Sunday, January 07, 2007
Farah Abdi Hussein, who witnessed the attack, said gunmen launched grenades at Ethiopians about four kilometres from the airport. One Somali soldier was wounded, according to a Somali military official asked not to be named for fear of reprisals.
The unrest comes at a precarious time for Somalia's transitional administration, which is trying to assert some control for the first time in a capital that has seen little more than chaos in the 15 years since clan warlords toppled a dictatorship and then turned on each other.
The government, backed by Ethiopia's military, drove out a radical Islamic militia last week. But many in predominantly Muslim Somalia resent the presence of troops from neighbouring Ethiopia, which has a large Christian population and has fought two wars with Somalia.
On Saturday, hundreds of furious protesters took to the streets, burning tires and smashing car windows while denouncing the presence of Ethiopian forces and shouting defiance at the Somali government's call for disarming Mogadishu.
Two people died in Saturday's violence, including a 13-year-old boy.
On Sunday, a similar protest took place about 350 kilometres away in Belet Weyne, after Ethiopian troops there detained a Somali military commander who refused to hand over an Islamic militiaman, witnesses said. That protest also turned violent, killing a 20-year-old civilian, Abdi Nor Salah Gedi said by telephone.
It was not clear who shot the man or the teenager killed Saturday.
Clan elders held emergency meetings Sunday and hundreds of Somali troops patrolled Mogadishu, setting up six extra checkpoints in areas where residents burned tires and broke car windows during Saturday's protests.
Dahir Abdi Kulima, a chieftain of the Hawiye, the dominant clan of southern Somalia, said the government's reliance on Ethiopia is backfiring.
“Since the Ethiopians arrived people are sleeping and waking with worry about what will happen next,” Mr. Kulima said during a break in a meeting with about a dozen other Hawiye elders. “This is a sign of upcoming problems in Somalia.”
Ethiopian soldiers, tanks and warplanes intervened in Somalia on Dec. 24 to defeat the Islamic movement, which had threatened to overthrow the internationally recognized government. At the time, the government controlled only the western town of Baidoa.
The African Union has begun planning for peacekeepers and Uganda has promised at least 1,000 troops. Previous peacekeeping forces met with hostility and violence when they tried to help in the early 1990s, and leaders of the routed Islamic militia are vowing from their hideouts to launch an Iraq-style guerrilla war.
Meanwhile, a top Somali politician with ties to leaders of the militant Muslim movement urged its fighters to surrender and join the peace process. And Sheik Sharif Hassan Aden, speaker of the transitional parliament but a strong critic of the interim government, also dropped his opposition to having foreign peacekeepers in Somalia, calling on people “to welcome, to hail, to respect, to accommodate them in a peaceful manner.”
Sheik Aden is closely linked to leaders of the militant Council of Islamic Courts, whose fighters scattered into the countryside after being defeated on the battlefield last week.
Source: AP, Jan 07, 2007