A mortar attack on Somalia’s presidential palace has shown the need for peacekeepers to move quickly into the Horn of Africa nation, the African Union (AU) said after endorsing such a mission.
The AU’s peace and security council approved a 7 650-strong force for Somalia late on Friday, just minutes before attackers struck Mogadishu’s hilltop Villa Somalia with five mortars.
President Abdullahi Yusuf, who moved there after the recent ouster of Islamists who had controlled most of south Somalia for six months, was inside but unhurt, government sources said.
A late-night gunfight ensued outside the palace between the guards and assailants, who melted back into the streets.
”This shows the need for deployment as soon as possible,” AU peace and security commissioner Said Djinnit told a news conference in Addis Ababa on Friday evening after the formal approval of a six-month peacekeeping mission.
Many doubt the AU’s capacity to muster such a force, let alone tame Somalia. The country has been in chaos since the 1991 ouster of a dictator and defied United States and United Nations peacekeepers in the early 1990s.
Only Uganda has publicly vowed to supply troops but Djinnit said a second, unnamed country had also pledged to contribute, meaning the first three of nine planned 850-soldier AU battalions could go in ”within weeks”.
The AU, whose peacekeepers in Sudan’s Darfur region have failed to halt the conflict there, wants the United Nations to take over after six months. But it is not at all clear whether the world body’s members want to take on such a mission.
Ethiopia wants out
Friday night’s attack on Villa Somalia was one of the most high-profile in a series of guerrilla-style strikes on the Somali government and their Ethiopian military allies who drove the Islamists out of Mogadishu over Christmas and the New Year.
Most attacks in recent days had been on Ethiopian troops.
Witnesses said the strike was launched from a nearby school and suspicion fell immediately on the Islamists. They have repeatedly vowed to hit back with guerrilla tactics after their surprisingly quick defeat by government-Ethiopian forces.
Scattered to remote parts of the south near the border with Kenya, some Islamists have begun returning to Mogadishu in disguise, according to sources in the movement.
Yusuf (72) arrived in Mogadishu just days ago to take up residence in the bullet- and rocket-scarred building that used to house former dictator Mohamed Siad Barre.
Facing multiple threats from the Islamists, returning warlords, clan rivalries and the prevalence of guns across Somalia, the government has a momentous challenge to restore order and impose its authority.
Set up at a peace conference in Kenya in 2004, the government’s mandate runs out in 2009. It has international support from the UN, US and others, but lacks a genuinely popular power-base inside Somalia.
So diplomats fear a dangerous vacuum once Ethiopian troops propping up the government return home. Prime Minister Meles Zenawi has said he wants to withdraw them within days, adding urgency to the diplomatic push to create a peacekeeping mission. – Reuters