An African Union summit on Tuesday discussed raising thousands more troops for a peacekeeping force in Somalia after defusing a potentially damaging row over Sudan.
The force, essential to avoid a dangerous vacuum when Ethiopian troops leave Somalia within weeks, needs 4 000 more troops to bring it up to projected strength of almost 8 000.
Ethiopia, whose military might enabled Somalia’s interim government to crush Islamists who threatened to overthrow it, says its mission is complete.
Officials were lobbying African countries at the summit to contribute more troops.
While the presidents met, European aid chief Louis Michel said the interim government had agreed to hold a broad reconciliation conference of clan and religious leaders and political groups to discuss the turbulent country’s future.
Europe, the United States and Ethiopia had called on President Abdullahi Yusuf to open up to as many factions as possible, particularly moderate Islamists and powerful clan leaders, in order to stabilise the anarchic nation.
Michel said after meeting Yusuf he was impressed by his commitment to reconciliation and the European Union would release $19-million to finance the AU peacekeeping force.
The European money had been made conditional on the government reaching out to defeated Islamists and other parties.
In a keynote address to the meeting of the 53-nation AU on Monday, its top diplomat, Alpha Oumar Konare, chastised African countries for not moving more quickly to provide troops.
Chaos
”We cannot simply wait for others to do the work in our place,” he said, warning of chaos if troops were not deployed.
Uganda, Nigeria and Malawi have promised soldiers while Mozambique, Ghana and others are still deciding. Many countries are reluctant to send forces to Somalia, one of the most dangerous locations in the world, where gunmen have ruled through 15 years of anarchy.
Ethiopian President Meles Zenawi says a third of his troops have withdrawn from Somalia after helping the government there to crush the Islamists in a two-week war. He told Reuters on the weekend he would pull out the rest of his forces within weeks and the AU needs to deploy its first units by mid-February.
Meles was also critical at the delay in fulfilling pledges of financial aid for the force from the EU and US.
The first day of the two-day meeting was dominated by a dispute over whether Sudan should take the rotating chair of the AU, promised a year ago, despite a flood of international condemnation of violence in its Darfur region.
But a group of senior leaders, working on the sidelines of the summit, managed to defuse the issue more swiftly than expected by handing the chair to Ghana, seen as a neutral candidate and a good choice because it is celebrating the 50th anniversary of independence this year.
AU observers said the speed with which the dispute was resolved was a tribute to the determination of African leaders to defuse an issue that could have undermined the credibility of the organisation. — Reuters