SOMALIA: Somali President enters Mogadishu for first time since ousting

Somali President Abdullahi Yusuf entered Mogadishu on Monday (January 8) to cap a remarkable turn-around in the capital Islamists ruled since June before being ousted before the New Year. It is the first time Yusuf has landed in Mogadishu since being elected President in 2004. He went straight to bullet-scarred Villa Somalia compound, the former presidential palace of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre, whose 1991 ouster as Somalia's last national president in 1991 triggered more than 15 years of anarchy. After several protests and attacks against Ethiopian occupying troops in recent days, the streets of Mogadishu were under heavy security on Monday. Thousands of mainly Somali soldiers were on patrol. "He is the President he has to withdraw the Ethiopian troops in Somalia," said Mohamed Ali a resident of Mogadishu. Yusuf has stayed out of the capital, where he is an outsider and still has many enemies from his time as warlord based in the semi-autonomous northern Puntland region, for years. In a war that took just two weeks, government troops backed by the Ethiopian military ran Islamist fighters out of southern Somalia, smashing them with the superior Ethiopian military might of tanks and attack helicopters. Somalis and Ethiopians have a rivalry stretching back for generations, and the Islamists had whipped up nationalist fervour against them in the build-up to the war. Yusuf, whose election at the Somali peace process in Kenya in October 2004 was engineered by Ethiopia with the support of other countries in the region, has long asked for foreign troops to help his fractious government take control of Somalia.

ITN Source | January 9, 2007

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