KAMPALA: African Union leaders began a three-day summit in Kampala Sunday to boost the organization’s troop levels in Somalia and obtain a mandate to crush Islamist insurgents in the war-torn nation.
More than 30 heads of state from the AU’s 53 members gathered amid unprecedented security in the Ugandan capital, two weeks after suicide attacks in the city claimed by Somalia’s Shebab group killed 76 people.
Uganda’s president urged African Union leaders at a summit here Sunday to "sweep the terrorists" out of Africa.
"Let us now act in concert and sweep them out of Africa," Yoweri Museveni said, referring to the perpetrators of the July 11 blasts in Kampala that killed 76 revelers watching the football World Cup final.
"Let them go back to Asia or the Middle East where I understand some come from," he said at the opening of the three-day summit.
The AU summit observed two minutes of silence for the victims of the attacks.
"The African Union stands with you, my brother President Museveni, and with the people of Uganda," Bingu wa Mutharika, Malawi’s president and current chairman of the AU, said in his opening remarks.
Museveni also said many of the organizers of the attacks in Kampala have been arrested.
"Their interrogations have yielded very good information," he added.
Ugandan authorities have not been precise regarding the number of people detained for their suspected involvement in the blasts. Last week the inspector general of the Uganda police force, Kale Kayihura, put the figure at "more than 20" but several of those individuals have since been released.
The bombings that ripped through crowds watching the World Cup final were meant to bully Uganda into pulling out of the AU mission in Somalia (AMISOM), the last thing standing between the Shebab and total power.
Uganda reacted by saying it could send 2,000 more troops and urged more decisive international support, while the embattled Somali government argued the attacks were evidence Somalia required the world’s attention.
"Guinea is ready to immediately dispatch a battalion," AU chief Jean Ping said at a press conference in Kampala on Friday. "We are going to quickly top the 8,000 mark… I think the current trend could take us over 10,000."
Diplomats in Kampala say that Angola, Mozambique and South Africa may also pledge troops, whose current deployment consists of just over 6,000 Ugandans and Burundians.
The Shebab leadership has proclaimed its allegiance to Osama bin Laden and the group’s first bomb attacks outside Somalia renewed fears that the Horn of Africa country could become a new safe haven for Al Qaeda.
Ping also reiterated at the press conference that the African Union was seeking a tougher mandate for AMISOM under the United Nations Charter’s chapter seven, allowing it to take more aggressive action.
"If this request is answered positively, our troops will attack," he said.
Troops from the United States and the United Nations have previously not been able to crush the insurgency in Somalia, which has been without an effective government for two decades.
Eritrea, which is under international sanctions and has been accused of supporting the Shebab, argues that the Islamist insurgency needs to be engaged at the negotiating table than on the battlefield.
"We believe that military involvement can not bring a peaceful solution," Eritrean Foreign Minister Osman Saleh told AFP Friday on the sidelines of the pre-summit ministerial gathering.
The Shebab — as well as Mogadishu residents and rights groups — have criticized AMISOM for causing civilian deaths by shelling targets in densely-populated areas.
Analysts have warned a beefed up AMISOM mandate could make things worse.
"We are quite worried about the consequences of such an operation, because if they are engaged in quite an indiscriminate manner, they run the risk of playing in the hands of the Shebab," said the International Crisis Group’s Ernst Jan Hogendoorn.
The continent’s leaders also discussed the future of Sudan, where the oil-rich south is due to hold a referendum on independence in January.
Sudanese President Omar Al-Bashir, whose movements have been under close scrutiny since the International Criminal Court issued a warrant against him over the war in Darfur, did not attend the gathering, AU sources said.
International Criminal Court indictments against Sudanese President Omar Al-Bashir are "undermining African solidarity and African peace and security," the African Union president said Sunday.
"To subject a sovereign head of state to a warrant of arrest is undermining African solidarity and African peace and security that we fought for for so many years," said Malawian President Bingu wa Mutharika, current head of the pan-African organization.
Mutharika urged his counterparts at an AU summit in Kampala to look for ways of resolving the conflict in Sudan without the need to arrest Bashir.
"There is a general concern in Africa that the issuance of a warrant of arrest for… Al-Bashir, a duly elected president, is a violation of the principles of sovereignty guaranteed under the United Nations and under the African Union charter," he said.
"Maybe there are other ways of addressing this problem. Let us together explore this possibility."
The ICC this month added a genocide charge to Bashir’s indictment, which also includes charges for war crimes and crimes against humanity related to the conflict in Sudan’s Darfur region.
