Amnesty likely way out Somali imbroglio: UN expert

[Liqaye]

 

MOMBASA, Kenya – Offering amnesty to powerful individuals accused of fomenting violence in Somalia could help rid lawlessness from the Horn of Africa country, where the latest of a series of attempts to pass a new constitution faces dim prospects, a UN constitutional expert said on Wednesday.

 

World-renown Kenyan Professor Yash Pal Ghai, who has shepherded constitution-making assignments in Nepal, East Timor, Iraq, Kenya and Afghanistan, said such an offer would secure backing from the same people whose opposition doomed previous drafts.

 

Amnesty sometimes includes transitional justice in circumstances where warlords and clan chiefs block peace efforts, he added. Human rights groups have dismissed such deal-making as problematic, an unacceptable justification and a subjective stratagem that would foment impunity.

 

“The international community does not favour this, but you have to make sacrifices,” Ghai told Somali civil society activists meeting in the Kenyan port city of Mombasa, where they are discussing their role in fostering peace at home. “Sometimes you have to say that peace is more important and then give them amnesty and just move forward.”

 

Ghai, a former University of Hong Kong professor and UN advisor on constitutional matters, said tidy constitutional formulas and edicts would not hold in a country where loyalties and power bases have shifted numerous times.

 

“The environment that is prevailing in Somalia is not conducive for the process of constitution making. Some legal scholars say that one should not make a constitution until full peace is achieved. But you do not have a choice, but move ahead, “ he added.

 

Although the soft-spoken Ghai has never directly participated in previous Somali peace talks, his experience on conflicts and constitutional matters is highly regarded across the world.

 

Several ‘powerful’ Somali warlords and clan leaders, locked in bloody power struggles since the 1991 ouster of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre, have scuppered efforts to endorse constitutions, fearing they might lose clout and open the way for prosecutions.

 

Failure to enact the draft constitution will further weaken the government in the face of hard-charging Islamist Shabab militants, controlling swathes of southern Somalia including much of the capital Mogadishu, the crown jewel of the bloody contest for supremacy in Somalia.

 

United Nations and human rights officials have pressed for a probe into war crimes in Somalia, warning that impunity must be punished if the country is to achieve peace. Factional fighting and war-induced famine have claimed at tens of thousands of lives and displaced millions others.

 

Although the Somali conflict has spawned one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, the International Criminal Court has barely shown intentions to probe violations, fearing such offers might jeopardise the fragile UN-backed efforts to bring warring sides to negotiations.

 

Numerous agreements have previously failed to achieve that goal, further plunging the country of a graveyard spiral of violence that has shaken the region and intensified concerns that extremists linked to Al Qaeda have filtered into Somalia.

 

A deal reached in Djibouti last year extended the mandate of the Transitional Federal Institutions – created in 2004 – until August 2011 when, it is assumed that, parliament would have enacted a new basic law. The Horn of Africa nation, home to about eight million people, is currently run by a transitional federal charter that was drawn in Kenya seven years ago.

 

Late November, the Somali cabinet endorsed a new legal framework expected to be presented to the federal parliament in the coming days for debate. Officials said the government is currently lobbying to garner majority vote, but has suffered a setback when a suicide bomber killed at least 20 people, including three cabinet ministers, on December 3.

 

UN officials urged Somalis to support the new law, saying it would be part of a peace settlement that would end one of Africa’s most intricate conflicts.

 

“People must engage in this (constitution-making) process. They must identify with it, if this can be achieved, then the constitution becomes an integral part of a peace agreement,” Paul Simkim, a governance expert in the UN Development Programme, told the conference that was attended by experts who are drafting the Somali constitution.