Efforts to bring stability to lawless Somalia gathered pace Tuesday when east African leaders urged non-regional states to contribute troops to a proposed controversial peacekeeping mission.
But as regional powers looked to calm the situation in the volatile Horn of Africa nation, Somali lawmakers looked set to deal a blow to the fragile clan balance by ousting the speaker of parliament. The Somali government, meanwhile, rescinded a ban on four broadcasters, a day after they were ordered off the air for allegedly inciting violence.
Following talks in the Kenyan capital, Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi and Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki issued a joint statement "calling for the immediate deployment of an AU-IGAD stabilisation force to Somalia".
As chair of the seven-member Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD), Kibaki has approached eight outside nations to contribute troops to an African Union (AU) force which is projected to be 8,000 strong.
Angola, Mozambique, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Tanzania, Tunisia and Zambia have all been asked to supply soldiers to help restore stability after Ethiopian and Somali forces ousted a hard-line movement from Mogadishu last month, Kibaki's office said in a statement. It said the Kenyan president had dispatched six special envoys to the eight nations to explore possibilities of additional troop contributions.
Somali Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi was confident the mission would arrive shortly, telling lawmakers "the African peacekeepers are going to come to Somalia within weeks." Thus far, however, only one IGAD member, Uganda, has publicly offered to contribute to the mission and few others appear likely to do so as Somalia's immediate neighbours - Djibouti, Ethiopia and Kenya - are precluded from participating by a UN mandate regarding the force. Somalia has been without a functioning central authority since the 1991 ouster of strongman Mohamed Siad Barre plunged the country into anarchy.
A transitional Somali government, created two years ago in Kenya, has been riddled with infighting and was unable to assert control while the Islamists imposed their own order in Mogadishu from June until late December.
Divisions at the heart of the interim administration were highlighted as MPs at the government's provisional base in Baidoa plotted to oust their speaker Sharif Hassan Sheikh Aden who brokered unauthorised talks with the Islamists in November. The motion is expected to be presented on Wednesday while Aden is in Brussels.
"I think many members of parliament are in favour of the motion. I can tell you there are more than 100 MPs who are pleased with the motion," said one lawmaker, Madobe Nunow. "It will be passed," he told AFP.
According to the country's transitional charter, the motion has to be approved by a simple majority of members present during debate. "The motion has not yet been presented in the parliament. But if this motion is passed the speaker will lose his post because he is out of the country representing nobody," said Osman Elmi Boqore, the second deputy speaker.
Aden, an influential politician, is currently in Brussels to meet officials from the Somalia Contact Group, an international panel that is rallying world support for efforts aimed at restoring lasting peace in Somalia.
Somali watchers have said his ouster would further polarise the government and parliament, whose formation is based on a complex power-sharing alliance among fractious clans.
Aden was seen as a factor for the participation of the large Hawiye clan - dominant in the capital Mogadishu - in the government of President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, himself from the Darod clan. Yusuf's government, having imposed martial law, has been flexing its muscles in recent days with extensive searches for Islamists and their weapons.
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