Report Cites Somali Army Atrocities : State Dept. Backs Finding That 5,000 Civilians Were Slain

The State Department, endorsing a startling report about massacres in northern Somalia, said Saturday that it is “greatly concerned” about evidence that the Somali army had murdered at least 5,000 unarmed civilians over 10 months because of their ethnic background.

The report, prepared at the request of the State Department by Robert Gersony, a private consultant, contained convincing detail of the suffering of the people of the Ishaak clan in the civil war now embroiling Somalia.

The report left little doubt that the Somali government of President Mohamed Siad Barre is using brutal force in trying to put down the rebellion of the Somali National Movement, a guerrilla force based in the Ishaak area of northern Somalia, the nation that lies along the Horn of Africa.

Gersony also documented atrocities on the part of the guerrillas, but not on the same scale as those of the Somali army.

Says Abuses Documented

The State Department, which made the report available to the public last week, said it found Gersony’s findings credible. Department spokesman Mark Dillen said the report documented “serious human rights abuses” in northern Somalia.

“Atrocities were perpetrated by both sides,” Dillen said, “but clearly far more by the Somali army.”

In his most shocking account, Gersony, who spent 11 weeks interviewing more than 300 refugees and 40 government and international officials in Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya during March, April and May, described how “at least 500 and perhaps many more Ishaak men were systematically eliminated in Berbera . . . solely because they were Ishaaks.”

Berbera is a port on the Gulf of Aden that, according to an agreement between the American and Somali governments, can be used for military purposes when needed by the United States. But the United States maintains no naval facilities there now.

After a rebel attack on the town of Burao in May, 1988, the report said, the Somali army exacted a cruel revenge on the Ishaak city of Berbera even though it was not a battleground. From May until September, Gersony said, the army “systematically collected large numbers of Ishaak males on the sole basis of their clan association.”

‘Systematic’ Executions

Groups of five to 50 people were taken out of detention every night and never seen again, the report said. Gersony, describing the executions as “systematic, organized and sustained,” quoted several witnesses as saying they had seen “large knives chopped into the neck of the victims.”

Documenting other civilian deaths, the report said Somali soldiers, engaged in battle with the guerrillas, would often attack unarmed civilian villages not far from the battleground. In these rampages, Gersony said, the soldiers, among other incidents, beheaded two boys aged 7 and 1, shot a man reading the Koran in front of a mosque, bayonetted an elderly man searching for water and ordered two women and a man to stand still and then shot them.

Summarizing his account of atrocities throughout northern Somalia, Gersony said: “The Somali armed forces appear to have engaged in a widespread, systematic and extremely violent assault on the unarmed civilian Ishaak population . . . when neither resistance to these actions nor danger to the Somali armed forces was present.”

In addition, the report said, Somali planes and soldiers attacked refugees trying to flee from the battle zones to Ethiopia. This “probably resulted in the deaths of hundreds of asylum-seekers,” Gersony said.

The report also accused the Somali government of torturing and sometimes killing civilian prisoners suspected of supporting the rebels. Gersony, in his interviews, documented cases of severe beating, stabbing, choking, electric shocks and immersion of prisoners in excrement.

At the same time, Gersony accused the Somali National Movement guerrillas of killing at least several hundred or more unarmed civilians near combat zones and of executing 50 or more prisoners after perfunctory courts-martial.

Even more damning, the report documented rebel attacks on refugee camps set up in Somalia for many non-Ishaak Somalis who had fled the Ogaden province of Ethiopia when war broke out there years ago between Ethiopia and Somalia. Gersony said at least 400 unarmed civilian refugees were killed in these raids.

The rebels, according to the report, also adopted the dubious policy of deploying their soldiers, many in civilian dress, in the Ishaak areas of the important northern city of Hargeisa. In a major battle for Hargeisa, the report went on, “civilian deaths resulting in part from this factor may have ascended into the thousands.”

The civil war and the wanton killing of civilians pushed 300,000 to 500,000 refugees into eastern Ethiopia by last January. Hundreds of thousands of other refugees are believed to be camping within Somalia.

The expanding ranks of refugees have seriously strained the resources of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, which administers the Somali camps in both Ethiopia and Somalia.

State Department spokesman Dillen said the new and enormous swelling of refugees “will require financial resources that we and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees do not presently have.”

The Somali civil war has erupted in a country that at one time was looked on as free of the tribal tensions that plague other African nations. For years, in fact, Somalia’s neighbors regarded it as a threatening, tribally homogenous state that wanted to annex those parts of Ethiopia, Kenya and Djibouti heavily populated by Somalis. Yet, even though the Somalis are a single tribe speaking the same language, they are divided into clans, and the war has its roots in a mood of rebellion among many of the Ishaak people.