Leaders snub IGAD summit

Ethiopia’s Prime minister Meles Zenawi and his protege, Abdillahi Yusuf Ahmed who heads Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government (TFG) were the only foreign leaders to the meeting boycotted by Presidents Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, Hassan Omar Guelleh of Djibouti, Eritrea’s Issayas Afferworki and Sudan’s Hassan Omar al Bashir. Khartoum, Asmara and Djibouti did not sent representatives.

And a seed of diplomatic discord was immediately sowed between the TFG, its regional backers and the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) as IGAD member states pushed for the deployment of peacekeeping troops in Somalia against the militant Islamists’s opposition. A post summit joint communique betrayed a Pan IGAD hostility against the Muslim authorities that seized Mogadishu in June and confined the TFG to Somalia’s south central town of Baidoa.

Under the chairmanship of President Mwai Kibaki, IGAD member states resolved to deploy peacekeeping troops immediately after the regional body meets with the UN Security Council in Geneva later this month. The communique read by Kenya’s Foreign Affairs Minister Raphael Tuju called for foreign troops to bolster the TFG in its stand off with the Mogadishu authorities.

“There can never be negotiations when the Islamists are armed to the teeth and the other team is toothless. In fact, we are shocked why they are against peace missions. The peace missions will not stop the negotiations. They will only provide security to both parties even as they conduct negotiations,” the minister said.

Flanked by Uganda’s National Security ministers Amama Mbabazi and TFG’s Foreign minister Ismaeil Mohamud Tuju warned, “ IGAD forces will not be held hostage by someone who wants something that is unspecified. Ours is a protective force and we are not going to catalyse war as they (the Islamists) have claimed.”

The minister claimed the absent regional leaders apologised for skipping the meeting. Bashir is chairing Arab League talks between the TFG and the Islamists in Khartoum. Yesterday Tuju yesterday accused the ICU of doublespeak for calling for negotiations with the TFG and arming and seizing territory at the same time.

According to yesterday’s resolutions , Uganda will be the first IGAD member to sent troops to Somalia. Kenya, Ethiopia, Djibouti and Eriteria, all sharing a common border with Somalia will not participate in peacekeeping because “they can easily get sucked up in the politics of Somalia because some maybe having interests in it.” The communique did not refer to the Ethiopia’s troops in Somalia, a key ralling point for the Islamists’ opposition to Ethiopia and foreign troops.

There was anxiety in the morning about the meeting when the leaders failed to arrive in Nairobi. The three presidents and representatives from Uganda and Somalia from the Kenyatta International Conference Centre (KICC) to State House Nairobi for informal discussions among the three heads of state. The boycott of the summit instigated by Zenawi who visited last week to discuss peacekeeping in Somalia betrayed lack of faith in the Somalia IGAD peace process, Kenya’s mediation and widening intra IGAD rifts especially after the rise of the Islamists in June.

source timesnews