’Uganda peacekeepers arm Somali rebels’

NAIROBI(AFP)

24/05/08

A United Nations panel has accused Ugandan peacekeepers of selling arms to Islamist rebels fighting the government and Ethiopian troops in Somalia.

Amid a row over the acquisition of military hardware by bickering factions in Somalia’s transitional government, the UN panel charged with monitoring the situation there said it was alarmed by “continued militarisation and an increase of armed action” between the rival camps.

“The fact that members of the transitional federal government are buying arms at the market in Mogadishu is not new to the monitoring group,” it said.

“But during this mandate period, the monitoring group received information on sales of arms by prominent officials of the security sectors of government, Ethiopian officers and Ugandan officers of the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM).”

The report, seen by AFP, was sent to the UN Security Council by the panel which is charged with reviewing the 1992 arms embargo slapped on Somalia after it descended into anarchy a year earlier with the ouster of strongman Mohamed Siad Barre.

In it, the experts said arms on sale originate from army stocks or are seized following battles with Islamist insurgents.

“According to arms traders, the biggest supplier of ammunition to the market are Ethiopian and transitional federal government commanders, who divert boxes officially declared ’used during combat’,” the report said.

Since Barre’s ouster, several well-armed clan-based factions have been in an almost constant state of low-level war, hindering effective monitoring of the UN arms embargo.

The UN Security Council has rejected several pleas by President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed to ease the arms ban, warning that such a move would exacerbate fighting in the lawless nation.

The experts accused neighbouring Ethiopia, Yemen and Eritrea of continuously violating the embargo by sending weapons shipments to the increasingly hostile factions within Somalia.

Somali troops, their Ethiopian allies and AU peacekeepers have been routinely targeted by Islamist insurgents over the past year, worsening security and choking humanitarian operations in the country.

AMISOM has just over 2,500 Ugandan and Burundian troops in Somalia but the deployment falls short of the 8,000 pledged by the pan-African body and has been unable to curb the violence.

Sudan oil region fighting could displace 90,000: UN

ABYEI, Sudan (AFP)

24/05/08

Up to 90,000 people could be displaced by fighting in Sudan’s bitterly contested oil region of Abyei where the United Nations is racing against time to provide aid relief and prevent a return to civil war.

Two rounds of heavy fighting between government soldiers and the southern Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) have largely obliterated Abyei’s once bustling main town of mud huts that was home to 30,000 people two weeks ago.

The market, once the hub of trade and social life, is charred and flattened. Buildings have been reduced to skeletons and burnt-out vehicles are abandoned to the dust.

On the horizon, smoke coils into the air from isolated fires. In the silence of the ghost town, people loot what they can with apparent impunity as Sudan government soldiers look on.

Viewing the centre of town from the back of a UN armoured personnel carrier under heavy protection from a Zambian peacekeeping contingent, Ashraf (eds: correct) Qazi, the special representative of the UN chief to Sudan, likened Abyei to hell.

“We have been to the centre of Abyei and it doesn’t exist any more. It’s totally charred. It’s totally devastated. And it’s an absolute human tragedy and it is something that must never happen again,” he told reporters.

Casualty figures are unclear. The army, loyal to the central government in Khartoum, says 22 of its soldiers were killed and 45 wounded in the worst fighting on Tuesday, which followed clashes last week.

Medics at a clinic in Agok farther south, where UN agencies and aid workers are concentrating emergency relief efforts, said they treated 135 wounded — all but one from the SPLA.

The fighting is the worst crisis to beset the three-year peace accord that ended Africa’s longest running civil war between north and south Sudan, since the south walked out of the national unity government for two months last year.

UN-chaired committees grouping leaders of northern and southern Sudan, tasked with smoothing over difficulties in implementing the peace agreement, have not met since the latest fighting on Tuesday.

“That’s what we’re resolved in right now. Trying to ensure that this situation doesn’t deteriorate further and doesn’t spark off something much bigger,” Qazi said.

“That is a risk,” he conceded.

The 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) gave the south six years of regional autonomy and participation in a national unity government until a 2011 referendum on independence.

Abyei, on the border between north and south, was accorded special status. But half way through the six-year transition period, Abyei has still never been governed by a functioning joint administration as stipulated.

In 2011, the area will hold a separate referendum on whether to retain its special administrative status in the north or join the south.

“We can see that with any one issue, with Abyei in particular, if violence flares up it could easily spread to other areas and easily threaten the whole CPA,” said Qazi.

“We are working intensively with the two sides to overcome this crisis. And we will continue to do so.”

Aid workers fear that a deterioration in Abyei — where the estimated half-a-billion dollar oil wealth is at the heart of the dispute between Sudan’s Arab north and Christian and animist south — could displace many more people than initially feared.

“We could have up to 90,000 people on the move,” Abyei UN resident coordinator Jason Matus, now in Agok, briefed Qazi.

“We are in a race against time,” said Andy Pendleton, the head of the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in southern Sudan.

Heavy rains are scheduled to start in around two weeks. After that, water-borne diseases could spread unless people have adequate shelter, food and adequately dug latrines.

Sudan’s military has controlled Abyei since the latest fighting saw the SPLA redeploy farther south. The town is supposed to be patrolled jointly and the expulsion of the SPLA has sparked fears of renewed violence.

