United States Will Release Food Aid to Somalia
03 January 2007
State's Frazer will co-chair Somali contact group meeting January 5 in Kenya
Washington -- The United States will be releasing food aid to Somalia and plans to participate in a donor’s conference to assess humanitarian needs in the country following the overthrow of the Somali Council of Islamic Courts by Ethiopian and Somali forces.
State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said January 3 there will be “some immediate donations in which we will be able to release some food aid that will get to the Somali people.”
Bush administration officials also will be meeting with members of the humanitarian assistance donor community to discuss the scope of the country’s needs and who can help to fill them. “And certainly we'll be part of that,” McCormack said.
He said the Bush administration also has requested that a Somalia Contact Group meeting be held to discuss the next steps in the country following the ouster of the Islamic Courts, including ways to address the security situation and strengthen Somalia’s political institutions.
Jendayi Frazer, assistant secretary of state for African affairs, will co-host the meeting, which McCormack said will take place January 5 in Kenya.
Frazer is “very active in talking with interested parties both in the region and more widely through the mechanism in the Somalia Contact Group about what are the next steps in Somalia,” he said. (See related article.)
McCormack said the United States supported a negotiated solution to the conflict between the Islamic Courts and Somalia’s Transitional Federal Institutions, the provisional government. “Over time,” he said, “the Islamic Courts demonstrated behavior that was inconsistent with that policy of trying to see those sorts of negotiations … [and] it appeared that they believed that they could gain an upper hand through use of force.”
He said Ethiopian forces had intervened militarily “in consultation with” the Transitional Federal Institutions. “[T]hey weren't going to let the internationally recognized government in Somalia fall to the Islamic Courts through use of force.”
McCormack also said the leadership of Islamic Courts was falling under the control of those with links to al-Qaida and other terrorist organizations “that quite clearly were interested in imposing draconian types of interpretations of Shariah law on Somalia.” The Islamic Courts also were receiving outside support, such as arms, funds and non-Somali personnel.
The spokesman added that in the recent fighting, the top leadership of the Islamic Courts “fled in the face of the Ethiopian army, and they left behind teenagers and others to fight the battle with the Ethiopians. That's the kind of people that we're dealing with.”
He said the United States will be working closely with states in the region to prevent those leaders with ties to terrorist organizations from leaving Somalia for safe haven elsewhere.
“The other countries in the region don't want to see that any more than we do,” he said.
(USINFO is produced by the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
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