Somalia military movements increase

By By C. Bryson Hull
July 13, 2006

Those moves, along with government reluctance to negotiate with the Islamists because of their hard-line leadership, have raised fears both sides are headed for military confrontation.

President Abdullahi Yusuf's government and the Islamists, who took Mogadishu last month after defeating a group of U.S.-backed warlords, were due for a second round of Arab League-brokered talks on power-sharing in Khartoum on Saturday.

Sudanese television monitored in London said those talks had been postponed. It was not immediately possible to confirm this.

Yusuf's government and the Islamists, who want to impose strict sharia law to tame anarchy in the Horn of Africa nation of 10 million, are deeply distrustful of each other.

Roughly 2,000 Ethiopian troops earlier this week crossed in at Dollow, where the borders of Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia converge, along with several tanks to complement about 2,000 soldiers already there, various sources said.

"They had crossed with tanks, about a dozen, and about another 2,000-3,000 men," a Western diplomat said.

A military expert who monitors security daily and a government official based in Baidoa -- the government's temporary base and only outpost -- confirmed that.

"The Ethiopian troops are in several locations within Somalia, scattered all over in Dollow, Bulahawo, Wajid and in other remote locations on the outskirts of Baidoa," the Somali government official said.

"Most of the troops are ethnic Somali Ethiopians," he said.

The sources declined to be named because their positions do not allow them to speak to the press on sensitive matters.

'MILITARY MINDSET'

On Wednesday, defeated warlord Mohamed Dheere handed over about 420 fighters and 35 "technicals" -- pickups mounted with heavy weapons -- to the government.

"The plan is for his militias to be reinforced and then move forward to Baledogle," the military expert told Reuters, referring to a strategic town on the Baidoa-Mogadishu road.

The Islamists are still after the beaten warlords. Eight people were killed when they attacked the rural hideout of warlord Mohamed Qanyare, north of Mogadishu, including five gunmen who died when their pickup truck hit a land mine.

Ethiopia -- which has branded the Islamists "terrorists" -- on Thursday again denied entering Somalia.

"Ethiopia categorically denies that its troops have crossed into Somalia. It is the usual fabrication being dished out by Somali Islamists to confuse the international community," Ethiopian Defense Ministry spokesman Dawit Assefa said.

Yusuf has long been backed by Ethiopia, including in battles against the Islamists' hardline leader, Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, in the years after warlords toppled dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991 and set 15 years of anarchy loose.

Western diplomats worked hard on Thursday to make sure the government attends the talks. But they said it appeared Yusuf did not want to go, or even send a high-level delegation.

"He's just been very much in his military mindset these days," a European diplomat said. "If they do not go, then my fear is there will be some kind of military confrontation."

A draft U.N. Security Council resolution obtained by Reuters appears to show support for Yusuf's African Union-backed request for foreign peacekeepers and a limited waiver of a 1992 arms embargo, required to allow them in.

The Islamists refuse to accept foreign troops and some in their ranks have threatened a holy war should Ethiopia in particular come to Somalia.

------- (Additional reporting by Guled Mohamed in Mogadishu and Tsegaye Tadesse in Addis Ababa)

AT FIRST sight, recent events in Somalia look depressingly similar to those in Afghanistan when it fell to the Taliban. After 15 years of civil war and no government, an Islamist army has swept aside warlords and firmly asserted its control. This week the Council of Islamic Courts (CIC) finally took the entire capital, Mogadishu, and it controls several towns nearby (see article). As in Afghanistan, exhausted people are finding mullah-rule better than anarchy and extortion; as roadblocks have been lifted, prices have fallen. But outsiders, especially America, fear that the CIC is a shield for al-Qaeda.

Somalia is actually very different from Afghanistan. For instance, it is ethnically homogenous. Its divisions, ever since it fractured in 1991, have mainly been between clans—or, as it has continued to fall apart, between sub-sub-sub-clans. Unlike the Taliban, which was dominated by a single Pushtun tribe, keen to assert its rights over other ethnic groups, the CIC is creaking with inter-communal tensions. Indeed, those divisions are suggested by its name. Although Islamic courts have for several years been the only dispensers of justice in Mogadishu, each one is controlled by a distinct sub-clan—and cannot try a member of a rival group. If previous feuds are anything to go by, family ties will prove stronger than Islamist unity.

An Islamist fighter inspects an armoured personal carrier surrendered over to the Islamic Courts Union from the militias loyal to a secular warlord, north of Somalia's capital Mogadishu, July 13, 2006. (Shabele Media/Reuters)

The CIC offers an opportunity as well as a threat. Although its leaders want to build an Islamist state, some of them seem to realise that this would be unacceptable to many Somalis, who are a fairly secular lot. The CIC's most pressing concern is to prevent foreign peacekeepers, from Uganda and Sudan, being deployed to Somalia under the terms of a regional peace plan. This was designed to shore up the 14th effort to make a government in Somalia. The government—a coalition of warlords and businessmen recognised by the United Nations but by only a minority of Somalis—is cowering in the town of Baidoa, under a surreptitious guard of Ethiopian troops.

If the government and the CIC could negotiate a power-sharing deal, Somalia might end up with a government that actually controls its terrain. If the two sides fight, the consequences could be dreadful. Ethiopia would be likely to send more troops to the government, rallying many nationalists to the CIC and boosting hardliners among the Islamists, such as their joint leader, Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, who is accused by America of helping a few al-Qaeda fugitives in Somalia.

If that worries America, it has itself partly to blame. Early this year, it gave cash and guns to certain warlords in Mogadishu to grab the fugitives and their local friends on its behalf. This helped spark the recent conflict, in which several hundred people have been killed, and the CIC has triumphed.

With the European Union, America should urge Somalia's factions to negotiate. They should also insist that Ethiopia, a hated neighbour, withdraw its troops. And they should help uphold a UN arms embargo on the country. A governed Somalia would be easier to police—which is why America should quit meddling on the cheap, and pursue serious diplomacy. (The Economist: July 13, 2006)