Somali president says U.S. backs warlords

[Al-khiyal]

Eritrea asks Ethiopian troops to quit Somalia

[Al-khiyal]

Somalia on the brink of all-out war

[Al-khiyal]

Somalia's interim prime minister has accused Egypt, Libya and Iran of providing weapons to Islamists who have taken control of much of the country's southern region.

Mohammed Ali Gedi said: "Egypt, Libya and Iran, whom we thought were friends, are engaged in fueling the conflict in Somalia by supporting the terrorists."

Gedi is facing a no-confidence vote after 18 lawmakers resigned from his administration in disgust, saying it had failed to bring peace.

Two politicians were shot this week, one fatally.

Sheik Hassan Dahir Aweys, leader of the Islamists, denied receiving support from foreign countries and said Gedi was "trying to distract attention from his own troubles".

Jendayi Frazier, US assistant secretary of state, said that both sides in the conflict have "invited in foreign forces" and that "neither the union of Islamic courts nor the transitional federal government can take the high ground".

Speaking from Kinshasa in the Congo she said: "They've all been backed by foreign forces."

The Islamists have rallied their supporters by condemning reports that Ethiopian troops, Somalia's traditional enemy, have entered the country to protect the government.

The government, in turn, accuses the Islamists of receiving weapons from Eritrea.

On Saturday, mourners in Baidoa attended the burial of Abdallah Isaaq Deerow, the transitional government minister who was shot dead on Friday.

Police chief Aadin Biid said nine people have been arrested regarding Deerow's death.

Saturday's funeral for Deerow forced officials to postpone a scheduled vote in parliament on a no-confidence bill against Gedi.

Somali PM accuses Egypt, Libya, Iran

[Al-khiyal]

BAIDOA, Somalia (AP) - Hundreds gathered outside the home of Somalia's prime minister on Monday to show their support for the embattled leader, who barely survived a no-confidence vote in parliament over the weekend.

The demonstrators carried signs and chanted the name of Prime Minister Mohammed Ali Gedi, who kept his job Sunday even though only 88 lawmakers voted to keep him and 126 voted to remove him. The motion needed 139 votes against him to pass.

"We have seen what happens when we have no government,'' said Baidoa resident Safiya Roobaa, who was among about 200 people at the rally. "We need a government, and a bad government is better than none.''

The administration was formed two years ago with the support of the United Nations to help Somalia emerge from more than a decade of anarchy, but it has no power outside its base in Baidoa, 150 miles from the capital, Mogadishu.

An Islamic militia has seized the capital and much of southern Somalia, imposing strict religious courts and raising fears of an emerging Taliban-style regime. The United States accuses the group of harboring al-Qaida leaders responsible for deadly bombings at the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.

On Sunday, the first commercial flight departed from Mogadishu International Airport in more than a decade, demonstrating how the militants have pacified the once-anarchic capital.

Local airlines had been operating from private airstrips outside the capital. Now, Islamic militiamen are guarding the airport for commercial passengers, said Sheik Muqtar Robow, deputy defense chief for the Islamic group.

The Jubba Airways plane was headed to the United Arab Emirates, said Abdurahman Hassan Mohamud Mufo, a spokesman for the airline.

The news pleased Hussein Osman Kariye, a secondary school teacher in Mogadishu.

"I remember in the older days, happier times, when I would welcome my relatives from abroad. The airport was very beautiful then, well-lit, decorated and green,'' Kariye said.

Somalia has been without an effective central government since warlords toppled dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991 and then turned on each other, carving much of the country into armed camps ruled by violence and clan law.

The chaos transformed Mogadishu, home to an estimated 1.2 million people, into a looted shantytown with no public services. "Mogadishu was like a huge prison where no one could get in or out,'' said Abdi Nur Hassan, a longtime resident of the capital.

The United States and other Western powers have cautioned outsiders against meddling in Somalia, which has no single ruling authority and can be manipulated by anyone with money and guns. But there is little sign the warning has been heeded.

Gedi has accused Egypt, Libya, Iran and Eritrea of providing weapons to Islamic militants. The militants, meanwhile, say Ethiopia has sent troops here to support the fragile government.

