JEDDAH, 2 January 2004 — Somali faction leaders have again threatened to quit the present peace talks in Kenya if mediators invited rival leaders, press reports said yesterday. Last week, Kenya announced that Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni will open new talks for all Somali faction leaders on Jan. 9 to try to recuperate the country’s peace process. An East African body, the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD), has been sponsoring the current Somali talks since October last year.

“IGAD and the international community don’t have the right to overrule the process. They don’t have the right to decide for Somalis. It is Somalis who will decide this process,” said Mowlid Maane Mahmoud, a faction leader and spokesman for a group of leaders currently at the talks.

Mahmoud has threatened to quit the whole peace process if IGAD invited more faction leaders to attend the upcoming reconciliation talks, adding that they wanted only the 24 faction leaders that had signed a cease-fire accord on Oct. 27, 2002 and president of Transitional National Government Abdi Qassim Salad to attend the gathering.

IGAD wants about 42 leaders including more warlords, university professors and professionals to attend the discussions. The “retreat”, as it is billed, has been delayed on numerous occasions in recent weeks due to disagreements among Somali warlords about who should attend. At the same time, an official of the regional administration of the northeastern region of Puntland, Awad Ahmad Ashara, said that there was no need for a retreat.

“The retreat would not promote the peace process but would lead to its collapse. I believe it is a ploy to destroy the peace process and then blame the Somalis for the failure,” he said.

The yearlong Somali peace talks have been hampered with the walk out of Salad and other faction leaders. They vowed to organized parallel peace talks in the capital Mogadishu.

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Tension has erupted in the northern regions of Puntland and breakaway Somaliland over the disputed areas of Sool and Sanaag, media reports said. Last week, Puntland militia took total control of the Sool regional capital, Las Anod. A Puntland official told reporters that his militia went to Las Anod to stop fighting between two feuding clans in the area.

Somaliland regional House of Representatives called on the government to secure Somaliland’s borders. Media reports from Somaliland said that it had also dispatched forces to Sool.

Sool and Sanaag fall geographically within the borders of pre-independence British Somaliland. When Somaliland seceded from the rest of Somalia in 1991, it claimed that Sanaag and Sool were part of its territory. When Puntland established its autonomous regional administration, it counterclaimed that most of the clans in the disputed regions were associated with clans from its territory.

According a local newspaper report on Wednesday, people were fleeing Las Anod in fear of possible fighting between the advancing Somaliland forces and those of Puntland.

Humanitarian agencies recently delivered food to thousands of drought-affected nomads in the Sool Plateau. A humanitarian official said that any conflict in that area would complicate an already precarious humanitarian situation.

“We urge the authorities on both sides to resolve any differences peacefully and continue to enable humanitarian agencies to deliver assistance to the drought-affected communities”, Calum McLean, head of UNOCHA-Somalia, was quoted by UN news agency.