Transitional Gov't In Talks With Islamic Leaders‎‎

Armed militias on the streets of Mogadishu.

NAIROBI, Jun 8, 2006 – In an effort to restore law and order in war-scarred Mogadishu, two ministers from Somalia's Transitional Federal Government (TFG) were meeting on Thursday with the leadership of the Islamic courts, which now control the capital, a government spokesman said.

The ministers, Osman Ali Ato of public works and Mahmud Salad Nur of water and natural resources, had spent several days in Mogadishu before talks with Islamic courts chairman Sheikh Sharif Ahmed on Thursday afternoon.

"Today's meeting is a preliminary, ice-breaking one to prepare the agenda for a more substantive one next week," the spokesman, Abdirahman Muhammed Dinari, told IRIN by telephone from the south-central Somali town of Baidoa, where the TFG is based. Next week's proposed meeting would involve a government committee and leaders of the Islamic courts. The main agenda is expected to focus on how the TFG would work together with religious leaders to revive the police force to ensure peace, law and order in Mogadishu.

The move came as the African Union urged the United Nations Security Council to lift a UN arms embargo against Somalia to pave the way for the deployment of an African peacekeeping force in the Horn of Africa country, which has been devastated by civil unrest since 1991.

"The security situation [in Somalia] is again deteriorating. We must reactivate our efforts on Somalia in the coming weeks," AU Peace and Security Commissioner Said Djinnit told reporters at the AU headquarters in Addis Ababa on Wednesday after meeting a visiting delegation from the UN Security Council.

The AU had, in January 2005, given a green light to the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) to send a peacekeeping mission to Somalia to help the fledgling TFG to restore law and order in that country. However, the plan remains in limbo, mainly because the UN arms embargo on Somalia, which was imposed in 1992, is still in force.

"The [AU] Peace and Security Council has asked the UN Security Council to consider lifting the sanctions to allow the deployment of our forces," said Basu Sangqu, South Africa's ambassador to the AU, who is also the group's spokesman. "We have been assured that this is a matter the [UN Security] Council will be seized with in the coming period, and hopefully arrangements will be made so that whatever force is sent is capable of ensuring that stability."

The UN Security Council declined previous requests from the AU to lift the arms embargo, arguing that such a move would only aggravate the security situation in Somalia.

The leader of the visiting UN delegation, British Ambassador Emyr Jones Parry, said the world body was prepared to support IGAD's efforts to end anarchy in Somalia.

"The problem is that at the moment, there is no peace and there is no agreement to enforce, so conditions need to be established sufficiently so that a force can go in," he said. "If it is necessary for a force to go in, then, of course, it must be armed in order to do the job. That would mean lifting the arms embargo in relation to that force."

In a related development, Ethiopia has expressed concern about "the worrying situation" in Somalia and urged all factions to come together and resolve their differences.

"We are closely following the situation," Bereket Simon, adviser to the Ethiopian prime minister on public relations issues, told IRIN on Thursday. "We are part of the IGAD initiative that helped Somalia to form a transitional government, so we would not want any undesirable development that is not in the interests of the Somali people."

IGAD, which brings together Djibouti, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Kenya, Somalia, Sudan and Uganda, brokered the reconciliation deal between Somalia's various clans and factions, which culminated in the creation of the TFG in Kenya in 2004.

Ruling out any unilateral involvement by Ethiopia in the Somali situation, Bereket said his country supports the positions of the AU and IGAD. "As a neighbor, we firmly believe the Somali people should solve these problems themselves. We will not attach ourselves to whatever faction because we are interested in a durable relationship with the Somali people."

On Wednesday, another of Somalia's neighbors, Kenya, banned Somali faction leaders involved in the recent fighting from entering its territory. One faction leader, who was in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi, was arrested and deported from the country.

Militias loyal to the Islamic courts took control of most of the Somali capital, Mogadishu, on Sunday after routing forces of a group of secular faction leaders against whom they had fought since February. More than 300 people are believed to have died in the violence, some 1,500 others have been wounded and many thousands displaced.

Source: IRIN

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