From: senaey fethi (senaeyfethi@yahoo.com)
Date: Mon Jan 26 2009 - 04:33:26 EST
Ethiopia pulls last troops from Somalia
Reuters
Published: January 26, 2009
By Mohamed Ahmed
Ethiopia pulled its last soldiers out of Somalia on Monday after a more than two-year intervention to combat an Islamist movement in its Horn of Africa neighbour, officials on both sides said.
The departure of Addis Ababa's roughly 3,000 troops ushers in a new era for Somalia: some predict the power vacuum will herald more bloodshed, while others say it gives the nation of 9 million people a chance for national reconciliation.
Somali government spokesman Abdi Haji Gobdon said the remaining Ethiopian troops pulled out of the central provincial town of Baidoa, which houses parliament, on Sunday night before heading further west towards the border.
"The Ethiopians have fulfilled their promise. Their last troops crossed the border this morning," he said.
Ethiopian officials confirmed the pullout but said they would keep a heavy presence along the long border with Somalia.
The Ethiopians entered Somalia to chase a sharia courts movement out of Mogadishu at the end of 2006.
That sparked an Islamist-led rebellion that has seen at least 16,000 civilians die and created a humanitarian disaster. The chaos has fuelled a wave of piracy offshore.
Somalia's weak, Western-backed government had depended on the Ethiopians for military support, and is now exposed to an array of Islamist opposition groups. The Islamists have, however, been fighting among themselves in recent weeks.
In Baidoa, residents already suffering from a drought and food shortages braced for a possible Islamist assault on a town the insurgents have long wanted to control.
"We are afraid thirst or fighting will kill us," said mother-of-eight Fatuma Ali, outside her closed store.
"We do not know where to run."
PRESIDENTIAL POLITICS IN DJIBOUTI
Meeting with hundreds of Somali politicians in Djibouti this week, the United Nations' envoy and other international players are pushing for an all-inclusive administration to include the government and moderate Islamist factions.
The first steps in that, an expansion of parliament to include Islamists and then the election of a new president, were supposed to happen this week.
But Somali legislators, meeting in Djibouti due to insecurity at home, said on Monday they were likely to vote on a motion to allow more time for electing the new president.
Under the constitutional charter, a new Somali president should be chosen by parliament within 30 days of the resignation of former President Abdullahi Yusuf, who quit on December 29.
Parliamentarians at the U.N.-hosted reconciliation process said they were looking for an extension of seven to 10 days.
Members of the opposition Alliance for the Re-Liberation of Somalia (ARS), likely to join a new unity government, said they would like the election to be postponed by a few weeks.
The international community hopes a more inclusive Somali administration will be able to reach out to armed groups still fighting the government and African Union peacekeepers.
The more militant Islamist wing of the ARS, based in Eritrea, has so far refused to take part in the peace process. So have fighters in the hardline Islamist group Al Shabaab, who want to impose their strict version of Islamic law in Somalia.
Both members of parliament and ARS members said it would make more sense to broaden the discussions to include others. "We are for the reconciliation, but it depends on who we are going to reconcile," MP Asha Ahmed Abdullah said.
(Additional reporting by David Clarke and Abdiaziz Hassan in Djibouti, Abdi Sheikh in Mogadishu, Tsegaye Tadesse in Addis Ababa; Editing by Andrew Cawthorne)