Tuesday, June 20, 2006
ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia (AP) – Somalia’s President Abdullahi Yusuf was expected at the African Union headquarters Tuesday to push for urgent deployment of peacekeepers to stabilize the Horn of Africa nation, after Islamic militias seized his capital and other strategic towns.
Yusuf is expected to meet AU Commission Chairman Alpha Oumar Konare and pay a courtesy call on Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, Somalia’s Ambassador Abdikarin Farah said Tuesday.
The beleaguered leader is seeking to bolster his weakened transitional government, a day after the United Nations said it will send a security team to meet with the leaders of Islamic militants whose military and political ascendancy threatens to marginalize his administration.
The U.N. initiative is intended to prepare for a similar visit by U.N. humanitarian agencies that want to ramp up aid to the country, Francois Lonseny Fall, the U.N. special representative for Somalia, said Monday.
It also reflects a growing realization within the U.N. that the Islamic militants _ known as the Islamic Courts Union _ are the closest thing Somalia now has to a government after some 15 years as a failed state, officials said at United Nations headquarters in New York. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the subject.
Monday, African and Western diplomats agreed to send experts to study conditions in Somalia before deploying a peacekeeping mission there. It was not immediately clear when the assessment team will go to the Horn of Africa nation, nor how long it may take to assemble a possible peacekeeping mission.
Uganda and Sudan are expected to send the first contingent of peacekeepers to the anarchic nation under the banner of the seven-nation Intergovernmental Authority on Development that leads peace efforts on Somalia.
Monday, there were signs of increasing tension between Somalia’s transitional government, which was powerless to intervene in the recent fighting and has called for peacekeepers, and the Islamic militias, who fiercely oppose outside intervention.
Yusuf said he would only open talks with Islamic Courts after they withdraw militias to Mogadishu, lay down their arms, recognize his administration and accept the transitional constitution.
The leader of Somalia’s Islamic group, Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, on Monday rejected the conditions, adding his group would not open dialogue with the government if it continues to press for peacekeepers to be deployed in Somalia.
Source: AP, June 20, 2006
