At least 21 Somali civilians were killed and 59 wounded in fierce Mogadishu clashes between government forces backed by African Union troops and Islamist insurgents, medics said. 

Somali soldiers on Thursday launched a major counter-offensive to recapture recently lost ground from Islamist insurgents in Mogadishu, sparking a fierce battle that left at least 21 civilians dead.

Newly-trained government forces backed by the African Union mission in Somalia (AMISOM) kicked off their operation early in northwestern Mogadishu, drawing a barrage of retaliatory fire from rebel groups, witnesses said.

The internationally-backed government had lost ground last month when insurgents, mainly from the Al Qaeda-inspired Shebab movement, punched through a strategic frontline and closed in on the presidential compound.

“The Somali government forces advanced on the terrorists’ strongholds this morning,” Colonel Ahmed Ibrahim, a government security official, told AFP.

“They took control of several neighbourhoods which had been held by the rebels and the fighting is still going on. There are several bodies strewn across the streets,” he added.

Medical sources counted at least 21 civilian deaths after the first few hours of fighting but expected the toll to rise, with no immediate information on combatant casualties and several areas impossible to access independently.

“Today’s clashes are very heavy. The artillery and mortar fire exchanged by both sides is reaching distant neighbourhoods,” Ali Muse, head of Mogadishu’s ambulance services, told AFP.

“Our teams have so far collected 16 dead civilians and 59 wounded,” he said. “But the toll is likely to be higher since the fighting is continuing.”

Duniya Ali, an official at Mogadishu’s main Medina hospital, also said that five of the wounded brought in Thursday morning had died of their wounds, among them three children.

This year alone hundreds of civilians have died in the crossfire as a result of both insurgent attacks and retaliatory fire by African Union or government forces.

Thousands have been killed in such incidents over the past three years and hundreds of thousands forced out of the city into crowded camps.

On May 21-22, even as President Sharif Sheikh Ahmed was in Turkey mustering further support for his embattled transitional federal government (TFG), the Shebab and its Hezb al-Islam allies launched a devastating attack in Mogadishu.

They seized large swathes of the Shibis and Bondhere neighbourhoods, moving them within barely more than a stone’s throw of the shrivelling perimetre housing the presidency and other key institutions.

It also gave them a strategic vantage point over Mogadishu port and the ability to disrupt supplies to the government and AMISOM.

AMISOM said at the time that the insurgents had crossed “a red line” and that the rebel advance warranted tough reprisals.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday refused to block a lawsuit against a former prime minister of Somalia over claims that he oversaw killings and torture in his home country. The high court said it will allow lawsuits against Mohamed Ali Samantar to go forward despite his claims of immunity under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act. However, the court warned that the U.S. District Court will have to decide whether Samantar can access other claims of immunity that could stop the trial.

The court’s decision could have broad foreign policy implications. Allowing lawsuits against former foreign officials living in the United States could increase the likelihood that U.S. officials would be sued in overseas courts. A rise in the number of U.S. lawsuits dealing with past actions in foreign countries could also affect the United States’ current ties with those countries.

Omar Jamal, the first secretary of the Somali mission at the United Nations, said the court’s decision could result in “baseless” lawsuits that “probably will jam the courts.”

“The court has spoken, and therefore we have to live with that,” he said in a statement.

Samantar was defence minister and prime minister of Somalia in the 1980s and early 1990s under dictator Siad Barre.

He now lives in Virginia. He is being sued under the Torture Victim Protection Act by Somalis living in the United States who were subjected to persecution in the 1980s. They say Samantar was in charge of military forces that tortured, killed or detained them or members of their families.

A federal judge had thrown out the lawsuits against Samantar, saying he is entitled to diplomatic immunity under the FSIA. That law says “a foreign state shall be immune from the jurisdiction” of federal and state courts in most lawsuits. The federal judge said that protection extends to “an individual acting in his official capacity on behalf of a foreign state.”

The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed, saying that immunity does not extend to individuals, only to foreign states and their agencies.

The high court upheld that ruling.

“There is nothing to suggest we should read ‘foreign state’ …to include an official acting on behalf of the foreign state, and much to indicate that this meaning was not what Congress enacted,” said retiring Justice John Paul Stevens, writing the unanimous judgment for the court. “The text does not foreclose petitioner’s reading, but it supports the view of respondents and the United States that the Act does not address an official’s claim to immunity.”

