17 Jul 2006: ISS Today: Somali Government Says it Will Form Team to Meet Islamists

17 July: Somali Govt Says Will Form Team to Meet Islamists
Guled Mohamed, Reuters

Somalia’s government agreed on Sunday to form a committee to attend future peace talks with the country’s newly powerful Islamist, after rejecting a round of planned negotiations over the weekend. The deal to form the committee was brokered among Somalia’s parliamentary speaker Sharif Hassan Sheikh Adan, President Abdullahi Yusuf and Prime Minister Mohamed Ali Gedi.

Commentary

The past weekend has seen another sudden shifting of positions within the Transitional Federal Government of Somalia (TFG) regarding its intentions vis-à-vis the Islamic courts grouped together under the banner of the Supreme Islamic Council of Somalia (SICS). An agreement brokered by the Arab Union in Khartoum on 22 June had made provision for further meetings to be held between the TFG and SICS on 15 July, but by last week President Abdullahi Yusuf had announced that he had no intention of going ahead with the talks, accusing the SICS of violating the accord by imposing a military defeat upon the remaining warlord militias in Mogadishu. He also claimed that the Islamic militias were being assisted by fighters drawn from outside the country, from Arab states, Afghanistan and from the ranks of Ethiopian rebels. Accordingly, he reserved the right to call upon his own foreign friends to ward off any military threat against his government from the SICS.

All this came at a time when the international community, in the  form of missions from the UN, and from the African Union and the region were trying to ascertain the intentions of the SICS, even as they moved to offer moral support to the TFG, which they recognised as the legal government of the country.

It seems likely that Abdullahi Yusuf’s attempt to take a firm stand against the SICS apparent usurpation of sovereign authority in parts of southern Somalia was predicated upon the promises of international support he had received from the international organisations, and Kofi Annan’s recent appeal to UN member states to back the recognised authorities.

What form such support could take, however, and when it could effectively arrive, remained unclear. Suffice it to say that no practical assistance would be forthcoming in the near future, a fact that was evidently appreciated by the Somali parliament, the Speaker of which announced that his camp intended to resume talks with the SICS, threatening a widening of the existing rift between parliament and cabinet.

Now a compromise has been reached, and talks may proceed at some, as yet unspecified, time. The military strength of the SICS has taken many by surprise, as has its apparent popularity in many areas of the South. How the SICS will cope once it moves outside of areas of Hawiye clan dominance will be interesting to observe, because this may confront it with problems of a different order. But it must be clear to the TFG that at present the SICS enjoys a military superiority that is unlikely to be overturned by an uncertain and conditional alliance of warlords.

At present, negotiation and reconciliation would seem a more sensible road to take than seeking a confrontation that would probably draw in Ethiopian forces and reopen a protracted and violent war.

Richard Cornwell