A Somali warlord, whose fighters over the weekend seized control of the United Nations premises in the country’s disputed capital of Jowhar, on Tuesday handed back offices to the organisation’s local staff.
Mohamed Omar Habeb, who in June offered the Somali transitional leadership refuge in Jowhar, about 90km north of Mogadishu, returned the keys of the UN Children’s Fund (Unicef) offices to the staff.
Last week, the United Nations evacuated 13 of its international employees from Jowhar, amid fears of fresh hostility after hundreds of heavily armed gunmen, supporting Somali transitional leader Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, entered the provincial town.
”The UN is constantly monitoring the situation with the aim of returning the international staff to Jowhar when the security situation allows,” UNDP said in a statement.
On Sunday, Habeb ordered the remaining local UN staff members to leave the compound, which his militiamen surrounded. They later claimed they were guarding it from vandals, but this disrupted humanitarian operations.
Several UN agencies operate from the Unicef offices in Jowhar.
Ahmed and his Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi, who relocated from exile in Kenya in June, insist their administration must be based in Jowhar, arguing that Mogadishu, centre of the violence that has wracked Somalia for the past 14 years, is too unsafe.
But powerful warlords insist that the transitional leader is barred by the federal charter, a sort of Constitution, from transfering the capital from bullet-charred Mogadishu.
Since brutal dictator Mohamed Siad Barre was toppled in 1991, efforts to restore a semblance of a government in the fractured nation have been scuppered by warring factions. – Sapa-AFP