Somali Asks Nations to Back Him

Somalian Prime Minister Ali Mohammed Gedi condemned the international community Tuesday for standing by while his countrymen suffered during years of bloodshed, and he called for concrete support for the country’s transitional government.

“It is inhuman to watch and wait and see. It’s unacceptable to watch this punishment of the Somali people,” Gedi told diplomats gathered here for a seven-nation conference on Somalia’s future.

The conference took place in the wake of a victory last week by Islamist forces over secular warlords in Mogadishu, the country’s largest city and nominal capital. Gedi, prime minister of the transitional federal government, said the Islamists’ agenda was unknown and the country’s future was unclear.

Despite its international recognition, the transitional body lacks the credibility and power to establish itself in Mogadishu, so it is based instead in Baidoa, about 140 miles to the northwest.

Without international help, “the developments in Somalia will lead to another catastrophe,” Gedi said. The transitional body, which was formed two years ago in an attempt to re-create a central government, “has been doing its best, but they cannot achieve alone any tangible results without having our partners behind us,” he said.

“If we still wait and see, the issue of the Somali people will be out of control. It will not be only limited to Somalia, it will be a regional problem,” the prime minister said.

Somalia has had no government since 1991. There were 13 failed attempts to forge a central government before the establishment of the transitional body.

In 1992, the United States intervened in Somalia during a famine to protect aid deliveries amid clan warfare. A botched raid the next year against a warlord in Mogadishu led to the deaths of 18 Army Rangers and the end of the direct U.S. effort there.

Now, after 15 years of clan warfare and anarchy, Somalia has reached another potential turning point with the Islamist militia driving out an alliance of warlords that had ruled Mogadishu since 1991.

Amid intense international pressure to avoid a new bout of fighting, informal talks have been underway between the transitional government and the Islamic Courts Union. Tensions have already surfaced over whether to invite a small contingent of African Union peacekeeping troops to Somalia.

At the conference here, seven regional powers agreed on sanctions against the warlords, including a travel ban and a freeze on their assets. With little public support in Mogadishu because of years of lawlessness and extortion in the city, the warlords are seen by analysts as a spent force after their defeat.

The seven countries, known as the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development, have been trying to help broker peace and set up a government in Somalia.

Speaking at an open session before the meeting, a senior European Union official, Louis Michel, raised the possibility of partially lifting a United Nations arms embargo on Somalia to enable the transitional government to build a national police and security force. That move could come if the body presented a viable security plan for the country, he suggested.

Michel, the European commissioner for development and humanitarian affairs, said the international community must support and empower the transitional government.

Gedi told the open session that his government was willing to negotiate with the Islamic Courts Union over Somalia’s future, but only if the Islamists accepted the transitional government and backed democracy, free elections and human rights.

After the Islamist victory, U.S. officials expressed concern about the emergence of an extremist Taliban-style regime or the possibility that Somalia might offer a haven for the Al Qaeda terrorist network. But the U.S. denied widespread reports that Washington had backed the warlords against the Islamists.

The courts union is a fragmented and unpredictable alliance of 14 courts, three of which represent more militant factions. Diplomats in Nairobi, the Kenyan capital, are uncertain how extreme the Islamists might turn out to be and who will emerge as the most powerful leader among them.

The courts union already has foreshadowed the introduction of Islamic religious law, known as Sharia, but the union chairman, Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed, has tried to strike a moderate note, telling journalists in Mogadishu that the Islamist militia had no plans to attack Baidoa or the city of Jawhar, the warlords’ stronghold 60 miles north of the capital.

A more militant leader, Moallim Hashi Mohammed, had pledged to attack Jawhar, the Reuters news agency reported.

Mario Raffaelli, the special envoy to Somalia from Italy, which once governed part of Somalia as a colony, said the courts union was divided, clan-based and did not appear to control the whole of Mogadishu, as it had claimed. But though there were radical elements, he said, he did not foresee a Taliban-style regime.

“What the international community will do will influence the best-case or worst-case scenario,” he said. The question now, he added, is whether the Islamists will “hand over their weapons and leave the government to take over responsibility for law and order.”

“The problem is how to support them in creating a national army and national police,” Raffaelli said. “In the Somali context, only the Somalis can disarm themselves.”