East African defence chiefs expect to have the vanguard of a peacekeeping force for Somalia ready by the end of next month, officials said on Friday, despite fierce objections from powerful Islamists in the chaotic Horn of Africa nation.
Under revised plans for the mission agreed late on Thursday, the first elements of the nearly 7 000-strong regional force are to assemble in north-east Kenya near the Somali border in late September, the officials said.
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.
And it faces numerous other hurdles, not least of which are funding and United Nations Security Council reluctance to ease a 14-year-old arms embargo to assist the peacekeepers in restoring stability.
Meeting in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, chiefs of staff and senior military officials from the seven-member Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (Igad) adopted plans for a Somalia force of 6 800 made up of eight battalions.
They also appealed to the cash-strapped African Union, which has endorsed the force but is already struggling to fund its peacekeepers in Sudan’s Darfur region, for $18,5-million to back the mission.
”We agreed that we will deploy eight battalions in Somalia to help in the restoration of peace,” Igad peacekeeping chief Colonel Peter Marwa told Agence France-Presse after the Nairobi meeting.
”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.
From Garissa, a Kenyan border town about 300km east of Nairobi, those troops would be deployed to Baidoa, the temporary seat of the weak Somali transitional government, he said.
Igad first agreed to send a peacekeeping force to Somalia two years ago but the plans have been repeatedly frustrated and uncertainty persists over their viability.
In particular, the mission faces vehement opposition from the Supreme Islamic Council of Somalia (SICS), whose militia seized Mogadishu from warlords in June after months of fighting and have been expanding their territory since.
The rise of the Islamists poses a direct threat to the already limited authority of the government, which has repeatedly sought international military assistance to shore up its authority.
On Friday, SICS supreme leader Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, a hard-line cleric accused of ties to Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network, renewed the Islamists’ stance that peacekeepers are unnecessary and will be resisted.
”If troops are sent here while there is no need for them, we will have no choice but to fulfil our right to defend our country from aggression,” Aweys said in an interview with Mogadishu’s Shabelle Radio.
”Outsiders can’t bring peace to Somalia; 30 countries came here to bring peace and achieved nothing,” he said, referring to disastrous military interventions by the United States and UN in the early 1990s.
SICS is particularly opposed to any troops from neighbouring Ethiopia, an Igad member, which is accused of already having sent soldiers to Somalia to protect the government from feared Islamist attacks.
Addis Ababa denies the claims but numerous eyewitness accounts of uniformed Ethiopian troops in Somalia persist and have stalled Arab League-mediated talks to ease growing tensions between the government and Islamists.
Marwa, the Igad official, said the regional bloc that groups Djibouti, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Kenya, Somalia, Sudan and Uganda, hoped all Somali parties will agree to the peacekeepers by the time the first troops are ready.
”We hope that by deployment time there will be consensus among the Somali players,” he said, stressing that the peacekeepers would not be occupiers.
”The troops are not going into Somalia to enforce peace or impose the region’s will but to help that country regain peace and be accommodated in the international arena,” Marwa said. — Sapa-AFP