BRUSSELS, April 23, 2009) - International donors gathered in Brussels Thursday to try to help bring stability to civil war-torn Somalia, with rampant piracy in a busy shipping zone off its coast likely to dominate the talks.

The one-day conference is meant to boost Somalia's security forces and provide support to an African peacekeeping mission, but concern was high that the piracy problem might divert resources in the lawless nation.

"If we only treat the symptoms, piracy at sea, but not its root causes -- the decay of the state and poverty -- we will fail," European Commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso said ahead of the meeting.

"It is the symptom, and not the cause of a much deeper problem in Somalia."

"Security challenges have their root causes in development problems and governance weaknesses," he told reporters, after meeting UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

Ban, along with Somali President Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, and other senior international figures and representatives from some 30 nations were also attending.

While the conference was not focused on piracy, the high media profile of the growing number of cases of daring raids on freighters on the seas of the Gulf of Aden has become synonymous with Somalia's woes.

Despite international naval missions -- including from NATO and the European Union -- piracy has spiraled over the last year, as ransom-hunting Somalis tackle ever-bigger and more distant prizes.

More than 130 merchant ships were attacked in the region last year, an increase of more than 200 percent on 2007, according to the International Maritime Bureau.

Naval officers concede that hundreds of warships would be needed to effectively patrol around a million square kilometers of waters and that the only way to really halt piracy would be to launch some ground operation.

But there is no appetite for such an enterprise, given United States troops losses there in 1993.

Non-governmental organization Oxfam said the conference was being held at a critical moment for 3.2 million Somalis desperately in need of aid, more than a million of whom have fled their homes to avoid fighting in the last two years.

"Piracy, which is making international news headlines, is symptomatic of far deeper problems that have never been resolved since the collapse of the national government in 1991," said Oxfam's Robert Maletta.

More and more clans are trying to seek a living on the high seas -- one of the few if risky ways to make serious money in poverty-stricken Somalia, where Islamists have been waging a civil war since 1991.

However, bringing any political order remains an enormous challenge.

The transitional government has little real power, and none reaching into the north, which is divided between the Puntland region and the "republic" of Somaliland.

And since the Ethiopian army pulled out in December, the only security presence supporting the government is the African AMISOM peacekeeping mission.

The 4,300-troop force -- with soldiers mainly from Uganda and Burundi -- is well short of the 8,000 soldiers initially planned and is regularly attacked by the Islamist Shehab militia.

Council: Somalia Conference

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