Somalis rally in support of prime minister

[Al-khiyal]

Four more ministers quit Somalia's largely powerless transitional government as Islamists extended their control over large areas of the country.

The minister of minerals and water Mohamud Salad Nur and three assistant ministers announced their resignation in Baidoa, the provincial seat of President Abdullahi Yusuf's interim government.

"This is our decision because this cabinet has failed the reason for which it was established. It has failed to reconcile the Somali people," said Sayeed Hassan Shire, one of the assistant ministers who resigned.

Eighteen other officials resigned from the 102-member parliament last week.

Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi narrowly survived a no confidence against him on Sunday.

The Islamists have increased their control in central Somalia after local militiamen gave up their weapons and vowed to support them.

Militiamen from the Hawiye clan handed over at least 50 battlewagons - pickups mounted with machineguns - to the Supreme Islamic Council of Somalia (SICS) in Adado township in the central Galgudud region.

"We came here by the wishes of the locals not by force," said Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, the head of SICS.

"Our main objective is to establish an Islamic court here in central regions," said Aweys.

Local leaders said they would back the Islamists whose growing influence has threatened the authority of the transitional government.

The group has also opened a new sharia court in the north of the country.

"If the residents of every area in Somalia ask us to ... we should go and install Islamic courts," said Mohamed Qoryarey, leader of Islamic Courts' militia in Adaado district.

Authorities in Kazakhstan are investigating reports that a aeroplane with the insignia of the ex-Soviet republic delivered weapons for the Islamic militia, an official said on Tuesday.

An Ilyushin-76 cargo plane, with the Kazakh flag painted on its tail, landed in the chaotic country's capital Mogadishu on Wednesday and Friday of last week, witnesses said. The Somali government said it was delivering weapons from Eritrea.

The Islamists and Eritrean officials have denied the accusation.

The US State Department last week warned neighbouring countries against interference that could extend the violence in the Horn of Africa nation.

More Somali ministers quit

[Al-khiyal]

It has the makings of a perfect storm extending right across the Horn of Africa. The 15-year war of all against all in Somalia is threatening to morph into an international war bringing chaos and disaster to the rest of the region, and the al-Qaida-obsessed "securocrats" in Washington are the ones to blame.

The Somalis have nobody to blame but themselves for their basic plight. Although Somalia has only one ethnic group, one language and one religion, its people are deeply divided by clan, and when long-ruling dictator Mohamed Siad Barre was overthrown in 1991, the clan leaders were unable to unite and form a new government. Instead, the country fell into civil war and anarchy.

A U.S.-led military intervention in 1992 tried to restore order, but after 18 American soldiers and a thousand Somalis were killed in a single day (the "Black Hawk Down" episode), U.S. forces pulled out. By 1995 all the other United Nations troops had followed, and Somalia was abandoned to its fate as a real-life version of the Mad Max films: no government, no police, no schools, no law, just the trigger-happy troops of rival warlords roaring around in "technicals," pickups mounted with machine guns or anti-aircraft cannon, stealing and killing to their heart's content.

But U.S. interest in Somalia reignited after the terrorist attacks of 2001, because as a Muslim country without a government it seemed a potential haven for Islamist terrorists. At first American policy concentrated on re-creating a national government, and by 2004 a transitional regime blessed by the United Nations and the African Union and led by one of the warlords, Abdulahi Yusuf, was installed in the town of Baidoa. But he was not in the capital, Mogadishu, because the three warlords who ruled that city rejected his authority. So did most other Somalis.

Meanwhile, a different kind of authority was emerging in Mogadishu: the Islamic courts. It was an attempt, paid for by local businessmen, to restore order by using religious law to settle disputes and punish criminals.

Each clan's court has jurisdiction only over its own clan members, but it was a start on rebuilding a law-abiding society, and in 2004 they all joined to form the Union of Islamic Courts. Unfortunately, the mere use of the word "Islamic" spooked the U.S. government.

As usual, Washington's response was mainly military. It decided that the Union of Islamic Courts was a threat, and in February CIA planes delivered large amounts of money and guns to the three warlords who dominated Mogadishu. They named themselves the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism, and started trying to suppress the UIC.

