By C. Bryson Hull
Friday, April 13, 2007
NAIROBI (Reuters) - A rift between Ethiopia and Eritrea playing out in Somalia threatened to split the region as East African states met on Friday to discuss the crisis in their anarchic Horn of Africa neighbor.
Diplomats meeting in Nairobi under the auspices of the seven-member Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD) were expected to push for more support for African Union peacekeepers and national reconciliation in Somalia.
Kenya, Uganda, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan and Somalia make up the east African bloc.
But the meeting of foreign ministers quickly became a forum for the festering feud between Ethiopia and Eritrea, rivals still bitter over their 1998-2000 border war and locked in what many see as a proxy war in Somalia.
Somalia and ally Ethiopia accused Eritrea of undermining Somalia's interim government by supplying weapons to insurgents involved in some of the worst violence in Mogadishu in 15 years.
Eritrea blamed the United States and Ethiopia for their "irresponsible external interference" under the guise of fighting terrorism in Somalia.
At least 1,000 people were killed and thousands fled the Somali capital after Ethiopian and Somali forces two weeks ago launched an offensive to wipe out insurgents drawn from a dominant Mogadishu clan and a former militant Islamist movement.
"Eritrea is trying to scupper what we are doing," Ethiopian State Minister for Foreign Affairs Tekeda Alemu told the meeting. "Eritrea is not only visibly supporting and promoting terrorism in our region, it is actively engaged in terrorism."
Several United Nations reports on arms embargo violations in Somalia have said Eritrea provided weapons and training to the former Islamic Courts Union (ICU), which Washington accuses of working with al Qaeda.
"FACTUALLY UNTENABLE"
Eritrea denies that, but regional experts say the U.N. reports are mostly accurate.
"One can easily understand the destructive role the government of Eritrea is playing ... by giving all material and other support first to the ICU and now to its remnants," Somali Foreign Affairs Minister Ismail Hurre Buba told the meeting.
He urged IGAD to sanction Eritrea.
The Islamist movement ruled southern Somalia for the last half of 2006, until Ethiopian and Somali troops beat them in a two-week New Years' war with U.S. backing and tactical support.
"The portrayal of developments in Somalia in terms of the global war on terrorism is factually untenable and politically imprudent," said Andeab Gebremeskel, Eritrea's foreign affairs director for Africa, Asia and the Pacific.
Diplomats said they did not expect much action from the meeting beyond urging a ceasefire and pressing for inclusiveness at a delayed reconciliation congress due in Mogadishu in May.
"The purpose of this meeting is to try and prevent the fragmentation of IGAD," said a diplomat who declined to be named.
A heads of state summit last year embarrassingly failed to materialize after Eritrea, Sudan and Djibouti refused to come, angry that it appeared Ethiopia would get the war it wanted to eliminate the Islamists.
Source: Reuters, April 13, 2007