Saturday, August 19, 2006
NAIROBI, Kenya (AFP) – East African defence chiefs expect to have the vanguard of a peacekeeping force for Somalia ready by the end of next month, officials said yesterday, despite fierce objections from powerful Islamists in the chaotic Horn of Africa nation.
Under revised plans for the mission agreed here late on Thursday, the first elements of the nearly 7,000-strong regional force are to assemble in northeast Kenya near the Somali border in late September, the officials said.
However, the proposed deployment was immediately rejected by Somalia’s newly dominant Islamist movement, whose supreme leader vowed to resist the deployment of any foreign troops on Somali soil.
And, it faces numerous other hurdles, not least of which are funding and UN Security Council reluctance to ease a 14-year-old arms embargo to assist the peacekeepers in restoring stability.
Meeting in the Kenyan capital, chiefs of staff and senior military officials from the seven-member Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD) adopted plans for a Somalia force of 6,800 made up of eight battalions.
They also appealed to the cash-strapped African Union, which has endorsed the force but is already struggling to fund its peacekeepers in Sudan’s Darfur region, for $18.5mn to back the mission.
“We agreed that we will deploy eight battalions in Somalia to help in the restoration of peace,” IGAD peacekeeping chief Colonel Peter Marwa told AFP after the Nairobi meeting.
“Uganda and Sudan will send the initial two to assemble in Garissa by the end of September and be ready to move into Somalia,” he said.
From Garissa, a Kenyan border town about 300km east of Nairobi, those troops would be deployed to the Baidoa, the temporary seat of the weak Somali transitional government, he said.
IGAD first agreed to send a peacekeeping force to Somalia two years ago but the plans have been repeatedly frustrated and uncertainty persists over their viability.
In particular, the mission faces vehement opposition from the Supreme Islamic Council of Somalia (SICS), whose militia seized Mogadishu from warlords in June after months of fighting and have been expanding their territory since.
The rise of the Islamists poses a direct threat to the already limited authority of the government, which has repeatedly sought international military assistance to shore up its authority.
Source: AFP, Aug 19, 2006
