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ADDIS ABABA - A Somali Islamist group threatened today to fight any peacekeeping troops sent to their country as African leaders struggled to put together an international force for the anarchic Horn of Africa nation.
The European Union released 15 million euros ($28 million) to finance peacekeeping operations, but leaders at an African Union summit were still seeking the 4,000 troops they need to bring the projected force up to strength.
A total of 8,000 troops are seen as necessary to fill a power vacuum when Ethiopian troops pull out after having backed the government in a brief war that defeated the Islamists who had run much of the country for the previous six months.
"If African troops are not in place quickly, then there will be chaos," African Union commission chief Alpha Oumar Konare told the summit.
Delegates to the summit in Addis Ababa said Ghana, Algeria, Tanzania and Zambia were considering whether to provide troops but final pledges might not be made at the talks. So far Uganda, Nigeria and Malawi have promised soldiers.
As the African leaders deliberated, a Somali Islamist website posted a message apparently from a new insurgent group which spelled out the dangers awaiting any peacekeeping force.
"Somalia is not a place where you can come to earn a salary -- it is a place where you can die," said the self-styled Popular Resistance Movement.
"The salary you are coming to look for here would be used to transport your coffin back home."
A Somali government security dismissed the statement.
"I don't think such a group exists," the source, who asked not to be named, told Reuters. "They must be day-dreamers. The Islamists were totally crushed. They can never resurface again."
Will of the people
US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Jendayi Frazer said the statement was intended "to try to intimidate the AU and the international community not to assist the people of Somalia".
"Those extremists are clearly not reflecting the will of the Somali people," she told reporters in Addis Ababa.
The authenticity of the Popular Resistance Movement could not be independently confirmed. But its statement evoked the last catastrophic effort to pacify Somalia after the fall of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991.
US forces left ignominiously after 18 soldiers were killed and dragged around the streets of Mogadishu in an incident seen later in the movie "Black Hawk Down".
Since their defeat, the Islamists have scattered to south Somalia but vowed a long guerrilla war, and there has been a wave of low-level insurgency-style strikes on Ethiopian and government targets in recent weeks.
European Union aid chief Louis Michel said the Somali interim government had agreed to hold a broad reconciliation conference of clan and religious leaders and political groups to discuss the country's future.
Europe, the United States and Ethiopia had called on President Abdullahi Yusuf to open up to as many factions as possible, particularly moderate Islamists and powerful clan leaders, in order to bring stability.
Yusuf said: "Anyone who wants peace is our citizen and we are ready to cooperate."
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged the government to work with other groups and avoid revenge or triumphalism.
Analysts fear Somalia could quickly return to the anarchy that has scarred it for 15 years if no force takes the place of the Ethiopians.
Ethiopian President Meles Zenawi told Reuters at the weekend that a third of his forces were withdrawing from Somalia and he wanted the remainder out within weeks.
In the central Somali town of Baidoa, Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi called for the implementation of the state of emergency law recently passed by parliament.
He said lawmakers were moving around Baidoa in heavily armed battlewagons locally referred to as 'technicals' contrary to a law which bans possession of arms.
- REUTERS
