Gabbal Posted October 25, 2003 KAMPALA: East African heads of state from the seven-member Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) announced plans to kick-start stalled reconciliation talks for Somalia. The measures were unveiled at the end of a one-day IGAD summit in Kampala, where Somalia's barely recognised interim president, Abdulkassim Salat Hassan, reiterated his rejection of the Nairobi-based talks with their current format and venue. "The summit has decided to expand the technical committee now renamed the facilitation committee on the Somali Peace Process to include (all member states of IGAD)," said a communique read out by Ugandan Foreign Minister James Wapakhabulo. IGAD comprises the governments of Djibouti, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Kenya, Sudan and Uganda. Somalia, which has no universally recognised government, is nominally also a member state. Until now, the technical committee mediating the Somali talks only included so-called frontline states: Kenya, Ethiopia and, until it walked out of the talks this month, Djibouti. The new, more inclusive technical committee is scheduled to meet at ministerial level in Nairobi on October 28. The summit asked the African Union (AU) to assist IGAD in the Somali reconciliation process. It also called on AU Chairman Joachim Chissano, the president of Mozambique, to help in an increasingly tense impasse in the peace process betweeen Ethiopia and Eritrea. At the end of two years of devastating war, the neighbouring Horn of Africa states agreed in a peace accord signed in December 2000 to give a neutral commission responsibility for deciding the precise path of their common frontier and to respect this commission's ruling as final and binding. But Ethiopia has rejected the commission's decision and as a result the crucual process of physically marking out the border has been repeatedly delayed amid increasingly terse pronouncements from Ethiopia and Eritrea. Also discussed by the IGAD summiteers -- presidents Mwai Kibaki of Kenya, Omar al-Beshir of Sudan, Yoweri Museveni of Uganda and Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi -- were issues related to terrorism and the flow into the region of illicit arms. Djibouti and Eritrea were represented by their foreign ministers. - AFP - AFP Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
