Britain to sign deal with Djibouti for anti-terror troop deployment
Source: AFP
December 24, 2005
DJIBOUTI (AFP) -- Britain is expected to seal an agreement with Djibouti next month to allow the deployment of British troops in this tiny but strategic Horn of Africa nation as part of a U.S.-led international counter-terrorism operation, officials said Thursday.
Djibouti's Defense Minister Ougoureh Kifleh and a British envoy said the deal was expected to be signed in mid- to late-January after details of English- and French-language versions of the agreement were completed.
"We had received the terms of this agreement earlier, but this time the British delegation brought copies in French ... so we can now amend them and agree on a final pact," Kifleh told AFP at the end of a two-day visit to the former French colony by a group of British diplomats. He could not discuss the exact size of the British deployment or when it was expected but a British envoy in Djibouti said Britain's ambassador to neighboring Ethiopia, Bob Dewar, would return "in three weeks time to sign a memorandum on the modalities of the deployment." Djibouti is already home to France's largest overseas military base and the only U.S. military base in Africa and currently hosts some 1,500 American troops and several hundred German, Dutch and Spanish soldiers participating in the U.S.-led anti-terrorism operation known as "Enduring Freedom."
Djibouti, located at the southern end of the Red Sea on the Gulf of Aden, is a key staging post between the Mediterranean, the Suez Canal and the Indian Ocean.
