SOMALI NATIONAL REGIONAL STATE

Jail Ogaden, known officially as Jigjiga Central Prison, is a large compound located in the middle of a residential area in Jigjiga, the capital city of Somali Regional State. It was largely hidden from public view in the 2010s until it was liberated during the political reform process of 2018. Notorious for the human rights abuses of thousands of women and men suspected of affiliation with the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF), the prison was run by the fearsome Liyu (‘Special’) Police, which took orders from the regional authorities, with allegations that the then authorities themselves sometimes took part in torturing victims. Human rights reports indicate widespread violence committed against prisoners who usually were not put on trial or convicted of any crime.

A team of statement takers from Setaweet Movement was provided with the opportunity to visit Jail Ogaden in February 2025. Jail Ogaden, which neighbors another compound that still operates as a prison, is now used to store food items and as a barrack for the prison guards, with some plans to turn it into a museum. A placeholder plaque has been placed at the center of the compound in anticipation of criminal prosecution, truth-seeking, reparations, and memorialization - the pillars of Transitional Justice.

Once we entered the sprawling compound, we were met by a former inmate who now works as a guard in the compound who agreed to show us around. He was a five-time occupant of a cell that looked large enough for five men at most but which he told us at times held up to thirty. Our guide also explained that the deep pit under our feet once held a number of prisoners who were served, from above ground, human feces as food.

Further afield, we saw a large water container that we had heard described in many interviews. Women as well as men were repeatedly dunked into cold water in this large container by way of torture, while women former prisoners had spoken of a large pit dug into the soil of the compound where they were made to sit on hot coals. Close by lies the cages where a hyena and a leopard had been kept in cages to terrify prisoners. The animals are long gone, but a commemorative photo sits atop their former home.

At one end of the prison complex lies the women’s section of Jail Ogaden which lets in light from the grill windows. Paper flowers decorate the ceiling, and according to our guard, up to six hundred women were once crammed in the space that is now used to store bags of grain. By all accounts, women at Jail Ogaden faced torture on similar levels to men, and there were no provisions made for their sanitary needs. In addition, many reports indicate widespread sexual violence, intimidation, and harassment suffered by women prisoners. In addition to rape, women survivors of Jail Ogaden shared being forced to perform sexual acts on prison guards, and the indignity of being paraded naked. One woman reported that she had been shown in her nakedness to her father-in-law, a source of great shame for her and her family.

Golchano: A Pathway to Jail Ogaden - Many of the former residents of Jail Ogaden hailed from a town called Golchano, a stronghold of the ONLF. When our team had visited Golchano, located 70 km from Jigjiga a few days prior to our visit to Jail Ogaden, we had been met with a larger group of women than we could interview in one day. Each one told us at length of a terrible time in the early 2010s when the ‘Liyu Police’ had descended into their small town with vengeance, beating women and men severely.

A woman in her 50s showed us her scarred legs where she had been shot at by the Liyu Police, who had also set up a temporary prison where the residents, with no due process, were held for two to three years each and tortured. Many of the Golchano residents that we spoke to were then transferred to Jail Ogaden for further torture. Many of our respondents had spent two to three years at Jail Ogaden, making their way home to Golchano when released as arbitrarily as they had been arrested.

Justice Delayed is justice denied - Abdi Mohammed Omar, commonly known as Abdi Iley, the former President of Somali Region, was arrested in 2018, charged with inciting violence and for gross human rights violations in the region that he led since 2010. He was, however, released from prison in March 2024, ‘in the interest of the public good.’ In a report from 2023, Ahmed Ibrahim, the founder of OVS, a victims and survivors’ group, stated that some of the law enforcement members that his team encounters in their present work were once their torturers at Jail Ogaden who now try to deter the pursuit of justice. Similarly, women we interviewed in Jigjiga spoke of seeing their former rapists from a distance. One survivor was told by her former torturer, 'what I did to you then, I could do again.'