Somalia’s PM Greeted by Cheers

It is just not a war without a victory parade, Ronin

Somalia’s Prime Minister Enters Capital, Greeted by Cheers After Ouster of Islamic Militias
By LES NEUHAUS
The Associated Press
MOGADISHU, Somalia – Somalia’s prime minister entered the capital Mogadishu on Friday in a visit meant to symbolize the government’s victory over Islamic rivals, a day after the militias abandoned the battle-scarred city.
Greeted by hundreds of cheering residents, Ali Mohamed Gedi drove into northern Mogadishu in a heavily armed convoy of 22 vehicles, as trucks fitted with loudspeakers roamed the city. Mogadishu has been controlled for the last six months by Islamic militias trying to establish a government based on the Quran, but the fighters abandoned the city on Thursday.
Several thousand demonstrators took to the streets to protest the presence of Ethiopian troops, throwing stones, burning tires and using cars to block a main road.
Earlier, Ethiopian troops aboard tanks fired warning shots into the air after dozens of young men threw stones at Gedi’s convoy. The men had been trying to block the convoy of about 300 soldiers traveling though a former Islamic stronghold, 17-year-old student Najiib Aden Muse said, adding that the youths were chanting, “Ethiopian invaders go home.”
Gedi drove through the international airport past Ethiopian tanks guarding the runway. Even before the rise of the Islamists, Gedi’s government was kept out of Mogadishu by clan violence. There was an attempt on his life during a rare trip to the city in November 2005.
Many in overwhelmingly Muslim Somalia are skeptical of the government’s reliance on neighboring Ethiopia, a traditional rival with a large Christian population and one of Africa’s largest armies. Ethiopia and Somalia fought a bloody war in 1977.
Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed, the executive leader of the Council of Islamic Courts, the umbrella group for the Islamic movement, was defiant in comments to The Associated Press.
“We will not run away from our enemies. We will never depart from Somalia. We will stay in our homeland,” he said from the southern coastal port of Kismayo, where his forces retreated from Mogadishu.
Hundreds of foreign fighters, mainly Arabs and southern Asians and some wounded, were seen in Kismayo. Some of the Islamic movement’s members espouse an extreme form of Islam, and the United States accuses it of harboring al-Qaida terrorists.
Somalia’s president vowed to take the fight to Kismayo.
“We are going to go there and confront them,” Abdullahi Yusuf said. “If we capture them we will bring them to justice.”
Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Meles Zenawi has said he will not give up the fight until extremists and foreign fighters supporting the Islamic movement had been crushed, predicting it would take a few weeks longer.
Ethiopian jets continued to buzz the front line town of Jilib, 65 miles north of Kismayo. Jilib is at a crucial junction of rivers and roads that lead to Kismayo.
Until now, the government has tried to rule from Baidoa, the only town it held before Ethiopian troops came to its aid less than two weeks ago.
“Now the difficult task of rebuilding the country begins,” Gedi told an AP reporter who was traveling with him. “We want to restore law and order.”
Gedi said he is ready to bring peace to the nation.
“I want to disarm the entire country’s general population,” he said. “Our people are sick of civil war and instability.”
Before the Islamists established control, Mogadishu had been ruled by competing clans who came together to support the Islamic fighters. Now, the clans could return to fighting one another and may reject the government’s authority.
Somalia’s clans have been the basis of politics and identity here for centuries. But infighting has left the country without an effective government since 1991, when clan-based warlords overthrew a dictator and then turned on one another.
Somalia’s complex clan politics have been the undoing of at least 14 attempts to install a government in this violent, anarchic nation. Gedi’s government is riddled with clan rivalries, most notably between the young prime minister and elderly President Abdullahi Yusuf.
“The future of Somalia is very bleak and Somalis will share the same fate with Iraq and Afghanistan,” Abdullahi Mohamed Laki, a Mogadishu resident, said Thursday. “The transitional government has no broad support in the capital.”
The U.N. said Friday it will resume humanitarian food aid flights to the country this weekend. Fighting forced the U.N. to evacuate its international staff and halt assistance to 2 million people affected by the conflict and recent floods.
The African Union and the Arab League have called for Ethiopian and all foreign troops to immediately leave Somalia.
Associated Press writers Salad Duhul and Mohamed Olad Hassan in Mogadishu, Nasteex Dahir Farah in Kismayo and Elizabeth A. Kennedy in Baidoa, Somalia contributed to this report.

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