Somali Government Softens Rhetoric

[Oromia]

http://www.somaliweyn.com/pages/news/Dec_06/18Dec14.html

 

Somalia's government struck a tone of reconciliation on Sunday by suggesting it would still be open to negotiations with rival Islamists who have threatened to attack if Ethiopian troops do not leave the country by Tuesday.

Raising war fears to a new high, the Islamists last week gave Ethiopian troops backing the government a seven-day ultimatum to leave, while President Abdullahi Yusuf said the door was closed for negotiations with the religious movement.

 

But a government spokesman in Baidoa - the only town aYusuf's Western-backed interim administration controls in its own country - said the president's words had been interpreted too dramatically by media tracking the Somali crisis.

 

"The door of talks was not shut by the government, which is a reconciliation government, but by the Islamic Courts," Information Minister spokesman Mohamed Abdulkadir Ahmed said.

 

"That's what the government said. Some media houses misinterpreted that," he added.

 

Diplomats said those words suggested the government may in fact be keeping open the option of a return to talks with the Islamists that stalled in Sudan last month.

 

And giving a further ray of hope to those believing the momentum towards war can still be halted, moderate Islamist leader Sheikh Sharif Ahmed said on Saturday the Somalia Islamic Courts Council (SICC) was still committed to dialogue.

 

Puntland behind government

 

On the ground, however, the military face-off remained tense over the weekend, witnesses said. Islamist fighters continued to dig in at positions on three sides of Baidoa, with government troops just a few kilometres from them at one point.

 

The Islamists took Mogadishu in June and spread across south Somalia after that, challenging the Yusuf government's aspiration to restore central rule to the Horn of Africa nation for the first time since warlords ousted a dictator in 1991.

 

The government says thousands of foreign radicals have bolstered the Islamists' ranks, while Washington last week accused the movement of being run by an al Qaeda cell.

 

The Islamists, for their part, say the government, formed in Kenya in 2004, has no popular legitimacy and has allowed more than 30,000 "invading" Ethiopian soldiers into Somalia to prop them up in Baidoa.

 

In a boost for the government, the president of the semi-autonomous north Somali region of Puntland, Mohamud Muse Hirsi, visited Baidoa on Sunday apparently to express his support for Yusuf's government.

 

Speaking to reporters after Yusuf met Hirsi, Puntland's health minister would not give details of their talks. But he implied the region would be loyal to Yusuf.

 

"Puntland is part of the administration under the interim federal government," Abdirahman Said Mahamud said. Puntland is Yusuf's homeland and is also believed by experts to be hosting thousands of Ethiopian troops.

 

Separately, a pro-Islamist Web site reported another 200 government soldiers defected to Islamists in Diinsoor, south of Baidoa, at the weekend, following the desertion of 100 to Mogadishu earlier in the week. That could not be confirmed.

 

 

Source: Agencies