US in bid to salvage Somali peace talks
October 19, 2006 (AFP – Nairobi) - Confounded by deteriorating conditions in Somalia, a US-backed international panel is to meet here this week in a bid to salvage peace talks between the weak government and powerful Islamists, officials said yesterday.
Amid rising tensions and fears of regional conflict, senior diplomats from the 11 members of the International Contact Group on Somalia will gather in Nairobi today to urge the two sides to go ahead with a third round of talks in Sudan at the end of the month, they said.
The group will meet Somalia’s transitional President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed and Ibrahim Hassan Addow, the foreign affairs coordinator for the Supreme Islamic Council of Somalia (SICS), the officials said.
“The contact group wants to see the major actors in the Somalia conflict,” said one European envoy who will attend the meeting, which comes as tensions have soared between the government and the increasingly dominant Islamists. “The group will reaffirm its commitment to finding a lasting solution through peace talks and not the use of force,” the envoy said.
The US embassy in Nairobi confirmed that Washington’s Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Jendayi Frazer would attend the talks. The identities of representatives from other Contact Group members — the United Nations, European Union, African Union, Arab League, the regional east African Inter-Governmental Authority on Development, Britain, Italy, Norway, Sweden and Tanzania — were not immediately clear.
The Contact Group was formed by the United States after a US-supported warlord alliance was driven from Mogadishu in June after months of fighting with the Islamists, some of whom Washington accuses of links with Al Qaeda. Its one-day meeting in the Kenyan capital comes amid growing uncertainty over prospects for the next round of Arab-mediated peace talks between the government and the Islamists set for October 30 in Khartoum.
The embattled government, which controls only a speck of the country around its temporary seat of Baidoa, has threatened to boycott the Khartoum talks, accusing the Arab League of bias toward the Islamists.
Meanwhile, the Islamists have also threatened to boycott unless the international community presses Ethiopia to withdraw troops it has allegedly sent to Somalia to prop up Yusuf’s administration. Both the government and Addis Ababa have denied the deployment of Ethiopian troops on Somali territory despite persistent eyewitness accounts of their presence in the country.
Two previous rounds of talks in Khartoum in June and September have resulted in interim accords between the two sides that both sides claim are being violated by the other. The government has repeatedly accused the Islamists of violating the pacts by continuing to expand their territory, which now includes almost all of central and southern Somalia, where they have imposed strict Shariah law.
Late last month, the Islamists took the key southern port of Kismayo from a government-allied local militia, a move they said was intended to block the arrival there of foreign peacekeepers the government has appealed for.