Human Rights Reporting, Surveillance & Censorship in the "War on Terror" in Africa
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:18
But now we are ready to start the talk of Jennifer Scholte.
00:22
She is a social scientist and human rights researcher, and has served as a consultant to the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, Tactical Tech, or Engage Media, amongst others. She will be talking about human rights reporting today. Welcome, Jennifer. Thank you. So for those who are curious, this map shows models and inventory of surveillance and weaponized drones
00:45
of the U.S. military flown out of Djibouti, Ethiopia, and Kenya, and from aircraft carriers at sea. Before we begin, though, I should tell you that I am the researcher in the description for this talk, whose findings with Somalis in Ethiopia had been repressed.
01:03
I will share for the first time publicly today what was censored from my research, how it was repressed, what the implications are, and how further investigative work has enabled me to connect the dots, revealing a larger political picture than I had known while I was working in Ethiopia.
01:22
I discovered that surveillance and censorship, I experienced, was not only part of a history of surveillance and repression in Ethiopia, but that it also connected with a larger pattern of surveillance and censorship in the Horn of Africa, involving regional U.S. allies such as Ethiopia, Kenya, and Djibouti, in service of an information campaign for the War on Terror in Africa.
01:46
Throughout this talk, I would like you to keep in mind a 12-year-old Somali girl, let's call her Ayan, in a refugee camp in Ethiopia just over the Somali border. When I met her a few years ago in her makeshift shelter of branches with rags and tarpaulins
02:01
stretched over as a patchwork roof held down by twine from the dry, hot wind, she sat on the ground on a plastic woven mat, silently, and her aunt sat with her. She said Ayan had been barely able to speak since fleeing Mogadishu. Her father had been slaughtered in front of her eyes.
02:21
Armed men raped her mother, and she soon died afterward. Her aunt said she felt Ayan was terrified to leave the shelter, even to fetch water, or go to a school in the camp, fearing that she would be brutally assaulted like her mother, or assassinated at close range like her father.
02:40
Everyone had heard stories of adolescent girls gone missing from the camps, and no one knew whether they were alive or dead. Al-Shabaab fighters, Ethiopian military, paramilitary and security forces, police, and myriad local and foreign men rove along the roads and hills surrounding the camps near the Somali border. Some of these foreign men include American special forces, soldiers, contractors, and CIA.
03:06
They also include, allegedly, fixers working for Saudi men in search of young Somali girls for weekend marriages. Many Somali refugee girls I spoke with had survived severe traumas and catastrophic loss,
03:21
and lacked fundamental support and options to recover and rebuild their lives after fleeing to the camps, where they faced ongoing risks of attacks and abductions. I've been working as a researcher on human rights issues involving women's and girls' rights for over a decade. I've worked with refugee adolescents from 18 conflict-affected countries
03:41
that include Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Arguably, adolescent girls surviving war and displacement are among the most vulnerable people on earth. And for Somali, Iraqi, and Afghani girls, in surviving the war on terror, they face a unique pattern of threats
04:03
from diverse and extreme adversaries. So in this presentation, I'm going to share with you some of the results of my ongoing investigative work over the past couple of years since I left Ethiopia with many questions. To start, what was the context in which surveillance and censorship
04:21
of my research in Ethiopia took place? At the time, I did not know, as a U.S. citizen, that the U.S. military had built a large drone base next door in Djibouti. Since soon after September 11, 2001, the U.S. had begun expanding across Africa, a continent where every country, except for Liberia,
04:40
had previously refused to hold a formal U.S. military base. While in Ethiopia, others had warned me how I would be surveilled by Ethiopian intelligence in my work with Somalis. Of course, I had assumed that American CIA operatives would be active in the area, but I did not know that I would be working within a zone of targeted surveillance by CIA and U.S. military intelligence
05:03
as part of war on terror drone operations and proxy wars in the Horn of Africa. This map shows drone bases from 2015, but it does not show the innumerable lily pad or forward operating bases now reported to stretch across Africa
05:20
from north to south and east to west. I will share with you today some facts and stories of how suppression of human rights reporting and the press in Kenya, Ethiopia, and Djibouti connect with the war on terror. These are African countries receiving significant amounts of U.S. foreign military assistance, as well as aid,
05:40
and that are important African trade partners for the U.S. The Kapla Manie Base in Djibouti is the only permanent base of the U.S.-United States-Africa command on the continent. It hosts an estimated 5,000 soldiers and private defense contractors. For the U.S., Djibouti is strategically positioned on the Gulf of Aden between the Horn of Africa and the Middle East.
