Somali peace plans underway
2006-08-18 15:06
Nairobi - East African defence chiefs expect to have the vanguard of a peacekeeping force for Somalia ready by the end of next month, say officials, despite fierce objections from powerful Islamists in the chaotic Horn of Africa nation.
The officials said that under revised plans for the mission agreed here late on Thursday, the first elements of the nearly 7 000-strong regional force were to assemble in northeast Kenya, near the Somali border in late September.
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.
The deployment also faced numerous other hurdles, not least of which were funding and United Nations security council reluctance to ease a 14-year-old arms embargo to assist the peacekeepers in restoring stability to the anarchic Horn of Africa nation.
'We will deploy eight battalions'
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 force of 6 800 made up of eight battalions.
IGAD peacekeeping chief colonel Peter Marwa said: "We agreed that we will deploy eight battalions in Somalia to help in the restoration of peace.
"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 that 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.
Mogadishu seized from warlords
IGAD first agreed to send a peacekeeping force to Somalia two years ago after the formation, but the plans had been repeatedly frustrated and uncertainty persisted over their viability.
In particular, the mission faced vehement opposition from the Supreme Islamic Council of Somalia (SICS), whose militia seized Mogadishu from warlords in June and had been rapidly expanding their territory since.
The rise of the Islamists posed a direct threat to the already limited authority of the government, which had repeatedly sought international military assistance to shore up its authority.
On Friday, SICS supreme leader Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, a hardline cleric accused of ties to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network, renewed the Islamists stance that peacekeepers were unnecessary and would be resisted.
Aweys said: "If troops are sent here while there is no need for them, we will have no choice but to fulfill our right to defend our country from aggression."
He said: "Outsiders can't bring peace to Somalia, 30 countries came here to bring peace and achieved nothing", referring to disastrous military interventions by the United States and the UN in the early 1990s.