BAIDOA, Somalia, Aug 8 (AFP) – Somali Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi met on Tuesday with influential clan leaders to seek consensus on a new cabinet after the sacking of his previous dissent- and defection-riddled government.
The talks came a day after the dissolution of the fractious cabinet following Ethiopian mediation to salvage the weak transitional administration, whose limited authority is threatened by increasingly powerful Islamists. “The prime minister is holding consultations with clan elders as well as preparing a list of the new cabinet,” government spokesman Abdirahman Mohamed Nur Dinari told AFP. On Monday, Somalia’s interim President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed announced details of the Ethiopian-mediated compromise in which a new scaled-down and more efficient cabinet is to be appointed with Gedi remaining at the top. Officials said the new lineup, to be named within a week, would include 31 ministers and 44 assistant ministers, a sharp reduction from Gedi’s unwieldy previous government that had 42 ministers and 80 assistants. At least 43 members of that cabinet had resigned since late July to protest Gedi’s leadership policies, particularly the seeking of Ethiopian military help to protect his 18-month-old clan-based government from feared Islamist attacks. Gedi rejected calls to resign and narrowly survived a July 30 parliamentary no-confidence vote but the crisis had badly shaken his government, set up in neighboring Kenya in 2004 in a bid to end Somalia’s chronic instability. He, Yusuf and powerful parliament speaker Sharif Sheikh Adan had also publicly disagreed over whether to hold talks with the Islamists who seized the capital Mogadishu from warlords in June after months of fierce battles. Analysts believe Gedi will reach out the Islamists as well as the vanquished warlords in a bid to form the most inclusive government possible, although Muslim leaders have complained bitterly about Ethiopia’s role. The Islamists have ruled out attending Arab League-mediated peace talks, which failed to take place as planned in Khartoum last week, until Ethiopian troops pull out of Somali territory. Addis Ababa denies any military presence in Somalia despite numerous witness accounts that uniformed Ethiopian soldiers crossed the border in July. Somalia has been without a functioning central authority since the 1991 ouster of strongman Mohamed Siad Barre plunged the Horn of Africa nation of 10 million into chaos with rival warlords competing for territory. Gedi’s government, based in Baidoa about 250 kilometers (155 miles) northwest of Mogadishu due to insecurity in the capital, is the latest of 14 internationally backed attempts to restore stability to the country. But it has been wracked by infighting and unable to assert control over much of the country, a situation exacerbated by the rise of the Islamists, raising concerns of Taliban-style takeover of Somalia. Mogadishu’s Islamic courts have begun to enforce strict Sharia law in areas they control and the United States and others have accused some senior clerics of ties to Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda network and harboring terrorists. The Islamists deny the charges. Source: AFP, Aug 8, 2006
