Arab states pledge 26 million dollars aid to Somalia

ALGIERS, March 24 (AFP) - Arab countries pledged urgent aid of 26 million dollars to Somalia at this week's summit in Algiers, Somali Foreign Minister Abdullahi Sheikh Ismail said here Thursday.

The aid "will provide a platform for the reconstruction of Somalia and material support for its constitutional bodies," he told a press conference a day after the summit closed.

Ismail said Somalia had also obtained support from the 21 other members of the Arab League for an Arab conference to draw up a plan to rebuild the lawless Horn of Africa nation.

They will help the Somali government, currently based in neighbouring Kenya because of insecurity at home, to disarm the dozens of militias in the country and join a planned multinational peacekeeping force, he said.

Ismail insisted that the government would be returning to Somalia to perform its duties "because the anarchy that reigns there now and the constitutional void benefit no one."

Somalia has been in chaos without any functioning central authority since the ouster of strongman Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991 turned the nation into a patchwork of fiefdoms ruled by feuding warlords.

Up to half a million people are estimated to have been killed as a result of mass murder in Somalia's civil and clan wars, compounded by man-made famine and diseases such as cholera and malaria.

bb/mb/gd AFP 241655 GMT 03 05

Copyright (c) 2005 Agence France-Presse
Received by NewsEdge Insight: 03/24/2005 11:57:25