06:03
A significant proportion of the world's commercial shipping trade passes between the Suez Canal through the Red Sea and on through the Gulf of Aden. It's also a channel of fiber optic cables for Internet connectivity required for commercial purposes, as well as for military and intelligence purposes for U.S.-Africom.
06:22
Note that U.S.-Africom includes the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, the Combined Joint Task Force for the Horn of Africa, and the Joint Special Operations Command. I'll let the U.S. Navy introduce you to Camp Le Manie and its mission.
06:47
Welcome to Camp Le Manie Djibouti, the only U.S. military facility on the continent of Africa. There are over 2,500 personnel working to support a variety of dynamic missions around the clock every day of the year.
07:01
At Camp Le Manie, my mission is to provide structural support on base and throughout the Horn of Africa.
07:28
To provide services to MWR. To ensure quality of life here in the base remains outstanding.
07:45
My mission here in Camp Le Manie is to provide security for all operational forces in the AOR.
08:12
Operational and logistical support for a coalition of U.S. and international partners is what we do. Everybody plays a part to help build safety, security,
08:21
and stability in the Horn of Africa, one mission at a time. It's worth taking a look at the evolution of U.S.-Africom's mission statement since George Bush Jr. announced the Djibouti Base in 2007.
08:45
It's not just formally recognized bases, but lily pad forward operating bases, local airstrips and airports, refueling stations that the U.S. military uses across Africa. U.S. soldiers and contractors are tasked with humanitarian projects
09:00
to win hearts and minds, stabilizing countries like Somalia and Yemen, security cooperation with African police, training to African military and security forces, counter-terrorism operations, drone-targeted assassinations of suspected terrorists tracking mobile phone SIM card metadata, and projects for de-radicalization and countering violent extremism.
09:27
A post-September 11, 2001 U.S. Foreign Internal Defense Tactics Techniques and Procedures for Special Forces Manual says that official U.S. Special Forces policy directly advocates pervasive surveillance,
09:41
censorship, press control, concealing human rights abuses from journalists, and extensive use of propaganda to make these and other population and resource control measures palatable. A 2013 Pentagon study revealed a U.S. shadow war in the Horn of Africa involving Kenya, Ethiopia, and Djibouti, and also Yemen.
10:03
U.S. military strategy in the 21st century relies on intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions to guide, kill, capture operations in its drone wars in Somalia and Yemen and proxy wars in the region. Through combining signals intelligence and human intelligence, gathered by personnel working in numerous small footprint operations
10:22
with the Djibouti base as the largest hub of activity. The U.S. drone wars in Africa, as well as in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, and other locations, are shaped by new U.S. military concepts through a doctrine pioneered by the Department of Defense in the 90s as the early days of the Internet advanced.
10:42
It involves coordinating across what's called C4ISR, command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, to create a system of systems through a global information grid. Network-centric warfare aims to translate information advantage into competitive advantage through computer networking of geographically dispersed forces.
11:03
It's driven by a few other key concepts, such as distributed responsibility. It's difficult to prove specifically which information are packets of data or whose orders directly shape a drone operator's find, fix, and finish cycle for each targeted drone killing, making attribution very difficult.
11:23
Power to the edge is the theory that the 21st century military environments are too complex for one individual, organization, branch of the military to understand them. There is secrecy that hides within this complexity, though, as has been said. Such as through covert ops of the Joint Special Operations Command.
11:42
Full spectrum dominance is another concept. It's the ability to dominate a battlefield from peace operations through overt use of military power, rooted in advantages of information superiority. It uses what's called the 3D approach, diplomacy, development, and defense, or 4D if you add data.
12:02
Humanitarians and human rights researchers, such as myself, can become interesting signals intelligence and human intelligence targets as we collect useful information to intelligence agencies in our work with politicized populations whom journalists cannot often access. Of course, it's without our consent.
12:21
We've started to hear in the press personal stories of what it feels like to be hunted by drones. What is it like to encounter the U.S. military to a day-to-day person in Djibouti, Ethiopia, or Kenya? Or to a child in Djibouti, or in Ethiopia?
12:41
Or those in the Oromia region in Ethiopia, which has been in the news recently concerning abuses by government security forces that have been trained by U.S. military? What image does the U.S. military seek to project in the Horn of Africa? Winning hearts and minds as a slogan goes back at least to the American war in Vietnam.
13:04
U.S. military have indeed been interacting with children in Ethiopia. Please remember this town, Deira Dawa. I'll come back to it. First, let's talk about Kenya, though. Investigative journalism on U.S. involvement in training of Kenyan military and police has been repressed.
13:21
Journalists who investigated the West Gate Mall terrorist attacks and Kenyan police extrajudicial killings have been warned not to report on U.S. military activities and have been surveilled and threatened.
