UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Somalia's prime minister urged the U.N. Security Council on Thursday to send peacekeepers to his country, but council members told him they wanted to see political progress toward peace first.Islamist-led rebels have been fighting the Somali government and its Ethiopian military allies since January when they were ousted from Mogadishu. An African Union peacekeeping force has yet to be fully deployed amid logistical problems.
"Somalia is at a critical cross-roads and it is the right time for the United Nations Security Council to assist in the maintenance of peace and security," Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi said, according to a text of his speech seen by Reuters.
He said Somalia wanted to see the African Union's AMISOM force transformed into a U.N. mission -- a request that puts pressure on the Security Council at a time when it is already preparing to send a hybrid AU-U.N. force of more than 20,000 peacekeepers to Sudan's Darfur region.
Diplomats said all 15 council members except Congo were cautious about a U.N. peacekeeping force, though they expressed support for the transitional Somali government and welcomed its efforts to promote national reconciliation.
"There's a window of opportunity to move forward on the political (front) and my worry is if that isn't grasped vigorously enough, the country will spiral down into further conflict and chaos," British Ambassador Emyr Jones Parry told reporters after meeting Gedi on Thursday.
Jones Parry said his message to the Somali government was that the international community would support it, but expects vigorous efforts to promote national reconciliation.
"We need to get AMISOM reinforced, and if peace is brought about and there's sufficient agreement, the United Kingdom will support a U.N. peacekeeping presence in Somalia," he said.
"We can only do so much. You can't put peacekeeping troops in if there's no peace to keep, that's the reality."
RECONCILIATION CONGRESS
In the latest in a wave of guerrilla strikes in the lawless Horn of Africa country, a roadside bomb killed two soldiers in Mogadishu on Thursday and two aid workers were shot dead overnight in the north of the country.
Outside intervention in Somalia has a dismal history. The killing of U.S. troops there in late 1993 in the so-called "Black Hawk Down" battle marked the beginning of the end for a U.S.-U.N. peacekeeping force that left Somalia in 1995 and influenced U.S. policy for years.
Crucial to establishing peace will be a national reconciliation congress due to start next month, which Gedi told the council would be "inclusive" and open to discussion of all issues -- a tall order in a country where so many factions and clans have been vying for power for some 16 years.
The congress has already been postponed twice but Gedi told reporters it would start on July 15 and would be open to all who wanted to participate, including former Islamist combatants, as long as they renounced violence.
Gedi said deployment of a U.N. peacekeeping mission as soon as possible was very important for Somalia.
"The Somali people has all the (same) rights as any other nation in the world to be supported," he told reporters after the meeting. "The international community is behind us, but the era of wait-and-see is over, we need concrete actions."