The court said its decision does not mean that the lawsuit against Samantar automatically goes forward.

“Whether petitioner may be entitled to immunity under the common law, and whether he may have other valid defences to the grave charges against him, are matters to be addressed in the first instance by the District Court on remand,” Stevens said.

As five Somali men stand trial in Rotterdam charged with the attempted hijack of a Dutch Antilles freighter, international criminal lawyer Geert-Jan Knoops spoke to the IJT about solutions to piracy in international criminal law.

By Thijs Bouwknegt

What do you think about the Dutch trial?
It is a unique trial, but it is also legally complicated. How do you actually prove that somebody is a pirate if a person says “well I initially had the intention to hijack a ship but I actually decided to withdraw from my intentions”?

This is the case in the Dutch trial against the five Somalian ‘pirates’ who allegedly tried to hijack, in January 2009, a Dutch Antillean ship. The hijacking didn’t succeed after which the pirates were arrested by Danish marines. And during the trial the pirates said that it was initially their intention to hijack this ship, but they were just fishing and they got problems with their motor and they withdrew from their initial plans. So the prosecution has to prove that this still is a criminal act. And this is not easy.

These men are being tried on the basis of a very old law. Is it still applicable?
The problem is how to enforce the law. Most domestic legal systems in the world will have a provision which includes some type of piracy or hijacking of ships on the high sea.

The problem, however, is that there is no universal system to try alleged pirates. There is no international piracy tribunal. It is left to the domestic systems. We have some international legal treaties on the prevention and suppression of hijacking on the high seas, but there is no obligation on part of the states to vest universal jurisdiction to combat piracy. The problem lies in how you enforce these international treaties which are meant to prevent piracy.

What about an international tribunal?
The Netherlands – with Russia – was one of the supporters of a tribunal, but last year it came out that most members of the United Nations do not support it. Even the solution of setting up a mixed tribunal in Kenya – composed of both international and local judges was rejected in November 2009.

Yet on the other hand – from the perspective of universality and uniformity in how you combat piracy – it would be one of the better solutions than the system as it is now, which basically leaves it to the discretionary powers of states to prosecute alleged pirates or not.

That means that a lot of pirates have to be released because no European state is willing to prosecute. And what do we do with the pirates after the trial? Can they be sent back to Somalia? Can they seek asylum? Nobody knows. That is the reason why a lot of cases are not being brought before the justice systems.

Is there any place for pirates at the International Criminal Court?
Piracy does not fall under the jurisdiction of the ICC, simply because it cannot be connected to the principles of the court, which mainly aims at international or national armed conflicts.

There are also a lot of legal technical problems to bring piracy as an international crime under the jurisdiction of the ICC. The proposal was already rejected last year and there is no chance that it will be included in it’s statute during the Review Conference of the Rome Statute this week.

Is international criminal law a solution to piracy?
No. I am convinced that it is not. As Hillary Clinton said, “the only solution for piracy lies in economic, political and socio-cultural change in Somalia.” There are a lot of fishermen who go into piracy because the fishing grounds around Somalia are being exhausted by professional fishing fleets from all over the world.

The economic and political instability of the country, which give leeway to corruption and the absence of any financial prospects brings people into piracy. Actually, we should not have the illusion that when you convict five Somali pirates here in The Netherlands that this would prevent future piracy. Nobody in Somalia will know about the trial in The Netherlands. The solution thus lies in economic and political change, not in international criminal law.

WASHINGTON – A former Somali prime minister is not protected by sovereign immunity from a lawsuit in the United States for alleged torture and human rights abuses, the Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday.

In a unanimous decision, the high court handed a defeat to Mohamed Ali Samantar, who served as Somalia’s defense minister in the 1980s and then as prime minister from 1987 to 1990.

Justice John Paul Stevens said in the ruling that a U.S. law, the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, protected foreign states and their agencies, but not an official acting on behalf of the state and did not provide Samantar with immunity.

The case had been followed closely for its foreign policy implications. Granting immunity could allow foreign torturers in this country to escape responsibility, human rights groups said.