13:42
For the first time, members of Kenya's death squad speak publicly about assassinating suspects. Kenya's counter-terrorism strategy is edging the country into conflict,
14:04
creating a generation of angry and alienated Muslims. They are becoming a threat to global security, so do the elimination. Al Jazeera has been given confidential documents
14:21
revealing the intelligence that drives this extrajudicial killing program. Intelligence that may have been supplied by Western security agencies. Once they give us the information, tomorrow is no longer there. The report that you gave us has been worked on.
14:41
Al Jazeera investigates whether global powers are conducting a proxy war in Africa using a rulebook from Israel. A part of the prevention sometimes is to kill the terrorists before trying. President Kenyatta has already faced charges of crimes against humanity
15:01
at the International Criminal Court. He could soon find himself in the dock again, this time for ordering the killing of Muslim clerics. Latin section was planned in Nalabi by very top high Latin police officers and government officials.
15:25
The journalists who investigated Kenya's killing squads have been threatened and warned by top Kenyan media houses not to cover U.S. activities in Kenya and not to report on the war on terror. We're seeing among security forces in Kenya and Ethiopia a pattern of abuses
15:43
similar to those of killing squad tactics from U.S. covert operations in Iraq, El Salvador, and Vietnam. In 2010, Human Rights Watch researchers in Kenya investigated allegations of Kenyan police at the Somali border using excessive force, arbitrary detention, threats of deportation, extortion,
16:03
and even rapes of Somali refugees. Complex power asymmetries in U.S. proxy wars in Africa are coming to light as Kenyan and Ethiopian security forces trained by the U.S. military are committing rights abuses against local people and refugees.
16:22
When I was in Ethiopia, you can catch this video another time, when I was in Ethiopia, my driver in Addis told me he was a former investigative journalist. He had left journalism as he had received death threats to himself and his family. He warned me repeatedly not to talk about sensitive issues or criticize the Ethiopian government, even in his car,
16:42
sure that his car was bugged and the mobile phones could record and transmit our conversations. He didn't even want me to tell him stories for fear that I could put him at risk by being seen as even listening to me. It's worth noting Ethiopia may be called a former Stasi state that received decades of military and intelligence assistance from East Germany.
17:05
The Ethiopian government may be seen as still using tactics of fear and repression, having been advised by Stasi consultants. The government has used the 2009 anti-terrorism proclamation to suppress freedom of expression through detention of journalists and protracted trials.
17:23
Many have fled the country due to harassment, intimidation and politically motivated criminal charges. Another human rights researcher commented to me confidentially, government people are not reducing trafficking in the country because they are involved in the business and the government is not concerned about violations of their own security forces,
17:43
by their own security forces. If you try to research trafficking, there will be surveillance. They will put their spies following you. They dedicate a lot of resources to surveillance. In fact, German surveillance technology company Trovacore played a central role in expanding Ethiopian government communications surveillance capacities
18:02
according to a joint investigation by Privacy International and Netspolitik. Trovacore was doing business in Ethiopia while I was there a few years ago. Journalists and activists, average citizens in Ethiopia, widely assume that their communications are extensively monitored. Phone records and transcripts have been used to extract confessions under torture,
18:23
according to Human Rights Watch. The Information Network Security Agency, created in 2011, is alleged to be the agency responsible for using offensive malware from Italy-based hacking team in 2013 and 2014 to target journalists, again according to Privacy International and Netspolitik's research.
18:43
This map shows where the Ethiopian refugee camps are at the Somali border, where I did research with adolescent girls. And while that map shows how the camps are well within, what this map shows are transit ranges for US and NATO signals intelligence used to guide drone strikes. People reside in the Jijiga area camps in the east of Ethiopia,
19:04
under the gaze of US drones, while also being surveilled by Ethiopian intelligence, and with Ethiopian military, Al-Shabaab, US military and contractors, and other fighting factions roving the same roads and hills where refugees must walk.
19:21
Ethiopian soldiers have been trained by the US to carry out covert US counter-terrorism operations. This photo shows the US Navy giving advanced tactical weapons training to an Ethiopian soldier. Reports are emerging that the Ethiopian Liu police, special police forces, are using US military tactics to put down insurgent and terrorist forces,
19:43
despite that in Ethiopia the Oromo and Somali areas have been contested under land rights issues for decades, long before their protests became framed as terrorism under Ethiopia's 2009 anti-terrorism proclamation. This photo from the Jijiga area is also where these men rove,
20:01
as I said, on the same roads and hills, where Somali refugee women and girls walk to gather firewood for cooking food rations and must look for a way to earn money. Whose story matters? Let's see what Somali refugee girls had to say. Like Somali girls trying to get on with their education
20:21
and transition to adulthood while in the camps, some Somali refugee girls are doing okay, helped by humanitarian aid organizations having fled to the camps, many from Mogadishu, some are in Ethiopia or Kenya with family members, some go to school and aspire to become doctors, IT professionals, physicists.
