Feed Gunmen To Save Somalia, East Africa Urges

NAIROBI, March 20, 2006 – East African leaders on Monday urged backing for a plan to keep Somalia's peace efforts alive, including giving food to militiamen in a country where millions are facing drought-induced famine.

Roughly 3,000 gunmen were put in camps outside the city of Baidoa last month, to make it safe enough for the anarchic country's parliament to meet there - on its home soil for the first time in 15 years.

Somalis say the legislature's session is the best chance to end a rift that has paralyzed the interim administration for more than a year in a 14th attempt to restore normal government since warlords overran the country in 1991.

The homegrown solution of housing militias in camps was critical to keeping Baidoa -- and the peace process -- safe, the leaders said after a one-day summit in Nairobi of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD).

"We call upon our partners to take measures to alleviate the shortage for encamped militias outside Baidoa," a communiqué issued at the meeting said.

The bloc was founded in 1986 to counter drought and desertification, but since then has metamorphosed to push peace and development in its member states - Kenya, Djibouti, Uganda, Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia and Eritrea.

Going back to its roots, IGAD also said it would establish an emergency fund with help from donors and the private sector to mitigate effects of a drought that has left at least 6.25 million people in east Africa hungry.

FEEDING GUNMEN

As for the Somali gunmen, diplomats said traditional donors would not be able to pay for their food, given funding rules and the fact the region's poor - but peaceful - citizens need food.

"We believe that it is important to support the militias and their encampment. But it is extremely difficult for us to do," one Western diplomat said.

The estimated cost would be up to $1.6 million for the six months the parliament said it would need to stay in session.

Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, who handed over the IGAD chairmanship to Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki on Monday, said his country would contribute.

The regional bloc brokered Somalia's peace agreement and the pact to end Sudan's two-decade civil war. The communiqué also praised the progress Sudan has made so far, and urged donors to meet reconstruction funding commitments they made last year.

Opening the meeting, Kibaki urged Ethiopia and Eritrea to exercise restraint and negotiate to end a fight over their border, source of a 1998-2000 war that killed 70,000 people.

"I believe that there is a window of opportunity to resolve the simmering tensions amicably," he said.

But the communiqué issued after the summit made no mention of the disputed frontier. Diplomats said the fact Eritrea only sent its agriculture minister, while Ethiopia's Prime Minister Meles Zenawi was present, made taking a position difficult.

On Somalia, the summit reiterated an earlier call for the U.N. Security Council to lift an arms embargo to permit a proposed African peacekeeping force there.

IGAD in January 2005 authorized troops from Uganda and Sudan to help secure Somalia's government. But warlords in the Somali cabinet and their allies vehemently protested the decision, widening a rift with President Abdillahi Yusuf and his backers that all but paralyzed the government for a year.

Source: Reuters