The lawsuit, seeking financial damages from Mr. Samantar, was filed by a small group of Somalis who said they suffered torture or other abuses in their homeland by soldiers or other government officials under Mr. Samantar’s general command.

The five plaintiffs do not claim that Mr. Samantar personally committed the atrocities or that he was directly involved.

But they said the Somali intelligence agencies and the military police under his command engaged in the killings, rapes and torture, including the use of electric shocks, of civilians.

Mr. Samantar has lived in Virginia since 1997 while some of the plaintiffs are naturalized U.S. citizens. They brought the lawsuit in 2004 under a U.S. law called the Torture Victim Protection Act.

A federal judge dismissed the lawsuit, but a U.S. appeals court reinstated it, ruling the 1976 sovereign immunity law does not apply to individuals. That decision prompted Mr. Samantar to appeal to the Supreme Court.

Mr. Stevens upheld the appeals court’s ruling. He emphasized that the Supreme Court’s decision was narrow, limited only to the reach of the 1976 law and he sent the case back to the judge for more proceedings.

Mr. Stevens said whether Mr. Samantar may be entitled to immunity under the common law, which is based on judicial precedent rather than legislation, and whether Mr. Samantar may have other valid defenses to the charges against him are matters to be decided by the judge.

Somalia has been without central rule since warlords toppled former dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991. A cycle of civil conflicts has ensued. In the latest chapter of Somalia’s bloody recent history, al Qaeda-linked Islamists have been waging an insurgency against a U.N.-backed interim government.

NAIROBI — Agence France-Presse’s Somalia correspondent Mustafa Haji Abdinur has been awarded the CNN Multichoice African Journalist of the Year Award in the Free Press category.

Abdinur, 28, who has been AFP’s Mogadishu-based correspondent since 2006, was among several African journalists recognised at the ceremony in the Ugandan capital Kampala on Saturday.

“Friends, I live in a country whose name has unfortunately become a synonym for lawlessness, where human life is not worth a lot and where press freedom simply does not exist,” said Abdinur.

He was chosen “for his work in Somalia including the ‘Peace Journalism’ initiative which he launched with the help of fellow Somali journalists earlier this year,” organisers said.

The CNN Multichoice Free Press Africa Award has previously been presented to the late Deyda Hydara from Gambia and the imprisoned Eritrean journalist Seyoum Tsehaye Musa Saidykhan.

The CNN African Journalist of the Year Award was founded in 1995 by Edward Boateng and the late Mohamed Amin to recognise and encourage excellence in journalism throughout Africa.

In November 2009, Abdinur won the Committee to Protect Journalists’ (CPJ) International Press Freedom Awards.

The son of famed TV newsman Ted Koppel has reportedly died.

Andrew Koppel, 40, was found early Monday morning and declared dead at 1:30 a.m. in a rundown apartment in Washington Heights, according to The Associated Press.

Koppel was reportedly drinking heavily on Sunday night, the New York Post reports, and was with a man he’d met at a bar in Hell’s Kitchen.

“We took him to the bedroom and laid him down to rest,” said Belinda Caban, who lived at the apartment.

“His complexion wasn’t right. It was pale. I said to call the police,” she said. “When the ambulance came, they said he was dead.”

No one has been charged, and the exact cause of death has not yet been determined.

Koppel, one of Ted Koppel’s four children, is the ex-ABC newsman’s only son.

“The situation for human rights defenders and journalists in Russia is of grave concern to the European public at large,” Van Rompuy said at a briefing following an EU-Russia summit in the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don.

Several rights activists and reporters have been killed in Russia since Medvedev was sworn in as president in May 2008. His predecessor Vladimir Putin’s term was also plagued by such killings.

Russia is ranked as the world’s fourth deadliest country for reporters — after Iraq, the Philippines and Algeria — by the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists.

Many of the human rights activists and reporters killed in Russia have had links to the North Caucasus, a turbulent group of republics along Russia’s southern flank.

Rompuy said he had spoken to Medvedev about the EU’s concerns over “the climate of impunity, in particular in Chechnya and other areas of the North Caucasus.”

But the EU leaders at the briefing with Medvedev voiced no criticism of Russia‘s handling of Monday’s opposition protests during which more than 150 people were detained by police in a forceful crackdown.

