PANA
Monday, December 31, 2007
"Efforts to bring opposition elements into the Transitional Federal Institutions, into Parliament or the Government itself, have made little progress," Ethiopia's Foreign ministry said in its latest review of events in Somalia.
Noting that some discussions had taken place quietly over the last few weeks, the ministry said that Somali opposition elements did not respond to overtures by the recently appointed Prime Minister of Somalia, Nur Hassan Adde, while the former leaders of the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC), now exiled in Eritrea, have continued to rebuff any suggestion of talks with the Transitional Federal Government (TFG).
Ethiopia's second disappointment, according to the ministry, relates to the international community's failure to provide the necessary support to the African Union (AU) for deployment of an 8,000-strong peacekeeping force to replace Ethiopian troops in Somalia.
"This has meant that Ethiopian troops have had to remain in Somalia far longer than originally anticipated," the ministry lamented.
A year ago, Ethiopian troops entered Somalia to beef up a small force of the TFG to rout armed fundamentalists under the UIC, who had almost overrun the country, including the capital, Mogadishu.
Allied with Eritrea, the UIC took control of Mogadishu in June 2006 and gained significant quantities of arms, refused to take part in peace talks with the TFG in Khartoum, Sudan, declared a jihad against Ethiopia and advanced to the temporary relocation of the seat of the TFG in Baidoa town.
Following the rapid defeat of the UIC towards the end of 2006, Ethiopian forces moved into Mogadishu at the request of a committee of Hawiye clan elders, the majority ethnic community in the city.
According to Ethiopian officials, their troops have since then enabled the TFG security forces to carry out a series of successful operations against Al-Shabaab terrorists in Mogadishu.
Major military actions in March and April, and again in October and November this year, have destroyed most of the terrorist cells in the city, the ministry said.
However, the cost of these successes has not been negligible, including civilian casualties who were targeted by terrorists or caught in cross-fire.
"Thousands of residents in the three most affected of Mogadishu's16 districts have also fled the fighting.
"With food shortages from last year's flooding and this year's poor rains, the humanitarian crisis has been intensified by terrorist activity, by the failure of NGOs to co-operate with the TFG over distribution, and by the deliberate attempt of former UIC leaders and Al-Shabaab commanders to create obstacles to the successful implementation of humanitarian efforts," said the ministry.
Also, Ethiopia blames UN and other international agencies for "the serious exaggerations" in the numbers of displaced people.
For instance, the ministry said that the UN and the TFG had in early December 2007 taken an on-the-ground count of displaced persons along the Afgooye-Mogadishu road that found no more than 44,000 in ad hoc settlements and villages while agencies consistently claimed that there were over 200,000 displaced persons.
Similarly, the ministry added that the real numbers of those who have fled from Mogadishu over the last year were between 60,000 and 80,000 while international agencies persistently put the figure at over 600,000.
Though the AU peacekeeping force in Somalia was expected to increase to at least 4,000 troops in the next three months, following last week's deployment of additional troops from Burundi to join two Ugandan battalions in Mogadishu, the ministry said this number would be insufficient to provide enough security and allow Ethiopia to pull out its forces.
Source: PANA, Dec 31, 2007