By Marie-Louise Gumuchian
Wednesday, November 01, 2006
KHARTOUM (Reuters) - Somali Islamists called for talks with the interim government to be postponed on Wednesday and an international fact-finding mission sent to Somalia to help resolve "fundamental issues" between the rival sides.
A third round of Arab League-sponsored discussions seen as the best way to avert war in the chaotic Horn of Africa nation had been due to start on Monday in Sudan's capital Khartoum.
But two days on the two sides had yet to meet face-to-face, mainly due to an Islamist demand that Ethiopian troops they say are in Somalia to prop up the fragile government leave.
"There are fundamental issues that need to be analysed and sorted. ... We feel the meeting needs to be postponed," said Ibrahim Hussein Adow, head of the Islamist delegation.
There was no immediate comment from the government team.
Talking to reporters in his room at a luxury Khartoum hotel, Adow called for an international fact-finding mission to visit Somalia and verify the Islamists' claims about Ethiopian forces.
"We are in a war situation and Ethiopia has initiated this," he said. "We want the world to take a stand against Ethiopia. We know it can't take Ethiopia out of Somalia, but we want a clear position from the international community."
Diplomats from the Arab League, Europe, the United Nations and the east African regional body IGAD have met both sides separately but made little or no headway on the substance of talks.
"This is going nowhere," one expert on Somalia said before the Islamists requested a postponement. "I would say it's an 80:20 chance of conflict now."
Analysts say a war between the militarily superior Islamists and the interim government for supremacy in the nation of 10 million could draw in Ethiopia and its archrival Eritrea, inflaming long-smouldering grudges in the Horn of Africa.
Islamist troops on the frontline 10 km (6 miles) from joint Ethiopian-Somali government forces protecting the shaky administration's sole outpost in Baidoa said this week they expect to fight as soon as the talks end.
The two sides are vying for control of the nation, sunken in anarchy since the 1991 toppling of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre.
The Islamists sprang from a union of Islamic sharia courts and came to prominence after walloping U.S.-backed warlords in Mogadishu in June.
The government of President Abdullahi Yusuf -- a former warlord and colonel in the Somali army whom diplomats say may favour a military solution -- insists it has the international recognition and legal right to rule the country.
But its power on the ground pales to the Islamists, whose disciplined fighters have taken much of south and central Somalia and imposed strict sharia law.
Security experts believe Addis Ababa has sent about 5,000 soldiers to help Somalia's interim government which is isolated in the provincial town Baidoa. The Ethiopian government insists it has only several hundred armed military trainers in Somalia.
Source: Reuters, Nov. 1, 2006