African and Western diplomats were discussing the details of a peacekeeping mission to Somalia, an African Union spokesperson said on Monday, after militias vowing to impose Islamic rule took over the capital of the Horn of Africa country.
The meeting will not decide when peacekeepers will be deployed because the United Nations Security Council will have to first ease an arms embargo on Somalia imposed in 1992 so that troops can carry arms in that country without violating international law, said Assane Ba, spokesperson for the AU’s conflict management department.
Monday’s meeting ”will just be a joint consultation”, Ba said, between the AU’s executive body, the commission, representatives of the seven-nation Intergovernmental Authority on Development that leads peace efforts on Somalia in Africa and UN, European Union, British, Swedish and Italian diplomats.
Somalia has not had an effective central government since 1991, when warlords overthrew dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991 and then turned on each other.
An Islamic group portraying itself as capable of bringing unity and order after more than a decade of chaos has seen its militias emerge victorious across southern Somalia, including the capital, in on-and-off battles since February against an alliance of secular warlords. More than 330 people, most of them civilians, were killed in battles leading to the Islamic militia’s June 6 capture of Mogadishu.
Since then they have run the warlords out of at least two other southern Somalia towns, further consolidating their hold on the region of Somalia that has seen the worst violence in the past 15 years.
Somalia’s weak transitional government, which had not had a role in the recent fighting and has no real military, has a foothold in the southern Somali town of Baidoa. The transitional leaders hope to assert their authority through negotiations with the Islamic group, but a vote by its Parliament last week endorsing foreign peacekeepers angered the Islamic leaders.
The leader of the Islamic group, Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, said on Saturday that 300 Ethiopian soldiers had entered the country to help the transitional government. Ethiopia is Somalia’s traditional rival, but also a supporter of Somalia’s transitional president, Abdullahi Yusuf.
An adviser to Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi denied Ahmed’s claims, but said his government had massed troops along the border and was monitoring the Islamic militants’ advance across the country.
Ministers of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development, an East Africa group, on Tuesday imposed a travel and banking ban and asset freeze on Somali warlords and said that their governments will draw up a list of individuals and groups to be prosecuted at the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes.
On Friday, the AU’s Peace and Security Council said it endorsed those decisions. — Sapa-AP