By Louis Charbonneau
Buying a gun in Somaliland
February 13, 2014, United Nations (Reuters) – A confidential UN monitors’ report warns of “systematic abuses” by Somalia’s government, which the monitors say has allowed the diversion of weapons that Somali authorities purchased after the UN Security Council eased an arms embargo on Mogadishu last year.
Some of the arms believed to have been diverted were earmarked for a leader of the al Qaeda-linked Islamist militant group al Shabaab, the monitors said in their report, which was obtained by Reuters.
In its 14-page report to the Security Council’s sanctions committee, the UN Somalia and Eritrea Monitoring Group recommends either restoring the full arms embargo or at least tightening notification and reporting requirements related to arms deliveries.
“The Monitoring Group has identified a number of issues and concerns over current management of weapons and ammunition stockpiles by the Federal Government of Somalia (FGS), which point to high-level and systematic abuses in weapons and ammunition management and distribution,” the report said.
The panel of independent experts tracks compliance with the UN Somalia-Eritrea sanctions regime.
The 15-nation council’s decision to ease Somalia’s decades-old arms embargo last March was a controversial one, although Washington supported the Somali government’s appeals for restrictions to be relaxed to enable it to better arm its security forces to fight al Shabaab.
The new report details difficulties the monitors have had in getting access to weapons stockpiles in Somalia and information about its growing arsenal. It says the government cancelled several inspections of armories that the monitors and UN officials had planned to undertake.
Discrepancies
The monitors describe how parts of shipments of weapons from Uganda and Djibouti, including assault rifles, rocket launchers, grenades and ammunition, “could not be accounted for”. The report also mentioned discrepancies in accounts of what had happened to arms sent from Ethiopia.
“Given the gaps in information … it is impossible to quantify what the scale of diversion of weapons stocks has been,” the report said. “However, the Monitoring Group has obtained other pieces of qualitative evidence that point towards systematic abuses by the (Somali army).”
The Security Council imposed the embargo on Somalia in 1992 to cut the flow of weapons to feuding warlords, who a year earlier had ousted dictator Mohamed Siad Barre and plunged the country into civil war.
Somalia was virtually lawless until 2012, when it held its first vote in 21 years to elect a president and prime minister.
The monitors said they had identified at least two clan-based “centers of gravity” for arms procurement within Somali government structures that were distributing arms to “parallel security forces and clan militias that are not part of the Somali security forces”.
One of those groups is within the Abgaal sub-clan of Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, who last month said he wanted the U.N. Security Council to extend the partial lifting of the embargo when it expires in March because government troops needed more and better equipment to battle al Shabaab.
“A key adviser to the president, from his Abgaal sub-clan, has been involved in planning weapons deliveries to al Shabaab leader Sheikh Yusuf Isse … who is also Abgaal,” the report said.
Mohamud told Reuters in January his government had met all conditions related to the partial lifting of the embargo. “We have been following the instructions of the Security Council and the committee that has been assigned … to monitor,” he said.
Government minister
The report also referred to the role played by a Somali government minister from the Habar Gedir sub-clan in relation to arms purchases from a “foreign government in the Gulf” – a government the report does not identify.
“The Monitoring Group has received credible evidence of un-notified weapons deliveries by air from the Gulf state to Mogadishu during the course of October 2013, which would constitute a direct violation of the arms embargo,” it said.
“Indeed, after delivery, some of the weapons were moved to a private location in Mogadishu,” the monitors said.
The easing of the UN arms embargo has allowed sales of such weapons as automatic assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, but left in place a ban on surface-to-air missiles, large-calibre guns, howitzers, cannons and mortars as well as anti-tank guided weapons, mines and night-vision weapon sights.
“The trends described above demonstrate that the implementation of the (government’s) security policy is being captured by clan and sub-clan politics,” the report said.
“Weapons distribution along clan lines for the prosecution of clan warfare is ultimately reducing the prospect of a cohesive strategy by the (government) against al Shabaab.”
The report said private arms markets had popped up in Mogadishu, where weapons diverted from the army had been sold.
The monitoring group presented eight options for the arms embargo when the current easing expires next month. They range from lifting the embargo altogether to restoring the full embargo and possibly adding new measures.
It recommended either restoring the full embargo or at least keeping it as is and introducing stricter rules on notification and reporting to the UN sanctions committee.
It also suggested the possibility of beefing up the UN mission in Somalia by attaching a verification team to track arms deliveries and stockpiles in Somalia.
Source: Reuters
Israeli indicted in U.S. for smuggling arms to Somalia
June 29, 2010 (Haaretz) — Foreign Ministry and Defense Ministry sources adamantly denied yesterday that they were in any way involved in arms shipments to Somalia.
Spokesmen for both ministries were responding to news of the arrest in the U.S. of Hanoch Miller, an Israeli arms merchant, for allegedly illegal arms sales to Somalia, forging documents, money laundering and violating the UN arms embargo on Somalia.
A Defense Ministry spokesman said there is a ban on arms sales to Somalia and Miller did not have permission to sell arms there, and even if he had asked in Israel he would not have received such permission.
According to the charges brought against Miller at a Florida district court, he was arrested with an unnamed American partner for alleged involvement in the sale of hundreds of AK-47s to the government of Somaliland, a breakaway district in Somalia since 1991. Miller and his American partner allegedly organized arms shipments, which apparently included arms bought in Bosnia, and had planned to fly them from there in cargo planes to Somalia. The indictment also mentions a shipment that was sent from Panama.
