Twenty-four dead in renewed fighting in central Somalia

MOGADISHU, Jan. 13 (Xinhua) -- The death toll in renewed clashes between rival Islamist groups in central Somalia have risen to 24 while more than 50 others were injured in fighting raging for the consecutive fourth day, witnesses and health officials said on Wednesday.

The latest flare up of violence erupted between fighters loyal to the Islamist rebel movement of Hezbul Islam backed by its ally of Al Shabaab and the moderate pro-government Islamist sect of Ahlu Sunnah Wal Jama.

Both sides have been fighting over the strategic central Somalia town of Beledweyne which has changed hands between the two sides for the past two days. Latest reports indicate the two sides partly control the town while sporadic fighting still continues in and around the town.

Both sides claim to have inflicted heavy losses on the other side but hospital sources in the region say that nearly 24 people mostly combatants from the warring sides were killed while more than 50 others were reportedly injured in the fierce clashes that continued for control of the town and adjacent districts.

Many civilians in the combat areas were reported to have fled their homes as the two sides exchanged heavy artillery in and around residential areas in Beledweyne, the provincial capital of Hiran region in central Somalia which has lately been in the hands of Hezbul Islam militias.

The pro-government Ahlu Sunna fighters control most districts in the central Somalia province of Galgaduud and Mudug and have been trying to take Hiran and its environs from the radical Islamist faction of Hezbul Islam which is allied to the Al Shabaab faction, a group that controls much of south and centre of Somalia.

Al Shabaab and Hezbul Islam factions are opposed to the internationally recognized Somali government. The groups, seen as terrorist entities, want to overthrow the Somalia government and create an Islamic state in the war-torn east African country of Somalia.

Source:news.xinhuanet.com/

Will U.S. troops leave Haiti too soon?

WASHINGTON — As the number of U.S. soldiers in Haiti and aboard a small armada floating offshore builds toward 18,000, the question of how and when they will leave remains unanswered.

While past humanitarian missions, most notably in Somalia in the 1990s, have morphed into protracted — and bloody — "peacemaking" exercises, experts say there are many reasons that Haiti is unlikely to turn into a quagmire for U.S. forces.

If anything, said a half-dozen officials with long experience in humanitarian relief and peacekeeping operations, the danger is that the troops, ships and helicopters will leave too soon, before security is re-established. With ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Obama administration has little appetite for an extended military mission in the Caribbean.

"The risk is the opposite: that they will leave too quickly, and we will have chaos," said Andrew Natsios, who led the U.S. Agency for International Development from 2001 to 2005. "They've got their hands full in Iraq, Afghanistan-Pakistan. The U.S. military does not want to do this, in terms of anything beyond the humanitarian response."

The Haiti earthquake Jan. 12 devastated the country's capital, Port-au-Prince, left as many as 200,000 dead and crippled both an existing U.N. peacekeeping mission and the country's government.

There are about 13,000 U.S. military personnel in Haiti — roughly 4,000 ashore and 9,000 aboard ship — and that number will grow to 17,000 to 18,000 by this weekend with the arrival of a second Marine Expeditionary Unit, said Marine Col. David Lapan, a Pentagon spokesman. Twenty-two ships and 66 military helicopters are participating in the relief effort, he said.

Lapan said, "There hasn't been an impact to this point" on operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, although military planners are keeping a close eye on the flow of forces.

If all goes as planned, U.S. troops will begin departing after United Nations agencies and private aid groups are ready to fully take on the task of recovery and rebuilding. A U.N. peacekeeping force, which is being enlarged with 2,000 more peacekeepers and 1,500 policemen, will provide security alongside Haitian security forces.

"As we get through this initial crisis, as those other organizations bring up their capacity, we will work with all those organizations to determine when the right time is to transition our capabilities out of Haiti," Air Force Gen. Douglas Fraser, the commander of the military's Southern Command, said Thursday.

Neither the White House nor the Pentagon has spelled out the details of when and how that will happen, however.

Large-scale violence, which has been sporadic so far, or thousands of desperate Haitians taking to the seas to try to reach U.S. shores could upend the Obama administration's plans.

It also remains to be seen who'll coordinate the task of rebuilding Haiti, which will take years, cost billions of dollars and involve hundreds of agencies and charities.

Private aid groups have complained that the U.S. military has wrested too much control of the relief effort.

"There's a lot of pitfalls to all this well-meaning compassion," said Elizabeth Ferris, an expert on humanitarian issues at the Washington-based Brookings Institution, a research center.

The U.S. military's role "is still not clear to me," Ferris said, questioning whether American forces are focused on their own security, setting up logistics supply lines or directly delivering relief supplies. Once international and nongovernment agencies stand up their operations, "are there plans for it to exit in a reasonable period of time?" she asked.

