/ 13 June 2006

East African states mull sanctions for warlords

East African ministers on Tuesday sought ways of ending a devastating conflict in Somalia as Kenya pushed regional states to impose wider travel sanctions on warlords blamed for igniting the latest round of fighting in the capital, Mogadishu.

The Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD), a regional bloc key to the formation of Somalia’s transitional government, also called for support for a powerless transitional government, whose authority has been scuppered by unruly warlords and hard-line Islamic courts.

A Kenyan foreign ministry official told Agence France-Presse that Nairobi would press other IGAD members — Uganda, Sudan, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Eritrea and nominally Somalia — to slap travel sanctions on the warlords, who were routed from the capital by the Islamic courts.

”The travel sanctions will affect them because they have widespread interests in the region,” said the official, explaining that they had families and business interests across the region.

”We call upon our development partners and the rest of the international community to fully support our efforts in the stabilisation of Somalia,” Kenyan Foreign Minister Raphael Tuju said at the opening session before a closed door meeting.

On Monday, Tuju said travel sanctions were the only way to restrain the battered warlords.

The one-day conference comes as Yemen offered to mediate in dialogue between the Joint Islamic Courts, who last week seized large swathes of the capital from the warlords, and the President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed’s government.

Previous talks collapsed over the weekend when the hard-line Islamic tribunals pulled out in protest at the government-backed proposal, which seeks Parliament’s approval for the deployment of IGAD peacekeepers.

European Union Commissioner for Development and Humanitarian Aid Luis Michel said the world must empower the government, based in the regional town of Baidoa, about 250km north-west of the capital, if stability is to return to Somalia.

”The time for divisions, polemics and symbolic gestures has ended. We must move from mere moral support to effective tangible results,” Michel told the ministers.

”The international community has to unequivocally empower the legitimate transitional federal institutions. We look forward to the engagement of all Somali parties in constructive dialogue within the framework of the transitional federal institutions,” he added.

Nearly 350 people were killed and more than 2 000 wounded, many of them civilians, in four months of bloody battles in the Mogadishu before the Islamic militia routed the United States-backed Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counterterrorism. — Sapa-AFP