Africa's `vanished' people in the war on terror

Xan Rice
The Hindu, April 24

Prisoners accused of supporting terrorists in Somalia were secretly transferred from country to country for interrogation outside the boundaries of domestic or international law.

FATMA AHMED Chande was cold. It was 3 a.m. and raining. The 25-year-old Tanzanian woman was kneeling on the taxiway at Nairobi's international airport. Headlights from a convoy of police vehicles punched holes in the darkness. She saw a group of blindfolded men being led towards a plane. She recognised some of the shackled women and children who followed them.

A policeman jerked Ms. Ahmed's scarf over her eyes. He tied her hands behind her back with a pair of plastic handcuffs that cut into her wrists. It was the same man who had threatened to kill her if she did not admit that her husband had supported Al-Qaeda terrorists in Somalia. "This is it," she thought. "I am going to die."

The quiet 25-year-old from Moshi, at the base of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, did not die in the early hours of January 27. But the ordeal that had begun when she was arrested at Kenya's northern border three weeks before while fleeing the war in Somalia was far from over.

Bundled aboard African Express flight AXK-527 she was about to become part of the first mass "renditions" in Africa, where prisoners accused of supporting terrorists in Somalia were secretly transferred from country to country for interrogation outside the boundaries of domestic or international law.

Along with at least 85 others from 20 countries, she was flown back to Somalia — a war zone with no effective government or law — and on to Ethiopia. There, American intelligence agents joined the interrogations — photographing and taking DNA samples, even from the children.

On April 7, three months after her arrest, Ms. Ahmed was released. Salim Awadh Salim, her husband and father of her unborn baby, is still in detention. So, too, are 78 of the other passengers aboard the three secret rendition flights. At least 18 are children under 15.

Recuperating at her parents' house in Moshi, Ms. Ahmed made her allegations to The Guardian in the hope that it would pressure Ethiopia into releasing her husband and the other prisoners. She described how she had married in 2000 and moved to the Kenyan coastal town of Mombasa, where her husband ran a mobile phone repair shop. When his business soured last year, he decided to try his luck in the Somali capital Mogadishu, where a loose coalition of clan-based courts had established law and order for the first time since 1991. She joined him in August.

War was brewing. Ethiopia, backed by the U.S., accused the Somali Council of Islamic Courts (SCIC) of links to Al-Qaeda. As Ethiopian troops pushed towards Mogadishu in late December, the couple joined thousands of people fleeing south by road.

They joined two Swahili-speaking women who were also trying to reach Kenya. Halima Badroudine had three young children. Fatma Ahmed Abdulrahman had a son aged about six. "They told us that their husbands were Somalis who had stayed behind in Mogadishu," said Ms. Ahmed.

Complex truth

The truth was more complicated. Ms. Badroudine is married to Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, a Comorian; Ms. Abdulrahman to a Kenyan called Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan. Both men are Al-Qaeda members accused of prominent roles in the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. When the group crossed into Kenya at Kiunga, on Somalia's southern tip, Ms. Ahmed thought she was safe.

But Kenyan anti-terror police identified and detained Ms. Badroudine and Ms. Abdulrahman. The problem for Ms. Ahmed and her husband, and dozens of others detained at the border at the same time, was that they too were presumed "guilty" of supporting the Islamists.

They were separated and repeatedly interrogated. After 10 days, Ms. Ahmed was flown to Nairobi. The aggressive questioning continued.

One Kenyan interrogator asked if she was willing to separate from Salim.

When she said no, he beat his fist on the table. "He wanted to make me admit that my husband was a member of Al-Qaeda," she said. "He said he would strangle me if I did not tell the truth."

She insists Salim had never had close contact with the SCIC in Mogadishu — or with Al-Qaeda members anywhere.

Though she had her Tanzanian passport with her, the police refused to acknowledge her nationality. Her husband, who had since also been flown to Nairobi, had his Kenyan passport and birth certificate, but was also documented as an "illegal immigrant."

Pressure was building on the Kenyan government to lay formal charges or release the prisoners. Kenya's Muslim Human Rights Forum filed an application to force the government to produce them in court. Instead, it produced three flight manifests.

The first two were African Express charters to Mogadishu on January 20 and 27, one showing Ms. Ahmed and her husband among the passengers. A third, operated by Blue Bird Aviation, had flown to Baidoa, Somalia's temporary capital, on February 10.

In Mogadishu, where insurgents were already beginning to ambush Ethiopian troops, Ms. Ahmed was held in a tiny cell with about 20 other women and children, including a Swede, a Sudanese, and a pregnant Yemeni. After nine days, they were flown to Addis Ababa.

On April 7, Ms. Ahmed was put on a flight to Kilimanjaro. Her escort promised that her husband and the others would be released with a week. It has now been 16 days. —

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006