Somalia: AU has 'no solution'
2006-06-29 08:39
Addis Ababa - Stung by their inability to end 15 years of conflict in Somalia, African Union leaders prepare to confront the issue with no clear solution except to recite old appeals and re-emphasise the pressing need for stability for the Horn of Africa nation.
Analysts said the rise of the hardline Islamic courts union - controlling a large part of southern Somalia, including the capital - further damaged the 53-member AU's ambition of pacifying trouble spots on the continent.
Despite growing fears of the Somali developments, the leaders meeting at a weekend summit appeared unlikely to endorse any new proposal to try to halt the unrest that had plagued the impoverished country of 10 million since the 1991 toppling of the government of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre.
Deployment of peacekeepers
At the two-day summit in Gambia, African presidents, heads of government and other state representatives were expected to renew calls - which had already been rejected - for a UN arms embargo on Somalia to be relaxed.
They said that move would allow the deployment of peacekeepers from east Africa.
But, with its peacekeeping mission in Sudan's Darfur region already hamstrung by dwindling finances, the prospects for the AU making good on a pledge to send troops to Somalia appeared remote.
The seven-nation, east African Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD), said its plan to send troops to Somalia had stumbled on the arms embargo, but some observers said the real reason for the delay lied in the states' unwillingness to set foot in Somalia.
An AU official said: "The progress of the Somalia issue does not depend on the summit because the decision to deploy troops has already been made."
Embargo 'an obstacle to a deployment'
Yet despite that decision - which received new backing by IGAD's foreign ministers meeting in Nairobi recently - and a call for Sudan and Uganda to mobilise their troops, a full-scale military venture was far from reality.
An Addis Ababa-based diplomat said: "Some countries argue that the embargo is the obstacle to a deployment, but this is not really the case as it wouldn't apply to national armed forces.
"The problem is that no country really wants to go to Somalia. Certainly not Sudan and Uganda, which have numerous internal problems. So it is better to say that 'We will go', and not go."
In addition, analysts said the AU feared getting sucked in the Somali vortex, marked by a botched military intervention in 1993 that claimed the lives of 18 United States marines and several UN peacekeepers and scuppered ambitions to bring order to the chaotic nation.
One diplomat said: "How does the AU, with some 2 000 men it might finally deploy, hope to resolve a 15-year-old civil war?"