Reports say Ethiopian troops allied with Somali government advancing against Islamist militias.
Ethiopian soldiers were moving beyond the provincial seat of the interim Somali government in Baidoa to the towns of Buur Hakaba and Baledogle, various local residents said. Addis Ababa denies it has soldiers there, while the Somali government, which has little authority beyond Baidoa, said people were confusing its militia because they were wearing uniforms donated from Ethiopia.
Nominally Christian-led Ethiopia, the main power in the Horn of Africa, views the Islamists as “terrorists” and supports Somalia’s interim government. It has not hesitated to send troops in to attack radical Islamic militia in the past.
The Associated Press reports that the troops, who also brought armored vehicles, moved into Somalia to defend their allies, the “virtually powerless [Somali] government” from the threat of the Islamists who now control the capital after defeating warlords who ruled the city for years. Although the two countries are traditionally enemies, Somalia’s nominal president, Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, asked Ethopia for support, in a move that may be “its only chance of curbing the Islamist militia’s increasing power.” But AP says there is a chance the move may backfire.
… Ethiopia’s incursion could also be just the provocation the militia needs to build public support for a guerrilla war.
“We will declare jihad if the Ethiopian government refuses to withdraw their troops from Somalia,” a top Islamist official, Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed, told the Associated Press.
The BBC reports that its African analyst, Martin Plaut, says the decision to ask Ethopia for help puts the future of the transitional US-backed government in question.
Far from buttressing the administration, he says it may be the final blow to its credibility. Many [Somali] MPs will not wish to serve in what will be seen as a puppet government, and observers believe they may leave Baidoa [the last city in the country under the control of the transitional government], he says.
BBC provides some background on the stormy relations between the two countries.
SomaliNet, a Canada-based portal site that includes news from Somalia, reports that, for the first time in a decade, hundreds of residents of Mogadishu took to the streets to take part in a “peaceful demonstration” against the presence of Ethiopian troops in their country.
The rally which was called ‘the long peace march’ was organized by officials of [the Union of] Islamic Courts who took control of the capital and other key towns in southern Somalia from US-backed warlords last month.
More than one thousand civilians, some with cars and others on foot went through deserted areas devastated by the civil war in the capital from Hosh village in the southwest to the downtown of the capital. Cheering people were waiving flags and portraits showing the peace signs resumed in the capital after 15 years of gun rule by Somali warlords.
The Toronto Star reports on 11 Somali-Canadians who returned to their native country to be members of the transitional government, including minister for defense Ali Mohamed Hareed.
Abdirizak Jama of Toronto, whose old friends include both Prime Minister Ali Muhammad Ghedi and Hareed, is bracing for the worst. The Islamists, he says, “are either going to kill or capture them. These are radicals and not different from Afghanistan-style government. Their aim is to conquer the whole of East Africa, not just Somalia.”
But Robert Rotberg, director of the intrastate conflict program at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government told the Star that the members of the [transitional] government are “perfectly safe because the Islamist government hasn’t shown any massacre tendencies so far.”
The United Nations News Service reports that the senior UN envoy to Somalia urged both the transitional government and the Islamic Courts to resume the dialogue they started in Sudan last month.
“I appeal to both sides to respect the ceasefire and other provisions of the Khartoum agreement, including their commitment to refrain from any provocations that could lead to an escalation of the situation,” Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s Special Representative for Somalia, Francois Lonseny Fall, said. “The place to deal with differences is at the negotiating table,” he stressed.
The Voice of America reports that US State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said Wednesday the so-called International Contact Group on Somalia will meet again soon to discuss the situation.
Source: The Christian Science Monitor, July 21, 2006
