Ethiopia to withdraw troops from Somalia within weeks -PM

Jan 2, 2006 (ADDIS ABABA) — Ethiopia said on Tuesday its troops would remain in Somalia for another “few weeks” while the government pacifies the nation after the defeat of militant Islamists who had held most of the south for six months.

“Ethiopian troops will remain in Somalia for a few weeks to help the transitional federal government stabilise the country,” Prime Minister Meles Zenawi told parliament.

Meles, who set his military on the Islamists two weeks ago to stop them overrunning the interim Somali government’s provincial base of Baidoa, said international peacekeepers should move into the Horn of Africa nation swiftly.

“It is not Ethiopia’s role to act as a peacekeeping force in Somalia,” he said.

The United Nations had endorsed an African peacekeeping force before the war started. Diplomats say such a mission may now be the only way Ethiopian can extricate its military from Somalia without leaving the government enfeebled.

“It is up to the international community to deploy a peacekeeping force in Somalia without delay to avoid a vacuum and the resurgence of extremists and terrorists,” Meles said.

He added that Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni would be visiting him in days to discuss Kampala’s offer to provide the vanguard of troops for an African peacekeeping mission.

Uganda’s State Minister for Foreign Affairs Oryem Okello told Reuters on Tuesday Kampala was unwilling to contribute to a peacekeeping mission for Somalia unless its mission and an exit strategy were clearly defined.

Ethiopia’s military, one of the strongest in Africa, beat the Islamists surprisingly quickly, first pushing them back from Baidoa, then ousting them from their base in Mogadishu and their last bastion in Kismayu port.

Without Ethiopia’s military, the government would have been relatively defenceless against the Islamists, who had shown military prowess to defeat Mogadishu warlords in June.

The Somali government, led by President Abdullahi Yusuf and Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi, has said Ethiopian troops will stay “as long as we need them” under a bilateral arrangement. Somali officials say that could continue weeks or months.

“GALLANT SOLDIERS”

Meles triumphantly lauded his troops for routing a movement whose aim, he said, was to destabilise the entire Horn of Africa region on the pretext of waging a religious war.

“The myth of the extremists — that they would wage a Christian-Muslim war in the Horn of Africa — has been shattered by the gallant Ethiopian forces,” Meles said.

He said fighters from the Ethiopian rebel group, the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF), who had massed inside the Somali border in preparation for an attack, had been crushed. “They have been dealt with so that they will never return again,” he said.

Another Ethiopian rebel group which had allied with the Islamists, the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF), had also been defeated at Dinsoor inside Somalia, Meles said.

“I have information that the majority of ONLF members have also been smashed,” he said.

The Ethiopian leader, who went to war with Eritrea in 1998-2000 over their border, scoffed at predictions by some analysts that Asmara would take advantage of the Somali war to try and re-take some disputed territory.

“Eritrea has now power and preparedness to wage a direct war against Ethiopia. It is so weak that it cannot venture to take such a risk,” Meles said. “But there is always a possibility of miscalculation on the Eritrean side, and if that happens we are prepared to rebut the attack.”

(Reuters)