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/ 14 December 2008
Somalia’s president announced Sunday he was sacking the Cabinet but the premier challenged the move, in a fresh clash between the two rivals.
Ten of Somalia’s 15 government ministers announced their resignations on Saturday.
Somali government officials and exiled Islamist opposition leaders are to hold face-to-face peace talks in Djibouti, the United Nations special envoy to the country said on Friday. Somalia has been wracked by conflict since 1991, with the capital, Mogadishu, plagued by political and civil unrest, food riots and attacks on Western aid agencies.
All parties in Somalia’s conflict have carried out rights abuses including executions, rape and torture, Amnesty International said on Tuesday, adding there were reports Ethiopian soldiers had slit civilians’ throats. Mogadishu’s whole population is scarred from witnessing or suffering such abuses, it said in its 32-page report.
Somali Islamist insurgents and Ethiopian troops exchanged mortar fire on Sunday in some of the heaviest clashes in months with at least 20 people killed in the last 24 hours, residents and witnesses said. The fighting was fiercest in the Islamist stronghold of northern Mogadishu.
At least five people, including a child, were killed on Sunday in a new wave of violence in the Somali capital, Mogadishu, witnesses said. ”I saw armed men opening fire at policemen at Debka interception. Three policemen and a doctor who worked in a clinic nearby were killed,” witness Farah Hasan Sahal said in southern Mogadishu.
At least nine people were killed and 18 wounded in central Somalia when two clans fought on Monday over land, hospital and local officials said. The fighting erupted between the Sa’ad and Dir sub-clans over disputed land in Galkaio town in central Somalia, said Bile Mohamud Qabowsade, a government official.
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/ 29 January 2008
An international rights group on Monday urged Somali Prime Minister Nur Hassan Hussein, who is struggling to gain control over his nation, to ensure reporters rights are protected in the increasingly volatile Horn of Africa state. The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists urged the premier to ”end the ongoing pattern of countrywide arbitrary arrests”.
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/ 21 January 2008
Somalia’s new government on Monday pledged to put an end to a crackdown against journalists in the Horn of Africa country and vowed to restore press freedoms. Prime Minister Nur Hassan Hussein made the promise as he was taking part in a national press freedom-day ceremony in the capital, Mogadishu.
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/ 16 December 2007
The military wing of Somalia’s Islamist movement plans to intensify its offensive against government troops and their Ethiopian allies, a senior commander said on Sunday. Muktar Ali Robow said al-Shabab had killed nearly 500 Ethiopian soldiers and would fight until foreign troops left the Horn of Africa country.
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/ 7 December 2007
Somali President Abdullahi Yusuf said on Friday he was in good health after recovering from a bout of pneumonia, and laughed off a flurry of reports he was near death. ”I’m fine, I am OK,” Yusuf said in an exclusive interview from his hospital bed in Nairobi. ”I had pneumonia, but the doctors have taken it out [treated it] and I am well now,” he said.
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/ 5 December 2007
The United States and Africa’s Great Lakes states agreed on Wednesday to rapidly strengthen Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) security forces in their drive against rebel and foreign forces. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice gave no details when she announced the agreement in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
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/ 5 December 2007
Somali President Abdullahi Yusuf spent a second day in hospital on Wednesday with a condition some sources called very serious but an envoy said was a routine check-up for an old liver transplant. In a tumultuous week for Somali politics, an exiled Islamist leader rejected a call by Somalia’s new prime minister for talks to try to end 16 years of conflict.
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/ 4 December 2007
Turmoil struck the Somali government on Tuesday as a fifth minister resigned in a power-sharing dispute a day after being appointed, and the president was urgently flown to a hospital in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi. A security official described President Abdullahi Yusuf (72) as being in a ”serious condition” when he arrived in Nairobi on Tuesday.
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/ 3 December 2007
The United Nations’s top aid official, John Holmes, arrived in Somalia on Monday, calling for more to be done to help the Horn of Africa country where almost 6 000 civilians have been killed in fighting this year. UN officials say Somalia’s humanitarian crisis is Africa’s worst, with one million people displaced.
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/ 2 December 2007
Somalia’s new prime minister called on Sunday for dialogue with Islamist-led opponents to end an insurgency that a rights group says has killed nearly 6 000 civilians so far this year. In some of his first public comments on the conflict, Somalia’s new prime minister, Nur Hassan Hussein, said he was open to talks.
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/ 23 November 2007
A Somali media panel on Friday asked the country’s new Prime Minister, Nur Hassan Hussein, to protect press freedom that has been under siege as the government battles insurgents. The National Union of Somali Journalists appeal came a day after President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed appointed Hussein, a veteran law-enforcement official.