Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, injecting momentum into flagging Somali peace talks, won a pledge on Friday from a key faction leader to try to end a boycott of the negotiations by several powerful warlords. By turns scolding and cajoling an array of militia chiefs involved in years of blood-letting, Museveni deployed the rhetoric of black African nationalism to call for an end to political rivalries blocking efforts to end a decade of chaos. "We did not kick out the Europeans in order to deny our people their right to govern themselves," Museveni said in rousing address to a gathering of warlords from the ruined Horn of Africa country. "To be governed by guns, this is a mockery of our independence."
War and famine have killed hundreds of thousands of people in the past decade in the country of more than seven million, which has been torn apart by rival clan militias since the overthrow of former dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in 19921 [sic]. Museveni flew to Nairobi to try to breathe new life into the more than year-old negotiations in his capacity as chairman of a regional peacemaking body called the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD). "What is happening in Somalia is a slow genocide because when children are not immunised for 10 years, what does it mean? It means you are destroying a generation of young people in Somalia," Museveni, himself a former guerrilla leader, said.
Museveni secured a pledge by Abdiqassim Salad Hassan, head of a defunct interim government whose mandate expired last year, to try to persuade a group of warlords based in southern Somalia to end a boycott of the peace talks in Kenya. "Now we are on the right truck," said Abdiqassim after private talks with Museveni, hugging some of his fiercest political enemies as delegates sang and shrieked with joy.
"Enough is enough, this is the time to stop these warlords," said one delegate, Asha Ahmed Abdalla. "The people who are dying are the poor children in Somalia. This is reconciliation, we have to forget and forgive." Abdiqassim is an occasional ally of the faction leaders he has promised to bring to the gathering in Kenya, sharing their opposition to what they say are efforts by neighbouring Ethiopia to use the negotiations to install a client regime in Mogadishu.
| I'm a little confused as to how that'd be worse than what they have now... |
Ethiopia, the dominant military power in the Horn and a historic foe of Somalia, denies the allegation.
The leaders Abdiqassim will now contact include some of the country’s most powerful military leaders, including top Mogadishu warlords Osman Ali Ato and Muse Sudi Yalahow. A rival group of leaders who have continued to press ahead with the talks in Kenya includes Ethiopia ally Abdullahi Yusuf, de facto leader of the northerly breakaway region of Puntland. The meeting is now supposed to move to Kenya’s coastal city of Mombasa. |