JEDDAH, 21 March 2004 — A group of 17 Somali faction leaders threatened yesterday to quit the country’s peace talks in Nairobi, accusing regional mediators of hijacking the process and ignoring their proposals, reports reaching here said.
Somalia’s 16-month-old peace talks have foundered in the last few weeks on a charter agreed by rival warlords in January that maps out a transition to democracy. Under the charter clan leaders will select a Parliament that will in turn elect a president to head a transitional government and lead the country to elections after five years.
But a group of 17 leaders have repeatedly objected to a clause in the accord they say gives too many political factions a say in the selection of Parliament. The clause is supported by East African nations mediating the peace talks.
The leaders said yesterday that the mediators had refused to listen to their position and were imposing their will on the Somali people. “The ownership of the peace process was taken away from the Somalis and the whole course of events is now driven by imposition of instructive statements,” said Hussein Farah Aideed, on behalf of the 17 faction leaders. “If the situation is not rectified we are threatening to withdraw,” he told a news conference.
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The Inter Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD), an East African body, has been frightened by reports of renewed arms flow into Somalia, a statement said. IGAD is sponsoring the current Somali peace talks in Kenya. Media reports in the past two weeks said that arms were reaching the southern Bakol and Middle Shabelle regions from Ethiopia.
“Such a development runs counter to the aims of the National Reconciliation Conference and could create an atmosphere which undermines the process, by fueling conflict in Somalia. It also contravenes the arms embargo on Somalia imposed by Security Council resolution 733 (1992),” said the statement. It has urged the UN Monitoring Group tasked to monitor violations of the arms embargo “to investigate and report accordingly.” It also called on the Commission of the African Union to expedite deployment of a monitoring team in Somalia in accordance with its resolution of August 29, 2003.
At the same time, the Transitional National Government (TNG) President Abdi Qassim Salad accused Ethiopia of pouring arms into Somalia, press reports said on Friday. During a recruitment of 170 policemen at Mogadishu Police Academy, Salad also accused Addis Ababa of lying about the existence of terrorist cells in Somalia to extort money from countries that are committed to fight international terrorism and to undermine the ongoing peace process in Kenya. He noted that Ethiopia had prompted a few Somali faction leaders to abandon the peace talks.
Five warlords have walked out of the talks in Kenya, and have declared that they would convene another parallel peace talks inside the country. It is widely believed that these warlords have good relations with Addis Ababa.
Speaking about the position of TNG on the talks, he said, “I will hand over power without delay to any person elected by the conference, now in its final power-sharing phase in Kenya.”
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US prosecutors have been considering more charges against a Somali man suspected of having terrorist links, press reports said on Friday. Omer Abdi Muhammad has also been charged that he has had several long stays in Australia. His lawyer, Mahir Sherif said that Muhammad, was refused bail because he was deemed to be a flight risk. Muhammad was last in Sydney in December to witness the birth of his second Australian child but is now in custody in the US awaiting trial on immigration charges.
US prosecutors allege Muhammad, the founder of the Western Somali Relief Agency, made false statements in relation to $351,036 the agency received from the Global Relief Foundation.
The US government suspects the foundation of having terrorist links and has banned its operations there. Sherif said he expected US prosecutors to charge Muhammad with accepting $5,000 from the Islamic charity group Al-Haramain Foundation. In 2002 the US government blocked the accounts of the Somalia and Bosnia-Herzegovina branches of Al-Haramain Foundation.
Sherif said that US prosecutors had alleged Muhammad received money from another charitable organization that the government says has links to terrorism, and indicated that they will bring additional charges.
