World ignoring Somalia war crimes: rights group

NAIROBI (Reuters) - Mogadishu residents have suffered war crimes by Ethiopian troops, Somali government soldiers and Islamist insurgents in a year of hell "shamefully" ignored by the world, Human Rights Watch charged on Monday.

The group said Ethiopia's army had indiscriminately bombarded highly populated areas, targeted and looted hospitals, and summarily executed civilians.

Somali government forces fighting alongside the Ethiopians failed to warn civilians in combat zones, looted property, impeded aid, and mistreated dozens of detainees, it added.

Islamist-led insurgents had also put civilians at risk by deploying among them, and had committed crimes including burning foes alive, the New York-based rights watchdog said.

"The warring parties have all shown criminal disregard for the well-being of the civilian population of Mogadishu," the group's executive director Ken Roth said in a report titled "Shell-Shocked: Civilians Under Siege in Mogadishu."

"The illegal methods of warfare used by all the warring parties ... (has had a) catastrophic toll on civilians."

The study -- focusing on battles in Mogadishu since Ethiopian-Somali troops ousted militant Islamists at the end of 2006 -- said estimates of civilian deaths ranged from 400 to more than 1,300 in the two worst bouts of fighting.

Another 400,000 civilians had fled the capital.

The Ethiopian and Somali governments dispute those figures and deny rights abuses. Addis Ababa said the report was propaganda for Islamist radicals that distorted Ethiopia's beneficial role in supporting Somalia's interim government.

"As usual, Human Rights Watch is engaged in its now well-known fabrication, and in misinforming the world in unsubstantiated fairy-tales," Bereket Simon, special adviser to Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, told Reuters.

Somalia's government called the HRW charges "baseless". Spokesman Abdi Haji Gobdon said they were based on "wrong impressions of the reality on the ground" from U.N. bodies.

The government's only goal was "to restore sanity" not "massacre its own people," he said.

DARFUR TAKES LIMELIGHT

Human Rights Watch had harsh words, too, for the world's attitude to Somalia. "The U.N. Security Council's indifference to this crisis has only added to the tragedy," Roth said.

He added: "It is a conflict that has been marked by numerous violations of international humanitarian law that have been met with a shameful silence... on the part of key foreign governments and international institutions."

Riven by conflict since the 1991 fall of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre, Somalia has this year failed to galvanize world opinion in the way Darfur, another African hot-spot, has.

While the United Nations and African Union are now creating a 26,000-strong peacekeeping force for Darfur, there appears to be little enthusiasm for such a mission in Somalia.

The AU's intended 8,000-strong force there has stalled with the arrival of just 1,600 soldiers, all from Uganda. Human Rights Watch said even they have done little to protect civilians suffering "serious international crimes".

The AU mission was "constrained by its mandate and was apparently unwilling to act on behalf of civilians during Mogadishu's worst fighting in 15 years," it said.

It said Somalia's humanitarian crisis was now on a par with the early 1990s, in the aftermath of the fall of Barre's regime. A U.S. and U.N. intervention then -- best-known to the world through the film "Black Hawk Down" -- ended in disaster.

HRW estimated Ethiopia had as many as 30,000 troops in Somalia in early 2007, while the Somali government counted 5,000 fighters, and the insurgents 500 to 700 hardcore combatants in the main Shabab (youth) wing.

HRW criticized Ethiopia's military, particularly its shelling of neighborhoods to flush out insurgents, saying: "The deliberate nature ... suggests the commission of war crimes."

On the other side, "The insurgency routinely deployed their forces in densely populated civilian areas and often launched mortar rounds in 'hit-and-run' tactics that placed civilians at unnecessary risk," the report said.

(Additional reporting by Tsegaye Tadesse in Addis Ababa, Guled Mohamed in Mogadishu)