(Reporting by Conor Humphries; writing by Guy Faulconbridge; editing by Steve Gutterman)

Germany‘s president, Horst Köhler, resigned without warning today, after intense criticism of remarks in which he suggested military deployments were central to the country’s economic interests.

Köhler’s departure leaves a vacuum that will only add to Angela Merkel‘s growing political woes, amid criticism over a lack of decisive leadership, and a four-year low rating for her government in opinion polls.

Köhler, 67, was accused of advocating a form of “gunboat policy” after saying that a large economic power like Germany, with its significant global trading interests, must be willing to deploy its military abroad.

Though a member of Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU), he has previously managed to stay out of the political fray.

In a radio interview given on his return from a tour of German military bases in Afghanistan earlier this month, Köhler, a former head of the International Monetary Fund, said that the largely pacifist German public was finally coming to terms with the concept that their country could no longer avoid involvement in military missions, which helped “protect our interests, for example, free trade routes, or to prevent regional instability, which might certainly have a negative effect on our trade, jobs and income”.

The remarks were seized upon by the German left, who accused Köhler of supporting a type of “gunboat diplomacy” and of betraying the thousands of German soldiers who are currently stationed in Afghanistan.

Jürgen Trittin, the leader of the Greens, said Köhler’s comments were inconsistent with Germany’s constitution and he accused the president of being a “loose rhetorical cannon”.

Members of Merkel’s centre-right coalition government accused him of a careless choice of words.

Ruprecht Polenz, the CDU’s foreign policy spokesman, said: “It was an unfortunate formulation, to put it mildly”.

Köhler’s office said his comments had been misinterpreted. Even though the radio journalist’s question had been about Afghanistan, the president had not been referring to Afghanistan in his reply, but to the deployment of German military to the Indian Ocean to help keep shipping lanes free of Somalian pirates.

Announcing his resignation at the presidential palace, Bellevue, in Berlin, he appeared flanked by his wife, Eva Luise, and looked ashen-faced and sometimes close to tears.

Köhler said he felt his office had not been afforded the respect it deserved, and expressed his regret “that my comments on an important and difficult question for our nation were able to lead to misunderstandings”.

Köhler’s decision marked the first time in post-war German history that a president has resigned with immediate effect. An election for a new president is due to take place within the next month.

Merkel said she “deeply regretted” Köhler’s resignation, and admitted it had come as a huge surprise to her.

“I tried to persuade him to change his mind, but that wasn’t possible,” she said, adding that Köhler had won the love and respect of the German people largely because of his talent for “thinking outside the box”. She would miss the former banker’s advice over financial issues in particular, especially at a time of economic crisis.

Denis MacShane, the former Europe minister and Labour MP for Rotherham, said Köhler had fallen victim to those who still saw Germany as a “post-1945 dwarf orphan of world politics”.

He added that Köhler had done nothing more than “express the self-evident truth that German military power was now an expression of German national interests”.

South Korea says it has persuaded China and Japan to take part in financial sanctions against North Korea.

It comes in the wake of the sinking of a South Korean naval ship by a North Korean submarine.

In a BBC interview, South Korean Foreign Minister Yu Myung-hwan speculated that the sinking of the Cheonan might have been the result of internal Pyongyang politics.

North Korea has angrily denied any responsibility for the attack.

The North Korean military, Mr Yu said, might have decided to do it in order to distract attention from other problems.

Mr Yu had no criticisms to make of China for failing to condemn North Korea publicly for the sinking of the Cheonan.

On the contrary, he felt that China had been privately helpful and understanding during the three-way summit with South Korea and Japan, which ended on Sunday.

South Korea is hoping to make the regime in Pyongyang pay a heavy price for its actions.

It is invoking UN resolution 1695, passed in 2006, which makes it possible to introduce economic sanctions against North Korea for breaching its international obligations.

The government in Seoul wants all inflows of money to North Korea to be stopped.

If China, which has so far delayed announcing its own findings on the sinking of the Cheonan, does take part in the sanctions, it could make life even harder for President Kim Jong-il’s regime.

Fragile economy

Things are already difficult enough for him. The famine of the past seems mostly to have been dealt with, at least for now, as a result of the government’s decision to allow a quiet measure of free enterprise.