they are protecting is clear by their incompetent and irresponsible reporting on the topic.

We know who is funding and training these terrorists? We know who shattered the Pentagon and the New York building with US planes. We all know, and yet what the hell are we doing in Afghanistan and Iraq when none of the 12 were from these two countries.

We know who is funding and training these Shabab in Somalia. We also know who are the active players in this criminal venture. We can spot them from the air and the ground, and in fact we are the ones who are reporting on them.

What is so funny and sad is that, what are we doing by not sending UN and African Union and Arab League forces to stabilize the region. Are these institutions controlled by the same group that fund, retail and train terror? That is the real question. Who makes and sells the arms? Who trains the terrorists? How can we ignore this level of calamity for so long? Hitler would laugh at us in his grave and say look at these fools they are doing it again!

We know what to do, but we report as if some aliens from Pluto or another galaxy are responsible. We know the criminals are amongst us and may even be our closest friends and we have chosen to keep quiet.

It is like the US, Treasury and its mandated arm that regulates the market who knew Bernestien Maddoff was stealing and robbing the shadow banking system called Hedge Funds for over 30 years, and kept quiet when he robbed the world and his friends for over $50 Billion, NOW when it is really too late , we cry foul.

Yet he gets nothing and walks around with minor detective equipment around his ankles or forehead, while any African American youth caught or suspected to posses hashish is either shot on the spot or sent to jail for a long time. This is our sense of justice and fairness and competence. It is a shame and why get surpirsed if Maddoff gets a bail out.

Imagine, such level of incompetence in any planet and we would say the Martians are lost civilization and yet our own is vanishing under the weight of such incompetent civil societies and governance.

One wonders where we bail out thieves and robbers like Mad doff who robbed the economy not in thousands or millions but in billions and yet the common honorable person is left to be bankrupt and feel the homeless shelters.

Yes, like the Economist, in its current report, the world will respond with few temporary concern here and the and for few weeks we will sing, Noel, Noel! and even feed the poor in the shelter but soon forget them and continue to bail out the big robbers and even sell arms to the terrorists in the Horn and like London, England even facilitate the ransom money for the Pirates.

What a globe and civilizations that just does not care and continue to bail out the criminals with criminal priests interceding for their lost souls.

Please read below the fascinating story of the Shababa or Abused Youths with $100 per month into their self destruction.

It is a shame, no one seems to care! Just for the record do we know who is funding and training these Shababs and why did the US not put them in the Terrorists and Terrorist enabling list, I just wonder!

Dr B



The rise of the Shabab
The Economist | December 20, 2008

Sheik Muktar Robow Abu Mansur (2nd R), spokesman of Somalia's Islamic al-Shabab, leaves a news conference after vowing to step up attacks against government soldiers and foreign troops in Mogadishu December 14, 2008.

(REUTERS/Feisal Omar) FOR all its paradisal waters, golden dunes and swanky “eco-lodges”, life in Kenya’s coastal district of Kiunga, just a few miles from the border with Somalia, is hard. The place is remote, hungry and thirsty.

The harvest and the wells have failed again. Fishermen have no boats, only frayed nets cast from shore. Their catch rots for want of refrigeration. But what makes the village elders more nervous than anything is their proximity to Somalia.

During a war in the 1960s between Kenya and Somali bandits, known as “shifta”, who were egged on by Somalia, Kiunga was evacuated. These days a rough track, impassable during the rains, barely connects the two countries.

The border has been closed since December 2006, when jihadist fighters in Somalia retreated headlong from Mogadishu, the capital, and Kismayo, a southern port, into the mangrove swamps around Ras Kamboni, just inside Somalia. There they were shredded by Ethiopian artillery and American air raids.

An attack on Kenya by Somali jihadists based near the border is unlikely. Resurgent fighters still train there but look north. They belong to the Shabab (Youth), the armed wing of the former Islamic Courts Union that was all but wiped out two years ago. The presence of hated Ethiopian troops in Somalia, together with a corrupt and hapless transitional Somali government, gave the Shabab a chance to regroup.

Money and arms from Eritrea, which wants to use Somalia to hurt Ethiopia, as well as from some Arab countries, enabled it to recruit. Several thousand have signed up in the past year. They attend large training camps in southern Somalia where one of the instructors is said to be a white American mujahideen.

