MOGADISHU, 17 December 2003 — Some 34 people were killed and 80 wounded, some seriously, in two days of clashes this week between rival clans in central Somalia, elders told AFP yesterday.
“Around 34 people were killed and 80 others were wounded by renewed clashes (on Monday and yesterday) in the central Somali town of Herale,” one elder in the region contacted by radio told AFP.
“The fighting erupted on Monday afternoon and continued until yesterday between Dir and Marehan clans,” said the elder, who asked not to be named for security reasons. The fighting had died down by midday yesterday, even though no official ceasefire had been agreed, the elder added.
Another elder, Muhammad Ibrahim, said the chances of survival for the wounded were minimal and that most of them had been rushed for treatment in Mogadishu and other clinics in the Mudug region.
“Most of the wounded cannot survive because there are no medical facilities near the town and villages where there was fighting,” Ibrahim said, explaining that many people wounded in the previous bouts of fighting had died.
Ahmed Yakubu, a Dir elder, said his clan’s efforts to broker a complete ceasefire and reconciliation were thwarted by the Marehan clansmen, “who prefer to continue animosity and hostility.”
“Our pleas to the Marehan end fighting have been rejected. They (Marehan) prefer to continue fighting. The elders whom we sent to the Marehan villages, where there was no fighting, returned back without any agreement,” he said.
The clashes were the latest in a series of tit for tat confrontations rooted in the April murder of a Marehan elder, allegedly by Dir clansmen. Since October, at least 39 people were killed and more than 63 wounded in clashes between the same clans in Herale.
The heavily inter-married Dir and Marehan clans have lived side by side in Somalia’s Gedo region for several decades without much confrontation.
The Dir are affiliated with the Southern Somalia National Movement faction while the Marehan belong to Somalia National Front, both of which were among the 27 factions that signed a cease-fire agreement in Kenya on October 27, 2002.
The latest round of fighting erupted despite calls by the Kenyan government to all warring factions and clans in Somalia to respect a ceasefire agreement.
Somalia has been without a nationally recognized government and torn apart by factional warfare since the collapse of Siad Barre’s regime in 1991.
An umpteenth reconciliation conference aimed at restoring a national administration in the Horn of Africa country has been going on in neighboring Kenya since October last year.
