Published On: Fri, Mar 1st, 2013

Plan floated at U.N. to lift Somalia arms embargo for a year. (Reuters)

SoldierUNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – A proposal to lift a U.N. arms embargo on the Somalian government for a year but leave in place restrictions on weapons like surface-to-air missiles has been floated among a deeply split 15-member U.N. Security Council, diplomats said on Wednesday.

The Somali government has requested that the 21-year-old arms embargo be lifted so it can strengthen its poorly equipped, ill-disciplined military – more a group of rival militias than a cohesive fighting force loyal to a single president – to battle al Qaeda-affiliated Islamist rebels.

A draft resolution to renew a U.N.-mandated African Union peacekeeping force in Somalia, reconfigure the U.N. mission and decide on the arms embargo request is likely to be circulated among Security Council members this week, diplomats said.

The Security Council is scheduled to vote on the resolution next Wednesday before the mandate of the 17,600-strong AU peacekeeping force, known as AMISOM, expires the next day, March 7.

“What we may see is a lifting for a defined period … as far as the government itself is concerned but with some caveats,” said a council diplomat. “For example, excluding some types of equipment, which would continue to be embargoed.”

He said the proposed defined period could be a year.

The United States has been urging council members to agree to demands by the government in Mogadishu for the embargo to be lifted, while Britain and France were reluctant, council diplomats said. Negotiations were ongoing, they said.

The Security Council imposed the embargo in 1992 to cut the flow of arms to feuding warlords, who a year earlier ousted dictator Mohamed Siad Barre and plunged Somalia into civil war. The country last year held its first national vote since 1991 to elect a president and prime minister.

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“It sends shivers down the spine,” one council diplomat said of the proposal to lift the embargo. “This move would come with significant security risks and would set a deplorable precedent as the situation is still extremely volatile.”

He said the current embargo provided sufficient exemptions for the Somali security forces to be properly equipped and that the council was very divided over the issue.

Another U.N. diplomat said the Security Council’s Monitoring Group on Somalia and Eritrea, an independent panel that reports on compliance with U.N. sanctions, had reported that some al Qaeda-linked al Shabaab militants had infiltrated units of the Somali security forces.

U.N. monitors have also warned that the Islamist militants in the Horn of Africa nation are receiving weapons from distribution networks linked to Yemen and Iran, diplomats have told Reuters.

“There’s a good argument for sending a strong signal that Somalia now has a government that is increasingly establishing itself as a proper government … but on the other hand of course there is continuing concern about security,” a council diplomat said.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said earlier this month that the council should consider lifting the arms embargo to help rebuild Somalia’s security forces and consolidate military gains against al Shabaab militants.

AU troops from Uganda, Burundi, Kenya and Ethiopia are battling al Shabaab militants on several fronts in Somalia and have forced them to abandon significant territory in southern and central areas of the Horn of Africa country.

The militants, who merged with al Qaeda in February last year, launched their campaign against the government in early 2007, seeking to impose sharia, or strict Islamic law, on the entire country.

(Editing by Peter Cooney)


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There have been no elections in Somalia since 1967 and there won’t be any this year either. But the country has a new parliament (appointed on the advice of clan elders) who have elected a new president, and the new government actually now controls a significant part of the country. The world’s only fully “failed state” may finally be starting to return to normality.A failed state is a horrendous thing: no government, no army, no police, no courts, no law, just bands of armed men taking what they want. Somalia has been like that for more than 20 years, but now there is hope. So much hope that last month the United Nations Security Council partially lifted its embargo on arms sales to Somalia in order to let the new Somali government buy arms, and last week the U.S. government followed suit.The new government replaces the “Transitional Federal Government”, another unelected body that had enjoyed the support of the UN and the African Union for eight pointless years. Then last year a World Bank report demonstrated the sheer scale of its corruption: seven out of every ten dollars of foreign aid vanished into the pockets of TFG officials before reaching the state’s coffers.Fully a quarter of the “national budget” was being absorbed by the offices of the president, the vice-president and the speaker of parliament. The fact that after all that the TFG still only controlled about one square kilometre (less than one square mile) of Mogadishu, the capital, while the rest of the shattered city was run by the Islamist al-Shabaab militia, an affiliate of al-Qaeda, also contributed to the international disillusionment.That tiny patch of ground, moreover, was being defended not by Somali troops but by thousands of Ugandan and Burundian soldiers of the African Union Mission in Somalia (Unisom). More than 500 of them had lost their lives defending the useless TFG, and the foreign donors were losing faith in the mission. But the Unisom soldiers did achieve one major thing: they fought al-Shabaab to a standstill in Mogadishu.In August 2011 the Islamist militia pulled its troops out of the capital. That created an opening, and the international community seized it. It ruthlessly initiated a process designed to push the TFG aside: Somali clan elders were asked to nominate members for a new 250-seat parliament, which was then asked to vote for a new president and government.It was obviously impossible to hold a free election in a country much of which was still under al-Shabaab’s control, but this process also had the advantage that it allowed the foreigners to shape the result. The corrupt officials who had run the old TFG all re-applied for their old jobs, but none of them succeeded.The new president who emerged from this process, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, is a former academic and human rights worker who only entered politics in 2011. No whiff of corruption clings to him, and he has worked tirelessly to bring about national reconciliation. And he has the wind at his back: just after he was chosen last September, a Kenyan force evicted al-Shebaab from Somalia’s second city, Kismayo.That still leaves about 95 percent of the country’s territory and three-quarters of its population beyond the government’s direct control. Al-Shabaab still rules in most rural parts of the country, and Ethiopian troops and their militia allies control much of the western border areas. Pirates with a lot of guns and money effectively dominate much of the north.One whole chunk of the country, calling itself Somaliland, has declared its independence (and runs its affairs much more peacefully and efficiently than any other part of Somalia). No other country recognizes its independence at the moment, but it used to be a British colony, quite separate from Italian-ruled Somalia, and in principle it can make exactly the same case for independence as Eritrea did when it broke away from Ethiopia.The worst problem facing President Mohamud is the venal and cunning politicians who have exploited the clan loyalties that pervade every aspect of Somali life to carve out their own little empires. Some are frankly and unashamedly warlords; others, including all the senior officials in the defunct TFG, masquerade as national politicians but work for their own interests.They have not gone away, nor have the clan rivalries that kept the fighting going for 21 years. Drawing up the rules and sharing out the power for a new federal Somalia (none of which has yet been decided) will give them plenty of opportunities to make trouble for the new president and regain their former power. Mohamud definitely has his work cut out for him.Nevertheless, he has strong UN and African Union support, and he now has a chance to create a spreading zone of peace in the country and start rebuilding national institutions. So last week the United States declared that it was now willing to provide military aid, including arms exports, to Somalia. Weirdly, that actually means that thing are looking up in the world’s only failed state.Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.