They are expected to disavow music, videos, cigarettes and qat, the leaf Somali men chew most afternoons to get mildly high. Thus resolved, they wrap their faces in scarves and seek to fight the infidel. In return, they get $100 a month, are fed, and can expect medical treatment and payments if they are wounded, as well as burial costs and cash for their families if they are killed.

The Shabab now controls much of south Somalia and chunks of Mogadishu. It took Kismayo a few months ago. The port of Marka, which takes in food aid, fell more recently. Many fighters are loosely grouped around two older jihadist commanders with strongholds near Kenya’s border, Mukhtar Robow and Hassan Turki.

Mr Robow celebrated the recent festival of Eid al-Adha by hosting prayers in Mogadishu’s cattle market. How sweet it would be at Eid, he told the gathering, if instead of slaughtering an animal in praise of Allah, they would slaughter an Ethiopian.

On a visit to Marka he was only slightly less belligerent. He urged reconciliation—except with enemies of Islam. There are many of those, it seems. Hundreds of Somali aid workers, human-rights campaigners and journalists have been killed or exiled.

Foreigners have been shot and kidnapped, in two cases just across Somalia’s border, in Kenya and Ethiopia. Where it cannot exert control, the Shabab excuses banditry. Borrowing tactics from Afghanistan’s Taliban, it spreads chaos to build a new order.

The Shabab has learnt from its mistakes in 2006, when it was overwhelmed in a few days by the Ethiopian army. It is now more pragmatic and more aggressive. This time round, it is apparently not picking fights with wealthy qat merchants. Men can chew what they like—but won’t be “clean enough” to get a lucrative job in Kismayo’s port. Education is encouraged. Girls can go to school. Charcoal burning is forbidden for the sake of the environment.

But the Shabab has also tightened its own security. Alleged spies for the transitional government or for Ethiopia are routinely beheaded with blunt knives. Mr Turki, the jihadist leader who lives mostly in the bush near the Kenyan border, sleeps in different houses when he is in a town. Public floggings and executions strike fear. So do masked faces. “Before, we knew who killed our relatives,” says a Kismayo merchant. “Now we don’t even know that.”

Most tellingly, the Shabab has learnt how to get hold of money faster. It concentrates its fighters in towns where there is money to be earned. The aim is to create an army that puts Islamist identity above divisive clan loyalties. Shabab commanders say a pious state will emerge once weaker militias have been disarmed.

Some reckon that the Shabab shares some of the ransoms earned by pirates who operate out of the central Somali port of Haradheere. Those in Puntland, farther north, are apparently beyond the Shabab’s reach.

Ethiopia says it will withdraw its troops within weeks, once ships evacuate the 3,000 Ugandan and Burundian peacekeepers under the African Union’s aegis holed up in Mogadishu. Somalia’s transitional government looks even feebler than before.

This week the president, Abdullahi Yusuf, an ageing warlord, sacked his prime minister, Nur Hussein, blaming him for what the president called a corrupt, inept and traitorous government. Mr Hussein refused to resign, and won a vote of confidence in parliament. Mr Yusuf went ahead and appointed his own prime minister anyway. More factional fighting beckons.

The UN says Somalia is the world’s worst humanitarian emergency. Some 3.2m people are said to need aid. The UN, which says 40,000 Somali children could soon starve to death, expects fighting over food to break out, another reason the Shabab wants to control the ports. Pirates make it hard to deliver aid.

Their activities may be curtailed after the UN Security Council this week let foreign governments chase pirates in Somalia itself as well as at sea. But the piracy will probably continue as long as the catastrophe on land does.

George Bush’s administration backed some of Mogadishu’s worst warlords as part of its war on terror. President Obama will have to take a new tack. The AU force has proved ineffective but a bigger or more robust intervention, by America or any other country, is not expected; this week Condoleezza Rice, America’s secretary of state, called in vain for UN peacekeepers to be sent.

A new American administration is unlikely to urge negotiation any time soon with the Shabab; it is still listed as a terrorist group by the Americans and may indeed shelter al-Qaeda people. It may have sleeper agents in Kenya and even in Britain. It has certainly become stronger.

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Source: The Economist



http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iGX8BKNT8QuvxoqtjIvpNI-cUhYQ

AFP
UN arms embargo on Somalia constantly broken

December 19, 2008
UNITED NATIONS — A 16-year arms embargo against Somalia has been constantly violated with weapons mainly coming from Yemen and financed by Eritrea as well as Arab and Islamic donors, a UN report said Friday.

