SOMALIA: Prime minister opens national reconciliation conference in Mogadishu

Somali Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi opened a reconciliation workshop in Mogadishu on Monday (February 5) designed to foster peace amid an escalating spate of guerrilla-style attacks in the volatile Horn of Africa nation. In the latest assault in post-war Somalia, unknown assailants fired four rockets at Mogadishu port hours before Gedi began the week-long meeting of some 200 traditional leaders, religious leaders, and peace and women's rights activists. The pre-dawn rocket attack, which came from a residential area of the coastal city, was the latest in a series of almost daily strikes targeting Somali government installations and the administration's Ethiopian allies. Officials blame remnants of a defeated Islamist movement, which ran most of south Somalia for six months until it was ousted by a government-Ethiopian offensive over the New Year. Some Islamist fighters have vowed a holy war. Many residents fear the violence in the capital may also be due to rivalry between warlords who ousted a dictator in 1991, carving Somalia into a patchwork of fiefdoms controlled by militias. Under Western and Ethiopian pressure to reach out to all parties in Somalia, including moderate Islamists and powerful clans, President Abdullahi Yusuf agreed last week to call a reconciliation conference. His pledge triggered the release of 15 million euros in European Union funding for AU peacekeepers to Somalia. Officials said the workshop in Mogadishu will pave the way for the bigger national reconciliation conference. "Calling the president for national reconciliation conference is the starting point of the national reconciliation that we are organising and the international community have fully supported us and they are giving us assistance," Gedi told the workshop. The conference in Mogadishu was also attended by United Nations Development Program (UNDP) Country representative who urged all who had gathered to respect the government of the day, they should also stabilize all parts of Mogadishu and the rest of the country but if they remained divided, no peace was achievable. "What we intend to do in the next six months to come is twofold. The first one is to help in stabilizing all of Mogadishu, and the rest of south and central, the second is to re-establish the kind of social contract between you the people and your new authority. It is important that you trust the TFG, it's important you trust the TFG now, it's important you trust any government later on, because if there is no trust between the government or authority and you, you won't have any development, you won't have any peace," said UNDP representative in Somalia Erich Lorech. The government, backed by troops and weapons from Ethiopia, drove out the Islamists who had controlled the capital Mogadishu and much of the south for six months. The transitional government, which was not popularly elected, returned to Somalia in January 2005 after being formed in Kenya. As the government tries to cement political control of the country, African leaders are struggling to build an African Union peacekeeping force for Somalia, which would fill a security vacuum after Ethiopian troops leave. Many African nations are nervous about committing soldiers to one of the world's most dangerous countries where warlords and their gunmen ruled unchecked for 15 years.

ITN Source | February 6, 2007

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