Britain and the bloodshed in Somalia

Since people cannot reconcile with each other, it is best to forcefully expel [them] from the city... You have seen what happened in the last onslaught. Whoever has survived that will be exterminated in the one to follow."

The scene is Mogadishu, capital of Somalia. The man talking in a speech broadcast on radio 12 months ago is Salad Ali Jalle, former minister in the current Somali government.

In the year since Jalle's speech, roughly 7,000 civilians have been killed in city battles between pro-government forces and Islamist insurgents.

Nearly a million have fled the military 'onslaughts', ending up in camps stalked by hunger and sickness. On a recent visit to Mogadishu, witnesses told me they blamed both the insurgents and the government for the suffering.

I have seen the effects of the conflict on civilians: victims with limbs and guts blown

out by explosions; a makeshift famine ward full of skeletal babies; camps extending to the desert horizon; heavy gunfire day and night - and rubble-filled streets where government forces beat and pillage civilians.

Incredibly, the government side, which still includes men like Jalle, enjoys extremely close links with Britain. British taxpayers' money goes towards paying their salaries.

Leading figures in the regime are British or EU passport holders. Some have homes in Britain and return regularly to visit their families here. The President, Abdullahi Yusuf (left), often comes for medical check-ups in London, where his life was saved by a liver transplant from a British donor.

Yet the president stands accused of overseeing the indiscriminate bombardment of civilian districts where insurgents lurked. "Any place from which a bullet is fired, we will bombard it, regardless of whoever is there," he vowed in a broadcast days before one of the 'onslaughts' his deputy Jalle promised. Hundreds were later killed.

Another key figure in the leadership - who has a house in Leicester - commands intelligence forces alleged to