"Most serviceable weapons and almost all ammunition currently available in the country have been delivered since 1992, in violation of the embargo," the report from a UN monitoring group said.
"Commercial imports, mainly from Yemen, remain the most consistent source of arms, ammunition and military materiel to Somalia," the group said.

Restrictions put into place in Yemen since June 2008 to limit arms sales have helped cut the flow of weapons to Somalia.

"Nevertheless, weapons from Yemen continue to feed Somali retail arms sales and the needs of armed opposition and criminal groups," the UN report said.

This illegal trafficking is fueling the bloody armed conflict in the Horn of Africa country, which has been wracked by a civil war since 1991, and is aiding rampant piracy off the Somali coast, the report added.
Earlier Friday, the UN Security Council prolonged the monitoring group's mandate for another year and reiterated "its intention to consider specific action to improve implementation of and compliance with" the embargo.

Independent experts have been mandated "to continue to investigate, in coordination with relevant international agencies, all activities, including in the financial, maritime and other sectors, which generate revenues used to commit arms embargo violations."

Somalia's transitional government controls only of a small part of the country, and the UN Security Council slapped an arms embargo on the country in 1992 under resolution 733.

"Insurgent groups in Ethiopia also procure arms and ammunition from Yemen, which then transit Somalia in violation of the arms embargo," the report said.

"Financing for arms embargo violations by armed opposition groups derives from a variety of sources, including the government of Eritrea, private donors in the Arab and Islamic world, and organized fund-raising activities among Somali diaspora groups."

Criminal gangs are also adding to the lawlessness in the country and are "typically self-financing, employing the proceeds from piracy and kidnapping to procure arms, ammunition and equipment."
"Some of these groups now rival or surpass established Somali authorities in terms of their military capabilities and resource bases," the report added.

Earlier this week, the UN Security Council adopted a landmark resolution authorizing for the first time the use of land operations against Somali pirates in a bid to clamp down on audacious, well-armed gangs menacing vessels in the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean.

But the UN monitoring group warned that another source of the arms flooding into the impoverished nation came from outside forces seeking to support the transitional government.

"Although such contributions are intended to contribute to security and stabilization in Somalia, and are eligible for exemption from the arms embargo, most are not authorized by the Security Council, and thus constitute violations."

"As much as 80 percent of such support has been diverted to private purposes, the Somali arms market or opposition groups."
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http://en.afrik.com/article15065.html
Afrik, pan-African news agency
Ethiopia releases corrupt official, Ex dictator still at large in Zimbabwe
Konye Obaji Ori
Saturday 20 December 2008

Tamerat Layne, Ethiopia’s former Prime Minister convicted by the Ethiopian Supreme Court in 2000 for corruption and abuse of power has been released. He is said to have swindled the government to the tune of US$ 10 million and stashed it in a private Swiss account.

The Former Prime Minister who was dismissed from government in 1996 was sentenced to 18 years in prison but has been released after serving 12 years for showing good behavior.

The Ethiopian government managed to recover the funds allegedly stolen by the former Prime Minister, who was arrested alongside senior party officials on corruption allegations and convicted of those crimes in what is considered a tough anti-graft stance.

Tamerat Layne is however a key ally of current Prime Minister Meles Zenawi who assumed the post of prime minister in 1995, and Seye Abreha, who went on to become defense minister.

The three men are at the top of the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front coalition and it was their squad that ousted the military regime in 1991.

The military regime - known as the Derge - was headed by Mengistu Haile Mariam, whose 17-year rule was known as the Red Terror because of the thousands of people killed in that period.

Seye Abreha was also jailed for corruption not long after Tamerat was jailed in 2000 and like Tamerat, Seye was also given early release from prison last year.

However, Ethiopia’s Supreme Court in May sentenced former Ethiopian ruler Mengistu Haile Mariam - in absentia - to death.

It overturned on appeal last year’s ruling by the High Court sentencing Mengistu and 18 of his most senior aides to life in prison.

The judge said he had passed the death sentence as the defendants had tortured and executed thousands of innocent people, which amounted to genocide.

Mengistu has lived in exile in Zimbabwe since his overthrow in 1991. Tens of thousands of people were killed during a period of Mengistu’s 17-year rule known as the Red Terror
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http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=how_bush_failed_somalia
American Prospect (web only)
December 18, 2008
How Bush Failed Somalia

Matthew Yglesias

Two years ago the United States intervened in East African politics in a way that has been responsible for the deaths of untold thousands of people, has created the pirate problem, and is breeding a new generation of anti-American jihadists.



