Somalia’s govt to meet Islamists in Sudan this week
August 30, 2006 (NAIROBI) — Somalia’s weak, U.N.-backed transitional government will meet with its Islamic rivals this week in Sudan in an effort to ease tensions after the Islamists took over of much of the country’s south, an Arab League official said Wednesday.
Separately, a diplomat closely involved in the Arab League-sponsored meeting to be held in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, said the talks would focus on drawing up an agenda to consider issues such as power sharing between the transitional government and the Islamic courts, as well as security and military issues.
The talks will open with a ceremony Friday, with discussions starting Saturday, said Abdallah Mubarak, the Arab League’s special envoy to Somalia.
“That is what the two sides have confirmed to us, the Arab League,” Mubarak told The Associated Press, adding that the Islamic Courts specified they wouldn’t be available before Thursday for the talks.
Somali parliament Speaker Sharif Hassan Sheikh Aden is leading a 16-person government delegation to Khartoum, State Minister for Fisheries Abdalla Bos said as he boarded a plane to Sudan.
The Islamists’ foreign affairs chief, Ibrahim Hassan Adow, was already in Khartoum, according to the group’s Web site, Al-Khadisiya. The rest of the delegation was still to be decided by the executive council, meeting in the Somali capital, Mogadishu, the group’s information chief, Abdirahim Ali Mudey, said.
Mubarak said the Arab League would send a plane Thursday to pick up the rest of the Islamic courts group delegation in Mogadishu.
The two sides began talks in June in Khartoum, signing an agreement that called for an immediate truce and in which the Islamic courts officially recognized President Abdullahi Yusuf’s transitional administration.
Efforts to resume the talks in July failed, amid divisions within the transitional government over how to handle the Islamic courts’ ascendancy in Somalia. Islamic leaders also refused to attend, after reports that Ethiopian troops had entered Somalia in July.
The Islamic group relented earlier this month, deciding to discuss the issue of Ethiopian troops during the talks, instead of refusing to attend.
A diplomat in the Khartoum talks said that they may be moved to Saudi Arabia, Yemen or the Kenyan capital, Nairobi.
Somalia has not had an effective central government since warlords overthrew longtime dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991 and then turned on each other, pulling the country into anarchy.
In June, Islamic militiamen took over Mogadishu and then seized control of much of southern Somalia. Yusuf’s government has been unable to assert its authority beyond the southern Somalia town of Baidoa.
(AP/ST)