Rarely has any CIA plot backfired so comprehensively. Volunteers flooded in from all over southern Somalia to resist the warlords' attack on the only institution that showed any promise of restoring law and order in the country.

By early June the last of the warlords had been driven out of Mogadishu, which is now entirely in the hands of the UIC, and for the first time in 15 years ordinary citizens are safe from robbery, rape and murder.

It is by no means clear that the UIC must fall into the hands of Islamist radicals who will turn Somalia into a safe haven for anti-American terrorists. Left to their own devices, the moderate majority of Somalis can probably ensure that what finally emerges is a moderate Islamic government with strong popular support.

But Washington panicked, and last week it let Ethiopia send troops in to protect the isolated "Interim Government" in Baidoa. That probably means renewed war, and across borders this time.

Ethiopia has five times as many people as Somalia and has already fought two border wars with it, in 1964 and 1977. (Somalia claims most of Ethiopia's Ogaden region, where the people are mostly Muslim and ethnically Somali.)

But now it's more complex:

Ethiopia is a largely Christian country with big and restive Muslim minorities, and President Meles Zenawi is terrified that militant Islamists in power in Somalia might help those minorities to rebel, but this would not be happening without Washington's consent. It is exactly the wrong response.

On June 10, Abdulahi Yusuf's unelected "parliament" in Baidoa voted to seek foreign troops. On June 20 the first Ethiopian troops were spotted in Baidoa - and on the same day Sheik Mukhtar Robow, the UIC's deputy head of security, declared: "God willing, we will remove the Ethiopians in our country and wage a jihad against them."

Just when Somalia was about to escape from its long nightmare, a new and worse one has appeared: the prospect of a war that would consume the entire Horn of Africa (for Eritrea, teetering on the brink of another war with Ethiopia itself, is already sending aid to the UIC). The entire Horn of Africa could spend the next five years going through a catastrophe similar to what the Great Lakes region of Africa suffered in the later 1990s.

Sometimes you really wish that the State Department, rather than the Pentagon and the White House, ran American foreign policy.

Perfect storm brewing in Horn of Africa

[Al-khiyal]

The prime minister of Somalia has refused to resign despite a mass exodus of cabinet ministers and mounting criticism over the deployment of Ethiopian troops to protect his 18-month-old powerless administration.

Abdurahman Mohamed Nur Dinari, a government spokesman, said Ali Mohamed Gedi was instead working to replace the 36 ministers who have quit the 102-member cabinet in the past week.

The ministers called for Gedi's resignation even after he escaped a vote of no confidence over the weekend.

"The prime minister is not going to resign. Instead he is consulting with the MPs who support him and clan elders to replace the ministers who have quit," Dinari told AFP from the government's temporary base in Baidoa, about 250km northwest of Mogadishu, on Thursday.

"There is no legal basis for the prime minister to resign," he added.

Dinari spoke as Somali President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed and parliament speaker Sharif Hassan Sheikh Aden held private consultations after they disagreed with Gedi on whether to engage the Islamist militia in peace talks.

He said the fallout was caused by Yusuf and Aden insisting on sending delegates to the Arab League-mediated talks with the Islamists in Khartoum against Gedi's call for a postponement of the second round talks.

"The prime minister made it clear that the two were not respecting the principle of separation of powers and that it was his responsibility to chose delegates," Dinari said.

The Islamists, grouped under the Supreme Islamic Council of Somalia (SICS), hold sway of much of southern Somalia, including the capital, which they seized after routing US-backed warlords in clashes that claimed at least 360 lives.

On Wednesday, the SICS chief Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys
invited ministers who had resigned to join his movement and lashed out at Gedi for allowing the deployment of Ethiopian troops that has split the country.

The SICS have said that they will not participate in the talks until the Ethiopian troops pull back, with some Islamists calling for war against their northern neighbour.

The United Nations, the United States and other Western countries have warned that any interference by Somalia's neighbours might scupper efforts to achieve lasting peace in the country.

The Somali government, formed in Kenya in late 2004 after more than two years of peace talks, was seen as the best chance for the lawless nation to set up a functioning administration since the ouster of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991.

Somali PM refuses to quit