NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) – Somalis danced in the streets of central Mogadishu to welcome their prime minister on Friday, while across town others threw stones at the Ethiopian troops who brought him to the capital.

Division – over clan, religion, politics, power – has been the story of Somalia. Whether the next chapter can be unity and peace is the challenge before the Somali leaders and their Ethiopian, US and other backers trying for the 14th time to form an effective government.

Nowhere in the country has seen the competition for power and privilege bring more chaos and destruction than the streets of Mogadishu.

Travel just a few city blocks and feelings toward the government, the Islamic movement it is trying to replace and the warlords who held sway before that will change dramatically, depending on which clan controls the street. There are dozens of clan factions, each making demands on the government and each a potential spoiler, capable of extreme violence if ignored.

Somali Prime Minister Mohamed Ali Gedi said Friday that he would try to unite the city’s disparate clan leaders.

“In the coming days I will visit every corner of the city,” he said

But he acknowledged that he will continue to need Ethiopian troops for some time to come.

“They will stay until we agree to send them back to their country and this depends on the stability of Somalia,” Gedi added.

Ethiopia will not be the first foreign power to try to install a government in Somalia. Clan warlords drove out dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991, only to plunge the country into chaos and create a man-made famine that left 500,000 people dead. A UN peacekeeping force, heavy with US troops, arrived in 1992 and tried to arrest warlords and create a government.

That experiment in nation building ended in October 1993, when fighters loyal to Mohamed Farah Aided shot down a US Army Black Hawk helicopter and sparked a battle that left 18 servicemen dead.

Aided’s son, Hussein, is now the government’s national security minister in a Cabinet where positions are assigned according to clan. Despite efforts to create a government where every clan had an equal voice, warlords prevented the internationally recognised administration from taking power because they refused to settle for anything less than the presidency.

Even now, the speaker of the transitional parliament, Sheik Sharif Hassan Aden, has rebelled against the government and is throwing his support behind the Islamic movement, which has vowed to wage a last stand from southern Somalia.

“The presence of Ethiopian troops in Somalia is illegal, it is against the charter of the transitional government,” he told the British Broadcasting Corporation’s Somali service. “Somalis should resist against Ethiopian troops.”

It’s an evocative rallying cry. Predominantly Muslim Somalia and Ethiopia, with its large Christian population, fought a bloody war in 1977.

Gedi will need to reshuffle his Cabinet and make all kinds of concessions to bridge all the splits within Mogadishu and the country. But persuading Somali leaders to continue to cooperate when they don’t get what they want has always been a problem, even though everyone shares the same language, religion and culture.

Divisions within the government opened the door to the Muslim fundamentalists, some of whom have spent the last 30 years trying to install an Islamic emirate in Somalia. They started out offering peaceful dispute resolution through Islamic courts, but grew to become the most powerful military movement in the country: the Council of Islamic Courts.

Some elements of the movement though espoused a harsh vision of Islam at odds with Somali culture. Their departure was greeted in some areas with celebratory blasting of the Western music clerics had banned.

Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, long a backer of Gedi and his government, has a long history with the leader of the Islamic courts, Sheik Hassan Dahir Aweys. Aweys had twice before tried to start an Islamic movement in Somalia, and both times Meles sent troops – once with the help of current Somali President Abdullahi Yusuf – to crush them.

Now Meles and Yusuf both say they will pursue Aweys and his remaining 3,000 fighters who have holed up in the southern town of Kismayo. Four suspected terrorists, wanted by the US for involvement in the 1998 US Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, are reportedly among them.

Backed up against the Indian Ocean and a sealed Kenyan border, the fighting will likely be vicious and could degenerate into a lengthy guerrilla war..