20 October 2004
UNITED NATIONS: UN nation-building activities in Somalia should not be quickly expanded, even though a new government has just been named for the troubled African country, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan cautioned yesterday.
Despite appeals for a greater UN presence, there must first be political progress accompanied by serious efforts by Somali leaders to improve security, Annan said.
Somalia's new president, Abdullahi Yusuf, was sworn in last week in neighbouring Kenya and appealed in his inauguration address for an international peacekeeping force to help disarm the militias that rule the northeast African country.
The Inter-Governmental Authority on Development, a conflict resolution body composed of east African nations, also has appealed for more international help for Somalia, asking the United Nations to deploy a mission there to help secure the government and train security forces.
But Annan, in a report to the UN Security Council, said it was "clear that any enhanced role for the organisation in Somalia must be incremental and should be based on the outcome of discussions with the new government."
The go-slow approach is perhaps no surprise for a country best known to the outside world for a failed 1993 international intervention in which Black Hawk helicopters were shot out of the sky and the bloodied corpses of US servicemen dragged through the anarchic streets of Mogadishu.
The ill-fated US peacekeeping mission in Somalia forced Washington and later the United Nations to quit the country.
Yusuf, elected by an interim parliament in Kenya, takes over from Abdiqassim Salad Hassan, who from 2000-2003 headed a flimsy Arab-backed administration which never controlled more than a few streets in Mogadishu and tiny pockets of land elsewhere.
The election was part of the 14th attempt to return government to Somalia, which has been in the hands of a patchwork of feuding warlords since a coup forced out military dictator Mohammed Siad Barre in 1991.
Because conditions in Somalia are so precarious, the new administration plans to spend two months organizing in Nairobi before returning home.