Somalia's president on Wednesday defended his efforts to fire the country's prime minister after being sharply criticized by the U.S. and Kenya, while lawmakers said they would seek to impeach the president.Kenya's foreign affairs minister on Tuesday called Somali President Abdullahi Yusuf an obstacle to peace and announced sanctions against him, including a travel ban and freezing any assets in Kenya.
The U.S. State Department also criticized Yusuf, with deputy spokesman Robert Wood describing the prime minister's removal as undermining "efforts to promote peace and stability in the region."
"It cannot be true that I'm an obstacle to peace. It is propaganda," Yusuf said in a rare telephone interview with The Associated Press from the southern Somalia town of Baidoa, where parliament sits.
Yusuf unilaterally fired Prime Minister Nur Hassan Hussein this week after months of public feuds over the best way to bring peace in Somalia, but parliament soundly rejected Yusuf's decision and voted to keep the prime minister. The president said Wednesday that parliament's vote was illegal and that he had a right to appoint a new prime minister.
But lawmaker Ibrahim Isaq Yarow said that a resolution to impeach Yusuf had the support of 117 legislators in the 275-member parliament. The resolution alleges Yusuf has violated 14 articles of Somalia's transitional charter, including illegally printing money and committing unspecified injustices. No date has been set for a vote.
Yusuf called the impeachment attempt "illegal and an affront to the law of the land." He said he could not be impeached before Somalia's attorney general investigated the allegations.
The government dispute does nothing to stabilize the administration, which wields virtually no authority in the face of powerful Islamic insurgents who have taken over most of the Horn of Africa country. Ethiopia, which has been protecting the Somali government, recently announced it would withdraw its troops by the end of this month. That will leave the government vulnerable to Islamic insurgents, who began a brutal insurgency in 2007.
Civilians have suffered most from the violence surrounding the insurgency, with thousands killed or maimed by mortar shells, machine-gun crossfire and grenades. The United Nations says there are 300,000 acutely malnourished children in Somalia, but attacks and kidnappings of aid workers have shut down many humanitarian projects.
The lawlessness allows piracy to flourish off the coast; bandits have taken in about $30 million in ransom this year.
The United States worries that Somalia could be a terrorist breeding ground, and accuses the most powerful Islamic faction, al-Shabab, of harboring the al-Qaida-linked terrorists who blew up the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. The Bush administration is pushing for U.N. peacekeepers to be sent to help stabilize Somalia, but U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Wednesday that he had talked to at least 50 nations over the past four months about such a force and seen almost no support for the idea.
"Not one nation has volunteered to lead," Ban said. "The replies have been very lukewarm or negative. ... There are one or two who have expressed their willingness to provide some troops."