Ethiopia premier hints at Somalia withdrawal

Nairobi/Addis Ababa - Ethiopia could withdraw its troops from war-torn Somalia even if the transitional government is not stable but will hold on at least until the African Union deploys additional peacekeepers, Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi has said. Ethiopian troops invaded neighbouring Somalia in 2006 to help kick out the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC) and put the transitional federal government back in power. Ethiopia has long worried that instability in Somalia and the existence of Somali separatist groups in Ethiopia's Ogaden region only increases the anxiety. 'The operation has been extremely expensive, so we will have to balance the domestic pressures on the one hand and pressures in Somalia on the other and try to come up with a balanced solution,' Zenawi told the Financial Times in an interview. The Somali government and some moderate opposition leaders recently signed a peace agreement, but Islamic insurgent group al-Shabaab - the armed wing of the UIC - has refused to recognize it. Al-Shabaab says Ethiopian must leave Somalia before any kind of peace can be achieved. UN agencies say over 6,000 civilians have died in the insurgency that exploded in early 2007. Hundreds of thousands of Somalis who fled fighting in the capital Mogadishu are now living in camps. Ethiopian troops, backed by a small contingent of African Union (AU) soldiers, have struggled to contain the insurgents, who last Friday seized control of the strategic port town Kismayo. Despite Zenawi's apparent impatience with the state of play and also squabbles between the Somali president and prime minister, he said that Ethiopia would 'hold the ring' until the AU could deploy more peacekeepers. However, he made it clear that Ethiopia was not happy with carrying the burden by itself, with little backing from the AU and no backing from the international community. 'We didn't anticipate that the international community would be happy riding the Ethiopian horse and flogging it at the same time for so long,' he told the British daily. Only a quarter of the planned 8,000-strong AU force has been deployed so far. The United Nations has also been mulling sending in a peacekeeping force, but has so far taken no action. Somalia has been plagued by chaos and clan-based civil war since dictator Mohamed Siad Barre was toppled in 1991.