JEDDAH, 15 August 2003 — The president of Somalia’s Transitional National Government (TNG), Abdi Qassim Salad Hassan, has said that the Somali peace talks go against the unity, aspirations and beliefs of the Somalis, media reports said. He has reiterated his rejection of an accord reached on July 5 by Somali parties attending the present peace talks in Kenya. The talks are sponsored by an East African body, the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD). Addressing a news conference in Nairobi, Hassan said he was suspending participation in the talks, saying the IGAD technical committee had authorized the partition of the country. The TNG president was referring to the northern breakaway region of Somaliland. The region seceded and declared itself the sovereign republic of Somaliland after the downfall of the Somali government in 1991. Since then, it has boycotted all Somali peace talks.
“Contrary to the wishes of the Somali people, the technical committee has unilaterally decided to exclude (northern) regions from the conference, which amounts to the dismemberment of the Somali Republic. The conference is against the unity, aspirations and beliefs of the Somali people. I have no option but to suspend our participation in the conference until the issues we mentioned are satisfactorily addressed,” Hassan said.
Under the July 5 accord, the Somali faction leaders and the TNG representatives attending the talks agreed to form an interim federal government and a new parliament for Somalia. The TNG president has already opposed the decision in which traditional clan-elders would select the members of the parliament. Salad has accused his Prime Minister Hassan Abshir Farah, who was the TNG’s chief negotiator in the peace talks, of signing the accord without consulting him. The TNG was formed in Djibouti in 2000 during another round of peace talks. Its mandate expires on Aug. 26.
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The Brussels-based think-tank the International Crisis Group (ICG) has noted in a report that the demand of the northern region of a breakaway Somaliland for recognition presented the international community with stark choices.
“Recent developments have made the choice faced by the international community considerably clearer: Develop pragmatic responses to Somaliland’s demand for self-determination or continue to insist upon the increasingly abstract notion of the unity and territorial integrity of the Somali Republic — a course of action almost certain to open a new chapter in the Somali civil war,” noted the report, which was published on the ICG Website on Tuesday.
Any attempt to coerce Somaliland back to the Somali fold, says the report, would entail a bitter and probably futile conflict. “The question now confronting the international community is no longer whether Somaliland should be recognized as an independent state, but whether there remain any viable alternatives,” it stressed.
