Somalia wants a high-profile UN Security Council session in Nairobi to agree funding for an African peacekeeping force to end 13 years of chaos, the country’s new president said. “We really want them (council members) to resolve the Somali security question,” Abdullahi Yusuf, president of a new Somali Transitional Federal Government (TFG), told Reuters of the rare Council meeting taking place in neighbouring Kenya this week. “Above all we want it to tackle the question of funding of an African force because the African Union (AU) is too young for such a task,” Yusuf, visiting Djibouti, added in an interview on Tuesday evening that was received yesterday.

“The resources and the agreement for this force are expected from their (the UN.’s) side. We will present our programme and count on them for the mobilisation of the funds.”

<B>Undeterred </B>

The Council was meeting in Nairobi yesterday and today – the first session outside New York in 14 years – mainly to give momentum to stalled efforts to bring peace to southern Sudan. Somali government officials are due to address the 15 Council ambassadors on Friday.

Yusuf has asked the AU to send 20,000 peacekeepers to help disarm the militias who rule the damaged country of up to 10 million and collect the millions of small arms owned by Somalis.

The AU is considering the request but the fledgling peacekeeping department of the cash-strapped, 53-nation organisation is already overstretched by trying to monitor a ceasefire in Sudan’s troubled Darfur region.

Five Palestinian groups to field election candidate Yusuf was elected by a reconciliation conference held in Kenya last month seeking to end the chaos that has gripped Somalia since the overthrow of Somali dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991. Yusuf has yet to return to his Horn of Africa nation, where militias have carved the country into well-armed clan fiefdoms. Several militant Islamist groups in Mogadishu long hostile to Yusuf have expressed opposition to the deployment of foreign forces, saying without elaborating that their use would be against Islam and they would transmit “diseases.” Yusuf said he would not be deterred by the difficulty of the task of disarming Somalis, saying his apperoach would be different to that employed by a short-lived, Arab-backed administration that failed to control more than a few streets in Mogadishu during its 2000-2003 mandate.

“I will fight against anything that threatens security and the integrity of the Somali state, even if my life is threatened. It is my duty,” said Yusuf, an opponent of the 2000-2003 government. He said it was clear that his government’s three-phase plan for Somalia’s recovery –disarmament, rebuilding the army and then national reconstruction –needed foreign help. But this did not mean foreign domination, he said.

“We need an outside army to help us rebuild an army able to keep order and peace,” he said. “But we do not intend to subject the Somali people to outside armed forces. What we want is that the foreign force is accompanied by a Somali corps.” “Contrary to those (in the 2000-2003 administration), we will reconcile people and obtain their disarmament voluntarily.”

<B>Omar Hassan</B>