Somalia's new government on shaky ground
As summit nears, a U.S. report paints a bleak picture

NAIROBI, Kenya, July 14, 2007 – For the workmen racing to spruce up a bullet-studded police garage in time for a critical peace summit beginning Sunday in Somalia, the work got a little tougher this week when insurgents launched mortars at the site.

The message was as clear as ever: Somalia's transitional government is in trouble.

Diplomats say the conference on political reconciliation may be the government's last chance to hold onto power against a growing Islamist insurgency and with one of its most powerful backers, the Bush administration, perhaps rethinking the military operation that brought the regime to power six months ago.

Since Ethiopian troops, supported by U.S. training and intelligence, ousted an Islamist regime from the capital, Mogadishu, the government has been unable to control the city. Somali and Ethiopian forces face near-daily mortar attacks and assassination attempts by insurgents linked to the Islamists, who vowed Friday to disrupt the summit.

Public confidence in the government has plummeted further as security forces mount an offensive in insurgent neighborhoods, lobbing grenades into populated areas such as the busy Bakara marketplace. More than 50 people have been killed in the last two weeks, according to local hospitals, most of them civilians. Some eyewitnesses described the government strikes as indiscriminate.

The Bush administration linked the Islamist regime, known as the Council of Islamic Courts, to al-Qaida and said that its removal was necessary to keep the Horn of Africa from becoming a terrorist haven. Now administration officials appear to be reconsidering the wisdom of regime change.

A U.S. intelligence report sent to Congress on Wednesday painted a bleak picture of the future of the transitional government.

The government "is widely perceived by Somalis to be little more than a pawn of Ethiopia, yet its continued survival, certainly in Mogadishu, remains dependent on the support for the Ethiopian military," said the report. "Continued turmoil could enable extremists to regain their footing and heighten inter-state tensions throughout the region."

Last month, Jendayi Frazer, the State Department's top Africa envoy, was quoted as saying about Somalia: "It's hard to say whether it is better or worse off" since the Ethiopian invasion.

Referring to those comments, a Western diplomat in the region who helps formulate Somalia policy said, "They're saying they got it wrong. But you can't really recover from these mistakes."

The official did not want to be named because of his criticism of U.S. policies. But he said Somalia was becoming the sort of magnet for foreign jihadists that the Bush administration sought to avoid.

"They're getting guidance from outside Somalia, like Afghanistan or Pakistan. We're in danger of seeing a re-emergence of an active African Somalia A.Q. (al-Qaida) cell," the diplomat said, without elaborating.

Diplomats have been pressing the government to hold a reconciliation conference to begin building a stable, inclusive political system and ending the clan-based fighting that has plagued Somalia since 1991.

"This is the only scenario to avoid Somalia slipping back into civil war," the official said. "We don't have a Plan B."

McClatchy special correspondent Mahad Elmi contributed from Mogadishu.

Source: By Shashank Bengali - McClatchy Newspapers