Wednesday, January 03, 2007

ABC of US Policy in Somalia:
"QUESTION: I was confused about what the U.S. position was looking back about Ethiopia going in, because when we had a briefing with Assistant Secretary Frazer I got the sense that she was not supportive of the Ethiopians going in, it's time for diplomacy and all that, and yet the guidance from the State Department subsequently seemed to endorse it.
MR. MCCORMACK: Here's the situation. It was a complicated situation in which you had a number of different external forces in Somalia -- and I'm not talking about the Ethiopians here -- who were funding and supporting the Islamic Courts for their own purposes, either through arms or through money, infusions of money, or allowing personnel -- people from outside Somalia -- to flow into Somalia in support of the Islamic Courts. We supported a negotiated solution between the Transitional Federal Institutions and the Islamic Courts. The Transitional Federal Institutions are the ones internationally recognized. It is -- it has been up until this point a relatively weak set of institutions that has not been able to extend its control over all of Somalia, but we supported nonetheless negotiations and political dialogue between the Courts and those Transitional Federal Institutions. Over time, the Islamic Courts demonstrated behavior that was inconsistent with those -- with that policy of trying to see those sorts of negotiations. We tried to get together the parties in Khartoum but the Islamic Courts walked out because they felt -- it appeared that they believed that they could gain an upper hand through use of force, through taking over territory, basically backing the Transitional Federal Institutions into a smaller and smaller corner. So the Ethiopian government initially made some moves, moved their forces into position to try to support politically the Transitional Federal Institutions and to make it clear that the Islamic Courts could not win through the force of arms what they couldn't win via the negotiating table."