JEDDAH, 16 August 2004 — Somali delegates attending the two-year-long peace talks in Kenya are fraught with disagreements on how to share the seats of the country’s future Parliament and face inter-clan wrangling over individuals to be appointed MPs, press reports said.
Delegates representing Somalia’s various clans and sub-clans have been trying to form the Somali Transitional Federal Assembly for several weeks, in order to pave the way for an all-inclusive government.
The inauguration of the proposed transitional Parliament has been tentatively scheduled for Aug. 19. The foreign ministers of member states of the regional Inter Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD), which is mediating the talks, have twice postponed the inauguration, having missed the July 30 and Aug. 4 deadlines.
Media reports said the process of allocating seats and naming the MPs have been particularly contentious for all major clans. It was reported that some clans try to have more MPs, while some others are dissatisfied with the number of seats they have been allocated. Somalia’s four major clans were allocated 61 seats in the proposed 275-member Parliament, while an alliance of minority clans would have 31 MPs.
The United Nations Food Program’s (WFP) deputy country director for Somalia, Leo von der Velden, announced that his agency had delivered 2,400 tons of food aid to Somalia in order to avert a shortage of relief supplies in the country. “It is clear that malnutrition levels have risen in the most affected areas of northern regions of Sool and Sanaag as a result of the break in the food pipeline,” Von der Velden told a UN humanitarian news agency. Drought has led to severe food shortages in Kenya where WFP would have readily purchased grain to feed the hungry in Somalia.
It was also found earlier this year that some maize stocks belonging to farmers and traders in the Eastern Province of Kenya were contaminated, and therefore unfit for human consumption.
He said that grain arriving in northern and southern Somalia this month was donated by the United States. This month WFP would be able, he says, to distribute 50 percent of requirements in Somalia, and raise the amount to about 75 percent of the total needed in September, as more food arrived in the country. Food shortages in some Somali areas, he added, had been caused by lack of access due to insecurity, giving the example of Sool and Sanaag regions in northern Somalia.
Aid agencies working in Somalia had last month expressed concern over worsening humanitarian crisis in the country, saying that drought was spreading from the northern regions to the central areas and that up to a million people needed help. WFP recently appealed for more than $14 million to expand its current program of helping drought-affected regions in the country for the remainder of 2004 and 2005.
At least 800 Somali refugees staying illegally in a Kampala slum, have been relocated to Nakivale Refugee Settlement Camp in Mbarara, southern Uganda, press reports said.
Jamali Aidid, a member of the Uganda Somali Community Welfare Association, said, “The refugees have been traveling to Nakivale. Many have been doing business here. Some have even been claiming that they are Ugandans but when they heard of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) resettlement, they changed their status to refugees.”
