Organisers of a national reconciliation conference in Somalia due to start on Thursday have postponed it for one month in another blow to peace efforts in the chaotic Horn of Africa nation.
”The National Reconciliation Committee has decided to postpone the conference due to unforeseen circumstances,” committee chairperson Ali Mahdi Mohamed told reporters.
It was the second postponement of the national reconciliation meeting — originally scheduled for April — that was intended to bring together in Mogadishu hundreds of delegates from feuding clans and factions across Somalia.
Mahdi, reading a committee statement, said several clan leaders had requested a delay to choose their delegates, and the venue of the conference had not yet been fully constructed.
Foreign diplomats had widely expected the postponement, even though they are pinning their hopes on the conference as the best way to try to secure lasting peace in Somalia, which has been in anarchy since the ousting of a dictator in 1991.
Somalia’s interim government and its Ethiopian military allies ousted militant Islamists from Mogadishu at the end of 2006, but have been unable to pacify the city or establish national authority across the nation of 10-million people.
An Islamist-led insurgency has been rumbling since the New Year, bringing two bouts of large-scale fighting that killed at least 1 300 people and sent nearly 400 000 fleeing from the coastal capital, according to locals and United Nations figures.
Although the insurgents have been flushed out of their main Mogadishu strongholds, Iraq-style guerrilla attacks have continued against Somali government and Ethiopian military targets. African Union peacekeepers have also been hit.
Diplomats said the government should shoulder blame for the second postponement of the peace conference through not moving fast enough on preparations or reaching out to opponents.
”If this process is to work, the government has to show it is genuinely prepared to be more inclusive, and we haven’t seen real signs of that yet,” said one Nairobi-based diplomat, who tracks Somalia closely.
Bethuel Kiplagat, a Kenyan envoy who led the peace process that created the interim government in late 2004, urged the international community to remain patient with Somalia.
”The postponement is only one month. This conference can still definitely succeed. I’m not overly concerned,” he told Reuters in Nairobi. ”Remember, [south] Sudan took 10 years to get a peace deal signed, and this is only a couple of months. We are used to this kind of process.” — Reuters