Somalia undeterred by opposition to peacekeepers

15 Nov 2004 12:36:54 GMT

By Muse Sheikh Omar

NAIROBI, Nov 15 (Reuters) - Somalia's new government is determined to seek foreign peacekeepers to help stabilise the country despite a high-profile murder widely seen as a warning not to deploy them, the prime minister said.

"My government will not be demoralised by the killing of Gen. Mohammed Abdu," Mohammed Ali Geedi, prime minister of Somalia's new Transitional Federal Government (TFG), told Reuters late on Sunday.

"We will not despair. The government needs protection. So it is inevitable to bring protection forces for the government into the country, until disarmament is carried out."

Somalia's new president, Abdullahi Yusuf, has asked the African Union (AU) to send 20,000 peacekeepers to help disarm the militias who rule the damaged country of up to 10 million and collect the millions of small arms owned by Somalis.

The AU is considering the request but its fledgling peacekeeping department is already overstretched by trying to monitor a ceasefire in Sudan's troubled Darfur region.

General Mohammed Abdu Mohammed was shot by unidentified assailants in Mogadishu on Nov. 5 in an attack seen by diplomats as a warning to the AU not to deploy the troops. He was flown to Kenya for treatment but died early last week.

The general, a prominent and respected figure who served in the long-defunct National Army of ousted Somali dictator Mohamed Siad Barre, was shot several days after he expressed support for the deployment of AU forces in media interviews and at seminars.

Several militant Islamist groups in Mogadishu long hostile to Yusuf have expressed opposition to the deployment of foreign forces, saying without elaborating that their use would be against Islam and they would transmit "diseases".

Yusuf was elected by a reconciliation conference held in Kenya last month seeking to end the chaos that has gripped the country since Siad Barre's overthrow in 1991. He picked Geedi, a former academic, as prime minister on Nov. 3 and he and Geedi are due to pick a cabinet by Dec. 2.

Geedi said the government had yet to get any funding from the international community and this would be forthcoming only when the cabinet was chosen. "There is a (funding) pledge but the condition is to set up governmental structures," he said.

Yusuf has yet to return to his Horn of Africa nation, where militias have ruled by the gun for the past 13 years.

Geedi was speaking after a luncheon for Somali politicians in Nairobi where powerful warlords Muse Sudi Yalahow, Osman Ato and Mohammed Qanyare pledged support for Yusuf's government.

A militant Somali Islamist, Hassan Dahir Aweis, has pledged to reject any attempt by Yusuf to return to Mogadishu, accusing him of being a puppet of neighbouring Ethiopia.

Aweis, who holds influence among militia allied to the city's Islamic courts, recently resurfaced after vanishing amid heightened U.S. scrutiny of Somalia after the Sept. 11 attacks.