Americans don't spend much time thinking about Somalia. And what time we do spend has in recent months been focused on somewhat amused accounts of the uptick in pirate activity off the Somali coast. But the piracy is but a symptom of the larger problem of lawlessness and anarchy in Somalia.

To Americans who have paid no attention to East Africa in the time between the departure of U.S. forces from Somalia in 1995 and the recent spate of pirate attacks, this situation may appear merely endemic to the region.

But it's not. The Somali situation was, in many ways, improving as of two years ago. At which point the Bush administration initiated a new adventure that, like most Bush administration deeds, was ill-conceived and worked out poorly. In this case, it destroyed the country, has been responsible for the deaths of untold thousands of people, has created the pirate problem, and is breeding a new generation of anti-American jihadists.


And nobody in the United States seems to have noticed.

In part, this is because Somalia is an obscure corner of the world. And in part it's because the crucial events took place almost exactly two years ago -- during the Christmas season when most journalists were on vacation and most people weren't following the news.

Two years ago, most of Somalia was under the control of a militia called the Islamic Courts Union. This was, as the name suggests, an Islamist movement that arose out of sharia courts that had begun to provide some measure of local judicial authority amid Somalia's anarchy.

Eventually, the ICU acquired armed forces and was able to seize control of the capital city, Mogadishu, and begin expanding its control over broader and broader swaths of the country.

The ICU was not made up of nice people, and it didn't have a model of governance that was going to win any human-rights awards. What's more, one of the forces it was fighting against was the de jure government, the so-called Transitional Federal Government, a ragtag and essentially powerless group that had been put together some years prior under United Nations auspices.

But the ICU did manage to bring a degree of actual law and order to the territories it supervised, and it wasn't trying to pick any fights with the United States. It was, in short, an improvement over the previous 15 years or so of anarchy.

But during the middle of the decade, the United States military had been building increasingly close ties with Ethiopia, hoping to turn that country into our key regional proxy. And Ethiopia and Somalia have traditionally been rivals.

As the TFG got weaker, it also drew closer to Ethiopia. And when ICU forces attached the TFG's holdout in the south central city of Baidoa on Dec. 20, Ethiopian forces came to the TFG's rescue. By Dec. 24 -- Christmas Eve -- Ethiopian forces announced that they were staging a counterattack aimed at routing the ICU.

The United States supported the operation, both with intelligence and some direct special-forces engagement and also diplomatically, which is crucially important since U.S. military assistance was how Ethiopia built their best-in-the-region military force. Before New Year's Eve, Ethiopians were in control of Mogadishu and began an occupation of the country in the name of the TFG.

To those of us who were both paying attention and chastened by the misadventure in Iraq, this looked like a recipe for disaster. Here was a largely Christian country (Ethopia), operating with the support of the United States, trying to occupy a largely Islamic country (Somalia) whose population has historically been at odds with the former.

The inevitable results would be insurgency, death, destruction, anarchy, and the development of a more dangerous strain of Islamism as the United States sent the message that we were the enemy of all Somali Islamists whether or not they had any quarrel with us.

Some conservatives took note of these events to engage in some of their usual short-sighted bloody-mindedness. James Robbins observed in National Review that “Ethiopia is in it to win, nice to see a country in the developing world (or anywhere for that matter) that can take care of business." TNR‘s James Kirchick hailed the Ethiopian invasion as just and the U.S. participation, a worthy counterterrorism strategy.

Of course what actually happened was a downward spiral of insurgency, violence, criminality, piracy, death, destruction, and humanitarian tragedy. Over the summer, the U.N. decided the humanitarian situation was "worse than Darfur." Somalia has the world's highest rate of malnutrition.

Because of the precarious security situation, it's extraordinarily difficult for humanitarian-aid organizations to operate. And because of the dismal record of foreign interventions in Somalia, no foreign countries are interested in intervening to stabilize things.

Of course the United States and the Bush administration are hardly the only blameworthy actors here. But we are blameworthy.

We could have just minded our own business. But instead, in a fit of thoughtlessness, we initiated a policy that nobody in the States paid much attention to and that over a period of years has prompted massive human suffering around the world.

And the Bush administration is continuing to make things worse in its final weeks in office. I can only hope that the incoming Obama administration will spend some time thinking about Somalia and learning not only specific policy lessons but also developing a sense of humility about the damage that can be done when the world's only superpower thrashes around carelessly.