UN council delays debate on Somalia peacekeeping

15 Feb 2008 21:02:44 GMT
Source: Reuters
By Patrick Worsnip

UNITED NATIONS, Feb 15 (Reuters) - Backed by the African Union, Somalia's government appealed to the United Nations on Friday to send a peacekeeping force there, but the Security Council delayed a response until next month, diplomats said.

They said the council is still awaiting a delayed report from Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on peacekeeping prospects in the lawless Horn of Africa country, which currently has only a small AU force consisting mainly of Ugandans.

Somalia's U.N. ambassador, Elmi Ahmed Duale, called on the council to follow up on its request to Ban late last year to develop contingency plans for a possible U.N. operation.

"In order to avoid the deterioration of the security situation in Somalia we urge the Security Council, in no uncertain terms, to accelerate the implementation" of that request, he said.

The AU's chief U.N. observer, Lila Ratsifandrihamanana, reminded the council that a recent AU summit in Addis Ababa had also urged that a U.N. force replace the AU mission, known as AMISOM.

But both Ban and the council have been wary of sending U.N. troops to Somalia, scene of daily shootouts and mortar battles between Islamist insurgents, various warlords and Ethiopian-backed Somali government forces.

Talk of outside intervention in Somalia is still colored by the killing of U.S. troops there in 1993 in the "Black Hawk Down" battle that marked the beginning of the end for a U.S.-U.N. peacekeeping force.

"The sense of the council is that ... the council would attend to this issue as soon as it receives the report of the secretary-general," Panamanian Ambassador Ricardo Alberto Arias, the current council president, told reporters.

Diplomats said the report was expected on March 10. They said it had been delayed by difficulties encountered by two U.N. fact-finding missions to Somalia, on whose work it will be based.

They said, however, that U.N. authorization for AMISOM was likely to be renewed next week. The AU mission consists of two Ugandan battalions, totaling some 1,600 troops, and an advance party of 192 Burundians.

Somalia has been in turmoil since the fall of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991. The U.N. refugee agency last month described the conflict there, which has uprooted more than 1 million people, as the world's most pressing humanitarian crisis, worse even than Sudan's Darfur region. (Editing by Stuart Grudgings)