By Guled Mohamed and Mohamed Ali Bile
Mogadishu, July 25 (Reuters) – Somalia’s powerful Islamists said on Tuesday that they would not attend peace talks with the interim government until Ethiopian troops left their soil.
The fragile interim government had earlier agreed to the talks in Sudan, responding to a United Nations drive to avert war in the Horn of Africa country.
“We will go to Khartoum without any preconditions,” said Abdirizak Adam, interim President Abdullahi Yusuf’s chief of staff, after meeting a senior UN envoy in the government’s base in the provincial town of Baidoa.
From their stronghold in the capital, the Islamists had said in a statement they were committed to the talks, but their main leader later dashed hopes for progress.
“As long as Ethiopia is in our country, talks with the government cannot go ahead,” Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys told foreign correspondents in Mogadishu.
“If the government cares about the Somalis, it should remove our enemy from the country.”
Previous talks to prevent a standoff between the two sides from spiralling into war broke down on July 22, when the Islamists pulled out because of what they said was an incursion into Somalia by Ethiopian troops to defend the interim government.
Addis Ababa backs Yusuf and says the Islamists are terrorists. It has intervened in Somalia in the past to attack radical Islamists near its border.
On Monday, Somali legislators urged Ethiopian troops to leave their country, in a first recognition by the Horn of Africa’s interim authorities of a military incursion by its neighbour.
Aweys, a hardliner who is on US and UN lists of people linked to terrorism, was speaking before the UN special envoy to Somalia, Francois Lonseny Fall, met Islamist leaders in Mogadishu to try and promote the talks in Sudan.
The Islamists captured Mogadishu from US-backed warlords in June and now control a large swathe of southern Somalia.
Their rise has challenged the authority of Yusuf’s government, set up in 2004 in the 14th attempt to restore central rule to Somalia since the 1991 ousting of a dictator by warlords ushered in an era of anarchy.
A previous round of government-Islamist negotiations was boycotted by the government, which accused the Islamists of breaking an agreement to stop military operations.
Fall’s visit came a day after the African Union (AU) urged the UN Security Council to speed up plans to ease an arms embargo on Somalia to allow foreign peacekeepers to deploy.
That appeal followed an agreement by the AU and the east African regional body IGAD (Intergovernmental Authority on Development) to send troops to help secure peace in Somalia.
The troops plan has been repeatedly rejected by the Islamists, and al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden has said it would be tantamount to an anti-Islam “crusade”.
The Security Council says it is willing to consider a long-delayed deployment of foreign peacekeepers. In a July 13 statement, it also expressed a readiness to ease the arms ban to allow Somalia’s government to develop its own security forces.
Source: Reuters, July 25, 2006