The United States and the U.N. signed an agreement Friday clarifying the world body's lead role in earthquake relief efforts, the Reuters news agency reported.

A senior State Department official said the chances of Somalia-like "mission creep," with U.S. forces staying in Haiti as political arbiters, "are zero. ... What's the strategic rationale?"

Who'll lead the huge reconstruction effort "is a reasonable question," however, said the official, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity in order to speak more frankly.

The United States has a long, troubled history of intervention in Haiti. U.S. Marines occupied the country from 1915 to 1934. President Bill Clinton sent in U.S. troops in 1994 to restore democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. A decade later, U.S. Marines were back as part of an international stabilization force sent in after Aristide fled the capital.

James Dobbins, who was Clinton's special envoy to Haiti and helped organize the 1994 intervention, said he didn't foresee a lengthy stay for U.S. forces in the wake of the earthquake. Haiti's long-standing political tensions have been muted since Aristide departed, he said.

The U.N. peacekeeping mission, despite losing 70 staff members in the earthquake and having its headquarters collapse, is well-established in Haiti and has a clear job mandate, Dobbins and other specialists said.

"Ideally, I'd like to see U.S. troops stay as part of the U.N. force ... but I don't think that's likely to happen because of our other priorities," Dobbins said.

Source:mcclatchydc.com/

New Report Identifies Challenges in Africa for Obama

A new report says the Obama administration faces key challenges in Africa this year, including poverty, climate change and HIV/AIDS.

Africa Policy Outlook 2010 says the U.S. must take action to ensure it “does not miss a historic opportunity to bring meaningful change to the continent.” The report is co-published by Africa Action and Foreign Policy in Focus.

Gerald LeMelle, executive director of Africa Action, “The policy outlook is something we’ve put out now for 10 years. What we try to do is give a sort of an honest look at what the following year will look like vis-à-vis U.S. foreign policy in Africa based on the trends that we’ve seen from the year previous.”

Poverty is the biggest challenge

“We don’t like to discuss poverty that much because it’s kind of an indication that some of the free trade deregulation policies so favored by Western countries and Bretton Woods Institutions (World Bank, IMF) are in fact failing,” he says.

LeMelle calls poverty the greatest single threat to U.S. security today.

“We have seen the result of failed states across the globe and including in Africa, places like Somalia, that have come back to haunt The United States and other countries. And therefore, if we are not seriously addressing the question of poverty, then we’re really setting ourselves up for a fairly dismal future,” he says.

The Africa Policy Outlook report calls for a “nuts and bolts” approach to deal with poverty.

“We have to stop promoting deregulation. We have to stop promoting free trade. We have to stop promoting structural adjustment programs that make it safe for foreign direct investment to make 20, 30 percent profit at the expense of even minimal reinvestment in these communities where the money is being taken from,” he says.

LeMelle says an example of how failure to reinvest in the community can cause major problems is Nigeria’s Niger Delta.

“Fifteen years ago, we were organizing with Ken Saro-Wiwa, the peace activist from the Niger Delta, to get the oil companies to stop dumping oil into the environment. And by and large they refused to meet even minimal demands of reinvesting in schools and in housing and in roads for poor people in the Niger Delta. Today, people in the Niger Delta are picking up guns and shooting,” he says.

He calls it an attitude of profits being more important than people.

Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogoni activists were executed after being convicted by a military tribunal for allegedly instigating violence that led to the deaths of pro-government Ogoni chiefs. Saro-Wiwa and the others were hanged in 1995.

Climate Change

The report says another major challenge to Africa is climate change. And LeMelle is critical of the major powers for failing to take stronger action at the Copenhagen climate summit in December.

“Climate change is going to be a major contributing factor to death, disease, conflict, insecurity - all the things that we are concerned about from the perspective of national and global security. So we have to begin to address this,” he says.

LeMelle says while the rich nations pledged $100 billion to help developing countries deal with climate change, it’s unclear whether that’s new money or funds reallocated from other programs.

HIV/AIDS

The Africa Action report says HIV/AIDS will also remain a major problem, despite programs such as PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. LeMelle says it’s responsible for an 18 percent decrease in AIDS-related deaths across Africa since 2004. But he says the increase in funding for PEPFAR is not as large as in years past.

“The end result has been that countries like Tanzania are beginning to turn people away. New patients approach them and they are told they can only enter the rolls (for treatment) if someone else dies. Or they’re saying they’re not taking any new patients for the coming year. This is going to reverse the trend toward successfully decreasing the deaths from HIV,” he says.

He calls on the Obama administration to keep the strong U.S. support to provide anti-retroviral drugs to those infected with the AIDS virus.

LeMelle says with the many problems facing the continent, “Africa deserves a more sophisticated approach than what has been afforded to its people.”

Source:voanews.com/