Africa at large: AU leader presses leaders on more troops to Somalia
Posted by African Press International on May 16, 2008
Publisher, Korir, africanpress@getmail.no source.guardian.nigeria
African Union (AU) chief Jakaya Kikwete and Uganda’s president Yoweri Museveni, have called on African countries to send more troops to Somalia to stabilise the volatile country and strengthen an AU force on the ground.
The call, agency reports said, came as Islamic insurgents yesterday killed about three Ethiopian soldiers during a gunfight in the Somali capital. In an unrelated incident, inter-clan fighting in western Somalia killed at least 12 people and wounded at least 15 others during a land dispute, residents said Mohamed Toshow said both sides exchanged fire after an attack on an Ethiopian water tanker in southern Mogadishu. During a meeting Kikwete and Yoweri Museveni, whose country provides the largest number of men for the Somali peacekeeping force, agreed on “the need for more troops for AMISOM, and appealed to the countries that pledged troops to accomplished their pledges,” said a Ugandan statement said.
Ethiopian troops supporting the shaky United Nations (UN)-backed transitional government come under daily attack by Islamic insurgents, who receive support from Ethiopia’s archenemy Eritrea.
Osman Enow, a resident in the town of Luq, said a dozen people had been killed when fighting broke out over the weekend and that the wounded were being treated under trees because there were no hospitals in the area. Mohamed Abdi Kalil, the deputy governor of Gedo region, where Luq is located, said,” The clash was triggered by a land dispute, but the ensuing escalation of violence was attributed to a long-simmering rivalry between the clans.”
“We are planning to send a group of elders from both warring sides to iron out the differences,” he added. Disputes over land, water and pasture rights are common in Somalia, which has not had a functioning government since 1991. The current shaky administration is fighting an Islamist insurgency, whose six-month hold on the capital and much of the south was smashed when Ethiopian forces arrived in December 2006 at the invitation of the Somali president. The conflict in the impoverished country is complicated by clan rivalry and other countries using internal Somali forces as proxy militias.
AMISOM has been deployed in Somalia since March 2007 and is to ultimately number 8,000 men. It is currently made up of 1,650 Ugandan troops and 850 soldiers from Burundi. Kikwete, who is also president of Tanzania, held talks with Museveni on a variety of issues in the Ugandan capital including prospects for a regional summit on strife-ridden eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. “Kikwete and Museveni agreed to urgently convene a meeting to address the issue of negative forces in Eastern DRC,” the statement said.
They also “noted with concern the recent hostilities in violation of (a) 2006 cease-fire agreement” in Burundi. Three years after a civil war that claimed 300,000 lives in the small central African country, the rebel National Liberation Forces (FNL) signed a second peace deal with newly elected authorities in September 2006, but it has yet to be implemented. Burundi is still struggling to recover from the war that began in 1993, mainly pitting rebels from the Hutu majority population against the Tutsi minority, which then dominated the army.
A power-sharing government was formed in 2001, while conflict was still taking place, and South Africa mediated among the different sides, until almost all the rebel groups agreed to a cease-fire. The AU chief and Museveni “reaffirmed their efforts to steer the implementation of the agreement”. The two leaders called on Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebel chief Joseph Kony sign a final peace agreement.
Signing of the peace accord between Kampala and the LRA, which had been scheduled for early April, was put off because of Kony’s absence. The rebel chief is wanted under an international arrest warrant.
The agreement was to put an official end to a 20-year civil war, which left tens of thousands dead and displaced nearly two million people.
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