20:42
Some Somali girls I met called themselves modern because they play football in public, defying norms, conscribing how girls should behave. This is a Somali girl, age 16, who worked as a domestic servant. US Marines had rescued her at sea. She told me, after five, six days at sea, our boat capsized
21:01
and American military ships saved us and took us to Djibouti. US Marines held me in Djibouti for two months. Then I was sent by plane to Addis and then by ground transportation to a refugee camp. An NGO gave me a blanket and a mat to sleep on. The girl explained to me that she is unaccompanied, alone,
21:20
and only survives by working for a family. The only pathways that any girl could explain to me to income were domestic work and sex work, which actually constitutes child trafficking and paid rape of underage girls whose basic rights are being denied them. I used a research method called PhotoVoice.
21:41
I gave several Somali refugee girls disposable cameras. They hid them under their dresses. I asked them to document what they liked in the camps and what they did not like there, as girls. They explained to me how dark and dangerous it is at night in the camps. Girls avoid fetching water or going to the latrines after dark.
22:01
Can we turn on the light a little bit? Can people see this? Thank you. They explained unaccompanied girls who live with other families are forced to sleep in inappropriate places and are raped or killed. Sometimes they sleep outside. No one cares. Especially young girls who don't have a family to take care of them.
22:23
To the right of the red arrow on this photo is a refugee girl in a UN-managed camp sleeping outside in a burlap sack that had been used to transport cat or chaat, a methamphetamine-like leaf that mostly men chew throughout the day. Many men in the camps drink alcohol in the evening
22:43
to calm down from chewing cat. Girls complained how drunken men harass and assault them in the evenings. I interviewed 86 Somali girls, ages 10 to 16, both those who do and don't attend school. Adults corroborated stories of rights violations against girls.
23:02
Staff of NGOs feared getting kicked out of the camps by the Ethiopian government if seen to be criticizing the Ethiopian Administration for Refugee and Retreaty Affairs. Many took risks to entrust me with their stories, perhaps hoping that they might reach a wider audience of people who could do something about this situation.
23:22
For protection and security, I relied on analog counter-surveillance tactics, it's what I knew at the time, to keep conversations and handwritten interview notes as confidential and hidden away as possible. I compartmentalized information and sharply limited who knew my itinerary. I stashed sections of handwritten notes in secret places in my clothes and travel bags.
23:43
I waited to type up notes until after I left Ethiopia, as at the time I did not know how to encrypt files or hard drives, or other ways to secure sensitive material digitally. I also never hand-wrote or typed up a list of the names of people I spoke with,
24:00
so that if someone asked, they could not get such a list from me or anyone. UNHCR Ethiopia did later demand a written list from me, which I did not provide them, as I had made sure that such a list did not exist. Another research method that I used is called safety mapping and storytelling, which involved girls drawing their conception of the camp,
24:22
where they go, what they like and don't like, and then red Xs to show places where they feel unsafe. The Ethiopian government tried to force me to be escorted by one of their workers, a spy, in the camps and in my interviews for my protection, they said. I asked for a woman escort or spy when they presented me with an Ethiopian highlander man
24:45
who looked googly-eyed and hyper on cat, the methamphetamine leaf that men chew. I did end up with a woman government worker who it seemed I managed to bore by letting the first group of girls draw for over an hour quietly.
25:00
She eventually left me alone before I started the storytelling part of this child-friendly research method. Maybe she thought that I was doing an arts and crafts activity with the girls instead of serious research. Here are some examples of the maps that girls drew of the camps. They explained the maps to me with stories. Each red mark signified places where girls had been harassed, beaten, attacked or abducted.
25:37
One girl told me this story.
25:47
Most girls don't report rapes. They don't trust the local authorities. The Ethiopian government and UN were failing girls in providing their basic needs and protection.
26:01
I know that resources can be scarce, but surely the UN and refugee host countries can do better to protect children and adolescents. Allegations of sex trafficking with Americans and Saudis involved, as clients for prostitution, came from young and adult sources both.
26:20
Interviews revealed reports of sex trafficking from the camps to and through nearby towns such as Dira Dawa, where the US military had done humanitarian projects. An NGO worker said there had been a clustering of rape cases among refugee girls ages 13 to 14. NGOs do give training initiatives on prevention, often with protecting adolescent girls in mind.