The suspect allegedly presented “end user” documents of the defense ministry of Chad. Arms shipments to that African country are not forbidden.
The two were arrested in a sting operation of the U.S. Customs, when one of their contact persons, whose help they sought in organizing the air shipments, turned out to be an undercover Customs agent.
Miller, 53, is an aerospace engineer who served in the Israel Air Force in a unit that designed aircraft. He left the military with the rank of major and worked for a short while in the Israel Aircraft Industries. With two partners he set up Radom Aviation Systems, a company that dealt with the upgrading of aircraft, mostly in the installation of avionics. The company functioned in line with licenses issued by the Defense Ministry, and at times served as a subcontractor for IAI.
One of the last deals of Radom in which Miller was involved was with Chad. The company upgraded Soviet-made Mi-17 helicopters as well as Swiss-made, propeller-driven Pilatus aircraft, used for training but also as combat aircraft against rebels in the country. The deal was valued at $10 million.
Three years ago Miller left Radom and established an independent firm in Yehud, which he said worked on electronic warfare and night vision equipment, but it now appears that he was also involved in firearms.
Even though the indictment does not mention him by name, Joseph O’Toole, a former colonel in the U.S. Army who was arrested in the 1980s for allegedly illegally selling arms to Iran along with Israeli Ari Ben-Menashe, is mentioned in the case. In 1991, O’Toole was exonerated of suspicions against him. Ben-Menashe left Israel and now lives in Canada, having falsely claimed for years that he was a secret adviser of Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir.
Attempts to get a response for this article from Miller failed, and his office assistant disconnected the telephone and refuses to give details on his whereabouts.
The strategic location of the breakaway territory, which borders on the Gulf of Aden and the sea routes of the Indian Ocean from Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and through the Red Sea, have always been important for Israel’s geo-strategic interests. In the past Israel has shown great interest in the countries of the Horn of Africa, and the Mossad had secret links with some countries there.
The significance of the region has become all the more important because of the growing presence of Islamic fundamentalists there, and because it is used as a transit point for the shipments of arms to Hamas, as well as for the training of terrorists.
Source: Haaretz
AU troops in Somalia ‘selling arms’
Somali, Ethiopian and Ugandan forces face UN accusation as deadly clashes continue.
May 24, 2008 (Aljazeera) — UN monitors have accused Ugandan peacekeepers of selling arms to Muslim fighters battling the Somali transitional government and Ethiopian soldiers in Somalia.
The accusation was levelled as at least five people were killed and three others wounded during street battles between troops and fighters in the capital, Mogadishu, on Friday.
The UN monitors’ report, submitted to the Security Council on Thursday, came as the leader of the Islamic Courts’ Union pledged to remove Ethiopian soldiers by force and create an Islamic republic in Somalia.
Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys said UN-sponsored peace talks, which opened in the capital Djibouti last week, were doomed to fail unless Ethiopia first withdrew all its forces.
“The UN is not impartial. We don’t want to pursue this [peace] process,” he said.
“Our plan is to continue the struggle. It is important to expel the enemy from all areas.
“We don’t want a fight to the death. We don’t want to kill all the Ethiopian soldiers. We want to save them. We want them to leave.”
Aweys’ fighters, however, may have reasons to be grateful to the very Ethiopian soldiers they want to expel.
Officials involved
The UN monitoring group said sales of weapons to Islamic courts fighters were made by “prominent officials of the security sectors of government, Ethiopian officers and Ugandan officers of the African Union Mission in Somalia (Amisom)”.
The experts said many of the arms that were sold by peacekeepers came from Somalia’s military.
Amisom has just over 2,500 Ugandan and Burundian troops in Somalia but the deployment falls short of the 8,000 pledged by the pan-African body.
“According to arms traders, the biggest supplier of ammunition to the market are Ethiopian and transitional federal government commanders, who divert boxes officially declared ‘used during combat’,” the report said.
The UN monitoring group accused neighbouring Ethiopia, Yemen and Eritrea of continuously violating the embargo by sending weapons to hostile factions within Somalia.
Somalia’s breakaway northern regions of Puntland and Somaliland have been other entry points for weapons.
‘Covert routes’
Describing the flow of weapons, the UN report said “the routes are more covert, and the weapons reach Somalia either by a large number of small vessels, or through remote locations along the land borders.
“The Somali police force no longer differs from other actors in the armed conflict, despite the fact that many of its members have received training in accordance to international standards.”
The UN monitors further said that the Somali government’s budget, heavily supported by international donors, lacks even the most minimal standards of transparency.
“Some donors expressed discontent that some of the funding provided, despite being marked for civilian and peace-building activities, may have been used for military activities and purchase of military materials,” the report said.
Arms embargo
The UN panel has been in Somalia reviewing a 1992 arms embargo placed on the Horn of African country after fighting broke out following the removal of Mohammed Siad Barre, Somalia’s head of state from 1969 to 1991.
Since 1992, Somali factions have been engaged in low-level conflict, preventing the effective monitoring of the UN arms embargo.
The Security Council has rejected several pleas by Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, the Somali president, to ease the arms ban.
Somali troops, their Ethiopian allies and AU peacekeepers have been routinely targeted by fighters over the past year, worsening security and choking humanitarian operations in the country.
Joint Somali-Ethiopia forces removed the Islamic Courts’ Union from power in southern and central Somalia early last year after six months in rule during which they were accused of links to extremist groups.
Source: Aljazeera
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