Peace Force Is Attacked on Arrival in Somalia

By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
Published: March 7, 2007

KINDU, Congo, March 6 ― The first group of African Union peacekeepers arrived Tuesday in Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital, and received a patently Mogadishu reception.

Insurgents shelled the airport where peacekeepers from Uganda had landed and peppered the area with gunfire, witnesses said, setting off battles across the city that killed several civilians.

The episode was the latest burst of violence in Somalia, and a sign that the situation the new peacekeepers are stepping into is dangerously reminiscent of the chaos that haunted the last such mission to Somalia in the 1990s. After 18 American soldiers were killed in the infamous “Black Hawk Down” episode in 1993, most troops were withdrawn.

The Ugandan peacekeepers are the vanguard of an African Union force that is intended to expand to 8,000 soldiers, though only 4,000 have been committed, mostly from nations that are close American allies, like Nigeria and Ghana.

Each day the insurgent attacks seem to intensify. On Tuesday, dozens of masked gunmen blasted an Ethiopian Army base in a coordinated attack that engulfed several of the more densely packed neighborhoods of Mogadishu.

Residents said Ethiopian troops pursuing the insurgents ordered families out of their homes at gunpoint.

“But we’re not going to leave, especially not for any Ethiopians,” said Kadijah Warsaame, a resident of a Mogadishu neighborhood called the Black Sea.

Many people suspect that the insurgents are remnants of the ousted Islamist movement, which won wide popular support last year when it pacified Mogadishu for the first time since Somalia’s central government collapsed in 1991. Many of Mogadishu’s influential clans backed the Islamists and have been lukewarm toward the transitional government, which is controlled by a clan from north of Mogadishu and includes many former warlords.

On Tuesday, elders of the powerful Hawiye clan issued a long statement condemning the Ethiopian occupation and accusing government troops of killing civilians.

The statement also said: “To disarm the armed people in Somalia, the government must come up with a clear policy that all Somalis find fair and just. We will not accept that some particular tribes be disarmed and made to hand over the confiscated arms to other tribes.”