26:44
Censorship is rarely one overt action. It comes as a series of events. In the case of my research in Ethiopia, it was a combination of censorship and self-censorship of staff of NGOs, the UN and the Ethiopian government refugee agency before, during and after my interviews in the camps at the Somali border.
27:05
Findings had been repressed through verbal pressure and warnings, physical surveillance, self-censorship, the UNHCR Ethiopia editorial review two and three times. UN demands to remove sections and power imbalances in working relationships between organizations.
27:22
And this was all in context of Ethiopia, as among the world's top ten censorship offenders, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists in 2015. What was censored concerned criticism of the Ethiopian government, the types of perpetrators and the allegations that the state refugee agency was not systematically or immediately registering
27:44
Somali girls as refugees, which placed them in an extremely vulnerable situation where their rights were violated with impunity. Why was it so important to censor research on girls' rights in Ethiopian camps? Was it out of fear of criticizing the UN or the Ethiopian government
28:02
or angering illicit traffickers? Or was it because the findings perhaps were embarrassing to U.S. AFRICOM and could possibly question the legitimacy of the U.S. military in Africa? In 2013, U.S. soldiers in Ethiopia were caught sex trafficking girls,
28:21
but it was not reported publicly until late last year. Deira Dawa, which I mentioned earlier, is within reach of the Jadiga camps where I had been working by just a few hours. Military documents obtained by a journalist showed that soldiers had been warned that there were issues with human trafficking in Deira Dawa, and many migrants end up stranded there.
28:41
A U.S. military captain told soldiers not to engage in using prostitutes and that part of the mission is a positive projection of America. One sergeant had commented that several of the women referring to the prostitutes were younger than his daughter. Military documents showed a lieutenant said that there had been ringleaders
29:02
who told soldiers what to say and how to stay out of trouble. Government records showed that before and after a human trafficking training, military investigators based out of Germany found probable cause that nine of the 19 members of the military detachment had sex with prostitutes
29:21
either at an off-base residence in Djibouti or a hotel in Deira Dawa, Ethiopia. A soldier who raised concerns to his superiors highlighted that the prostitutes were taken to a sergeant's room where a secure communication system was kept and secret documents had been stored as well as weapons. Military investigation may have been triggered over the possibility
29:43
of security breaches of classified information and computers. In my interviews, people had told me to follow the trucking routes between nearby towns and to Djibouti. In fact, every Trafficking in Persons report for Djibouti from its first in 2006 to its latest in 2015
30:01
cites the Ethiopia-Djibouti Trucking Corridor. These are trucking routes the U.S. military have used from their bases in Ethiopia and Djibouti. The route passes through rural areas by an orphanage and by refugee camps over the border on the way to Djibouti City. Traffickers, merchants, migrants, tourists, and military all use these roads.
30:24
Reports revealed roadside brothels along the trucking routes and hotels in Djibouti as places foreign soldiers frequent for commercial sex. A Djiboutian Red Cross explained that a generalized epidemic of HIV and AIDS in Djibouti was being driven by several factors,
30:41
including the presence of naval and military bases with soldiers with large incomes. It reported neighboring instability in Ethiopia and Somalia led to migrant women and girls being most affected in pockets of concentration of the epidemic. So I'm 26 minutes in.
31:04
We started late. I'll wrap up. We have eight more minutes. You need me to wrap up. I'm very sorry, but we want to give people the chance to change between the...
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Yes, of course, of course. Okay, well, it's true that we started late. So in any case, you can... I'll put the slides online. I'll wrap up. I'm not only advocating for legal responses. Humanitarian aid programs need to become more brave in preventing and responding to sex trafficking, not only where men of color perpetrators are concerned,
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but when white, northern, European, and Saudi, and Arabian rich men and the institutions they may represent are involved. It is long past time to end impunity. The situation requires immediate and sustained action, and what I'm asking for includes an independent external investigation into US military and contractor involvement in sex trafficking in Djibouti and Ethiopia,
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capacity development for local services, investigation and prosecution in civilian courts in base hosting countries as well as US courts for American perpetrators, accountability for child sex trafficking involvement, and ending legal immunity for humanitarian, military,
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or private contractor personnel as it perpetuates impunity and undermines any legitimate humanitarian peace or stabilization mission. And for human rights researchers and journalists, please assess your digital, operational, and psychosocial risks to your communication, data, and devices and help mitigate those risks using encryption tools and tactics
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to circumvent electronic surveillance. You can ask me for more information about this. Thank you. If you have evidence you would like to submit for verification and reporting, you can send it anonymously to shahida.org at this address using the TOR anonymous web browser. Thank you very much.