KHARTOUM, 23 June 2006 — Rival Somali leaders yesterday reached an agreement to recognize each other in Arab League-sponsored talks in Khartoum aimed at ending fighting in the war-ravaged Horn of Africa country, officials said.
The agreement was signed after a delegation from the Islamic alliance, which ousted US-backed warlords from the Somali capital on June 5 after four months of fighting, went into talks with members of the transitional government.
The agreement recognizes “the legality of the transitional government and the presence of the alliance of Islamic tribunals,” Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa told reporters after heading talks between the two sides.
The text calls for an “end to media and military campaigns... the pursuit of dialogue without preconditions in the framework of mutual recognition” and “the judgment of war criminals,” Moussa said.
The Islamists have regarded President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed as no more than just another warlord, while the president regarded the grouping of Islamists as unlawful anarchists.
The accord was signed by a prominent scholar representing the Islamic courts, Ali Mohammed Ibrahim, and Somali Foreign Minister Abdullah Al-Sheikh Ismail.
The meeting came after both sides held separate consultations with Moussa as well as Sudanese President Omar Bashir, who holds the rotating chair of the pan-Arab body.
Bashir described the accord as “the beginning of the end of conflicts in Somalia.” The parties are to resume talks aimed at resolving outstanding security disputes on July 15 in Khartoum.
“We have come to the negotiations to find a solution to Somalia’s problems, with assistance from our Arab brothers,” said Ibrahim during a break in the talks before the accord was signed.
Upon his arrival in Khartoum, Moussa said the mediation was aimed at “paving the way for dialogue and for a Somali consensus,” the official Sudanese news agency SUNA reported.
The Khartoum talks were the first mediation effort in the conflict that flared up and left some 360 people killed and 2,000 wounded in recent weeks.
Somalia’s embattled transitional government sent a team including its president, Prime Minister Ali Mohammed Gedi and Parliament Speaker Sharif Hassan Sheikh Adan.
The Joint Islamic Courts militia, which has seized control of much of southern Somalia, has vowed to re-establish order and begun imposing Shariah in the areas it controls.
Somalia’s transitional authority is based in Baidoa, west of Mogadishu, for fear of attacks in the capital and has little control over the country. It suspects the Islamists want to overrun the whole of Somalia.
Previous dialogue attempts between the two sides had failed. The Somali president said Tuesday he would not talk to the Islamists until they recognized his government and gave up all the territories they had seized.
The Islamists charge that Yemen and Ethiopia, which are also sponsoring the peace talks, are biased in favor of the Baidoa government.
SUNA quoted Bashir as stressing “the need to put an end to the conflict and instability in Somalia in order to foil any plans for foreign interference in the affairs of a member of the Arab League.”
Bashir himself is trying to resist growing pressure for a troop deployment in his country, with UN officials currently campaigning to secure approval for sending peacekeepers to war-torn Darfur.
