Reuters’ headline said it all: “Supreme Court: no immunity for ex-Somali official”. The Supreme Court in question is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in that country. The ex-Somali official is Mohamed Ali Samatar, a man who for two decades (1969-1991) held so many of the top positions in the military dictatorship that ruled Somalia (minister of defense, prime minister, vice-president) that by the time the regime collapsed the only top position he had not occupied was the presidency itself. That man, Gen. Mohamed Ali Samatar, who once bragged that he gave the orders for the savage aerial bombardment of Hargeysa is now finding that a major pillar of his legal defense had been crushed and that the day of reckoning is getting closer. The defense that he had been using was the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, but as “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 wheels of justice have surely been slow, and it has taken too long to get to this point, but Samatar’s living victims are smelling justice in the air. This is a victory not only for Samatar’s victims but all the victims of those who abuse their power. The Supreme Court ruling is not the only recent defeat for Samatar and his supporters either, for they had also suffered another less publicized defeat in April when Professor Abukar Hassan Ahmed filed a court case in the United States against the former Somali army Colonel Abdi Aden Magan who now lives in Ohio. The court case accuses Colonel Abdi Aden Magan who was the investigations chief of the National Security Service of Somalia of having authorized the torture of Professor Abukar Hassan Ahmed. The reason this case is a defeat of Samatar’s supporters is that it blows away two of the arguments they often used to defend Samatar. The first argument is that Samatar was singled out because he belongs to an oppressed clan. Since Colonel Abdi Aden Magan is not a member of an oppressed clan, and since a case was brought against him, this shows that Samatar is not being targeted because of his clan but because of what he did. The second argument that Samatar’s defenders use is why Samatar is the only Somali official to be prosecuted for crimes committed when he was in office. Samatar’s supporters can no longer use this argument, because now he has company, and is not the only one who is being prosecuted, and hopefully the prosecution of many more war criminals will follow. Indeed, justice in the air.






























 

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