Reconciliation Meeting Opens In Mogdishu!!!

[raadamiir]

MOGADISHU, Somalia (Reuters) - Somali Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi opened a reconciliation workshop in Mogadishu on Monday designed to foster peace amid an escalating spate of guerrilla-style attacks in the volatile Horn of Africa nation.

 

In the latest assault, unknown assailants fired four rockets at Mogadishu port hours before Gedi began the week-long meeting with about 200 traditional leaders, plus peace and women's rights activists.

 

The pre-dawn rocket attack, which came from a residential area of the coastal city, was the latest in a series of almost daily strikes targeting Somali government installations and the administration's Ethiopian allies.

 

"Fortunately, the rockets plunged into the sea. No one was hurt and port operations are going on," Abdirahman Mohamed Warsame, in charge of security at the port, told Reuters.

 

Officials blame remnants of a defeated Islamist movement, which ran most of south Somalia for six months until it was ousted by a government-Ethiopian offensive over the New Year.

 

Some Islamist fighters have vowed a holy war.

 

But many Mogadishu residents fear the violence in the capital may also be due to rivalry between warlords who ousted a dictator in 1991, carving Somalia into a patchwork of fiefdoms controlled by militias.

 

Monday's attack came after a weekend visit by an African Union (AU) team assessing security prior to a planned deployment of peacekeepers in Somalia.

 

The AU team was at the port on Sunday.

 

Under Western and Ethiopian pressure to reach out to all parties in Somalia, including moderate Islamists and powerful clans, President Abdullahi Yusuf agreed last week to call a reconciliation conference.

 

His pledge triggered the release of 15 million euros ($20 million) in European Union funding for AU peacekeepers to Somalia.

 

Officials said the workshop in Mogadishu will pave the way for the bigger national reconciliation conference.

 

"I call for peace," Prime Minister Gedi said. "If we work together we can pacify this city. The Somali people's dignity depends on the outcome of this meeting."

 

In another development, Alamin Kimathi, chairperson of Kenya's Muslim Human Rights Forum, said Kenyan authorities were detaining two Americans among suspects accused of supporting Somali Islamists.

 

He said one American was of Arab descent while the other was African-American and being held with his three children at a Nairobi police station.

 

Kimathi said his group's investigations showed the children, two girls and a boy, were between six months and nine years old.

 

"The situation is very worrying because children should not be in those places," Kimathi told Reuters, adding that representatives from his group had seen the children who looked "malnourished and obviously lacking in comfort."

 

He said their mother died from malaria after they were arrested near the Kenyan border last month, where suspected Islamists have been intercepted while fleeing Ethiopian troops.

 

Kenyan police declined comment.

 

Human rights groups say Kenyan authorities have been making mistakes among the scores of Islamist suspects rounded up since the war, with some denied access to lawyers and medicines.

 

The various foreign passport-holders arrested also include four Britons and a pregnant Tunisian woman, activists say.

 

(Additional reporting by Marie-Louise Gumuchian in Nairobi)

 

Source: Reuters, Feb 05, 2007

[raadamiir]

It is a good start and hope for the best especially during the process of reaching compromising results as such for the safety, security, and prosperity for Somalia. The Nation of Somalia can't wait any more they want a working Government that control all of Somalia.

 

The cowards that dare try to destroy the only Government we have really need to think twise cause the days Somalians supported War-lords and Fake Clan Courts are over!!!

[Centurion]

It'll take a whole lot more than a 'workshop'.

[raadamiir]

^^^Lets start there first.

[Centurion]

Its too make-shift.

Something like this has the potential to be THE social phenomenon which puts the Nation's recovery back on track, and hence should be more than a mere workshop.

[ANWAR]

GOOD NEWS MEY ALLHA BLESS AS

[General Duke]

Its just a seminar the real talks have yet to be announced. Though one should always welcome such workshops.

[Som@li]

That quick, :confused:

[General Duke]

^^^Dont buy into the foreign media, they do not know anything. This is a seminar which was planned a while back and which is supported by the UNDP.

[ansaar17]

reconciliation under the nose of the ethiopian tanks ????????

[Lake]

Originally posted by General Duke:

^^^Dont buy into the foreign media, they do not know anything. This is a seminar which was planned a while back and which is supported by the UNDP.

The foreign media (CNN, FOX news) told me that

The ICU is bunch of lunatics..extremist muslims....Yeah you right. They don't know sh!t.

[General Duke]

^^^The foreign media was wrong on this as well, the clan courts was just a clan organisation which took orders from Asmara, it was not a religious movement, it had religious leaders but also common thugs like IndaCade..

[Taliban]

Originally posted by General Duke:

it was not a religious movement, it had religious leaders but also common thugs like IndaCade..

A non-religious movement that has religious founders and leaders? That sounds contradiction.

[General Duke]

^^^There was a facade, all where called Shiekh but most where clan centric politicians, warlords who occupied other peoples lands. Notably the lower Shabbele.

[Fiqikhayre]

Good news, also PM Gheedi reaffirmed that the peace conference will take place inside Somalia inshallah, as he put it that in Kenya the politicians came to an agreement and now what we need is all the stakeholders in Somalia coming together in order to reconcile inshallah!

 

We wish them luck and that those conferences bring about seeable fruits that will get our country out of the troubles it is finding itself in and into a new era and dawn whereby they can find lasting peace and prosperity inshallah!

 

We're grateful to god for this opportunity there's nothing better than reconciliation, may Allaah help them succeed on their way to reconcile all Somali groups! Amiin.