Delegations from Somalia’s transitional government and the rival Islamic alliance were due to travel to Sudan on Wednesday to participate in Arab League-led mediation efforts, officials said.
Sudanese President Omar al-Beshir, the current chairperson of the Arab League, said on Tuesday he would try to bring the Somali transitional president, Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, and head of the Islamic militia, Sheikh Shariff Sheikh Ahmed, to the negotiating table to ease tensions over control of the Horn of Africa nation.
Ahmed’s Joint Islamic Courts’ militias hold Mogadishu and have overrun most of southern Somalia after routing a United States-backed warlord alliance in four months of fighting.
Rejecting accusations of links with extremists, including from al-Qaeda, the Islamic alliance has vowed to re-establish order in the lawless land — which has had no effective rule in 15 years — and begun setting up administrations to enforce strict Sharia Islamic law.
The planned peace parley in Khartoum is being sponsored by Yemen and Ethiopia, which the Islamists have accused of supporting the transitional government.
The transitional authority in Baidoa, west of Mogadishu, which has little real hold over most of Somalia, claims the Islamists are plotting to overrun the whole country.
Officials said the government delegation is headed by Yusuf, Prime Minister Ali Mohammed Gedi and Parliament speaker Sharif Hassan Sheikh Adan. ”The three, headed by the president, will travel to Khartoum this afternoon for talks,” a foreign ministry official told Agence France-Presse.
Officials said Yusuf was currently in Nairobi to meet a top US diplomat for Africa, Jendayi Frazer, who is in East Africa for discussions about the deteriorating Somalia situation.
It was not immediately clear who would represent the Joint Islamic Courts in Khartoum.
Ahmed said 10 delegates would attend the talks, but refused to confirm whether he would be there.
”We are going to Khartoum to attend the meeting. The Islamic courts will open all avenues for negotiations in order to make the talks a success. But we shall not accept conditions from the government,” he told a press conference in Mogadishu.
On Tuesday, Yusuf said he would not talk with the Islamists until they recognise his government and give up all the territories they have seized.
Earlier attempts to launch dialogue have failed, with both sides refusing any compromise.
Ahmed’s Islamic alliance has vehemently opposed calls from the Baidoa government and the African Union for a peacekeeping force, threatening to attack any foreign troops on Somali soil.
The US, concerned about growing extremism in Somalia, which it feared could develop into a Taliban-like state, helped bankroll the secular warlord alliance, the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counterterrorism, in February.
But the Islamists defeated the warlords after more than four months of clashes that claimed at least 360 lives and wounded more than 2 000. — Sapa-AFP