“If we are out of Abyei and they (the Arabs) are in, then we know there will be fighting,” said Mam Thuc, a widow with 10 children, speaking in Agok.

Her husband was killed in the violence after the family, displaced by the civil war, returned home.

“We were supposed to come and settle. We were IDPs (internally displaced people) from Khartoum. We came back and within six months this happened,” said Thuc, clinging to the hand of her youngest child.

Somalia: US urges Somalia government to isolate extremists

BBC 24/05/08

The US government has reiterated the need to isolate the extremists fighting in Somalia who are opposed to reconciliation.

 

The deputy US assistant secretary of state for Africa, James Swan , stated this at a conference held in Ottawa on the situation in Somalia.

Mr. Swan said that the US government fully supported the peace talks between the Somali government and opposition groups in Dijbouti, adding that it was crucial to isolate the extremists fighting in Somalia. But the US official did not indicate whether he meant Al-Shabab or not.

He further stated that his government was closely working with the Transitional Federal government of Somalia on the issues of deploying peace keepers who would restore peace and order and would also support it in the forthcoming reconciliation process in the country.

 

He also commented on the peace talks between the government and the opposition groups, saying that the opposition should accept talks before the withdrawal of Ethiopian troops.

Ethiopia and Uganda deny breaking U.N. Somali arms ban

By Tsegaye Tadesse

24/05/08

ADDIS ABABA (Reuters) – Ethiopia and Uganda denied on Saturday accusations by a U.N. weapons sanctions committee that their soldiers broke the world body’s arms embargo on Somalia.

The United Nations says the Horn of Africa nation is awash with weapons despite a 1992 weapon ban that followed the collapse of the central government a year before. Somalia has been engulfed in civil conflict ever since.

Dumisani Kumalo, chairman of the U.N. Security Council’s Somalia sanctions committee and the South African envoy to the body, accuses “elements” of an AU peacekeeping force in Somalia and Ethiopian and Somali government troops of arms trafficking.

“We want to assure the world community that this accusation does not have an iota of truth,” Wahade Belay, spokesman for the Ethiopian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told Reuters.

“In fact our troops were and still are playing an exemplary role in mitigating the arms trade inside Somalia,” he said.

Boats, planes and donkeys mainly transport weapons and military hardware to Somalia’s numerous arms markets.

The South African envoy said 80 percent of ammunition on sale in Somali markets come from Ethiopian and Somali troops.

Ethiopia sent thousands of soldiers into Somalia in late 2006 to help the Somali government oust an Islamic Courts movement from the south. Since then, the two allies have battled an insurgency led by members of the Islamists.

Kumalo said the presence of Ethiopian troops inside Somalia was itself a violation of the 16-year-old arms ban. Addis Ababa rejected this claim.

“JIHADISTS”

The sanction committee’s report comes as the world body unanimously adopted a measure for a stronger U.N. presence in Somalia and opened the door for a possible U.N. force.

A 2,200-strong African Union peacekeeping contingent, known as AMISOM, has been unable to stem the mounting violence.

Uganda — which has 1,600 troops in Mogadishu — joined Ethiopia in condemning the sanctions committee’s accusations.

“I can assert that none of the AMISOM commanders is involved in any form of arms trafficking in contravention of the U.N. arms embargo,” said Captain Barigye Bahouku, spokesman for the mission.

Both Ethiopia and Uganda said they would investigate the claims if supplied with evidence.

Last week, Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi said his troops would remain in Somalia until the “jihadists” were defeated.

The United States, whose main ally in the region is Addis Ababa, says some of the Islamist-led insurgents have links to terrorist organisations.

Rebels hit Ethiopian and Somali government troops with near-daily attacks. Thousands of Somalis have been killed and some 1 million displaced by fighting.

(Additional reporting by Frank Nyakairu in Kampala)

(Writing by Jack Kimball)

(For full Reuters Africa coverage and to have your say on the top issues, visit, http://africa.reuters.com/)

Peacekeepers sell arms to Somalis

Angola press

Mogadishu,05/24 

Ugandan peacekeepers in Somalia have been selling arms to insurgents, a United Nations report says.

The report, by the UN monitoring group on the Somali arms embargo, says Ethiopia, Eritrea and Yemen are also breaking the embargo.

It cites one incident in which a group of Ugandan soldiers allegedly received $80,000 for a transaction.

Some peacekeepers are accused of setting up an arms trading network through translators.

The Ugandan army has already dismissed the accusations as “absolutely ridiculous.”

The report says the soldiers received a wish-list of weapons from arms dealers and the weapons were then supplied from stores of equipment seized from insurgents.

The monitoring group says the weapons find their way back to the insurgent group they were captured from in the first place.

The report was presented to the UN Security Council by the head of the committee which has been monitoring the arms embargo, Dumisani Kumalo, who is South Africa`s ambassador to the UN.

Mr Kumalo said there were grave concerns that some peacekeepers would do things to undermine the peace process.

The allegations have been sent to the Ugandan government, which has said it will carry out an inquiry.

The presence of Ethiopian troops in Somalia, backing the weak transitional government, also breaks the embargo, the report said.

The Ethiopians went into Somalia in 2006 to help oust Islamist forces which had taken control of Mogadishu.

Eritrea and Yemen are accused of backing the insurgents.

Somalia has been devastated by conflict since 1991 when former President Mohamed Siad Barre was ousted.