Ethiopia is urging the U.N. Security Council to deploy peacekeepers to neighboring Somalia, where a conflict has killed and displaced thousands of people since last year.
Ethiopian Foreign Minister Seyoum Mesfin told the U.N. General Assembly Monday that the U.N. Security Council has a responsibility to deploy a peacekeeping mission to Somalia as soon as possible, or at least, to provide resources to strengthen the current African Union mission.
The African Union has about 2,600 peacekeepers in Somalia.
Mesfin praised the deployment of troops from Uganda and Burundi to the A.U. forces and urged other nations to follow suit.
Ethiopian troops entered Somalia in 2006, to help the country's interim government evict an Islamist movement that had seized control of the capital and much of southern Somalia.
Since then, unrelenting violence has killed thousands of Somalis and displaced at least one million others.
Some information for this report was provided by AP and Reuters.
