The top United Nations envoy for Somalia has wrapped up private talks in the town of Jowhar with senior Somali officials who pledged to work
with the UN to heal the rift over the government's location and the
deployment of foreign peacekeepers that stalled the latest attempt to
re-establish a central authority in the war-shattered Horn of Africa nation.
According to a UN spokesman in New York, Secretary-General Kofi Annan's
Special Representative for Somalia, Franois Lonsny Fall, returned to
Nairobi on 2 August after talks in Jowhar with President Abdulahi Yusuf
Ahmed and Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi of the Transitional Federal
Government. Mr. Fall was in Somalia to help the leaders overcome the
current differences within the Transitional Federal Institutions on the way
forward, particularly on the relocation of the fledgling government from
Kenya to Somalia, which has had no functional central authority for 14
years following the collapse in 1991 of the government of Muhammad Siad
Barre.
The meeting on 1 August also focused on security and reconciliation. At a
joint press conference following the meeting, Prime Minister Gedi expressed
the Government's willingness to work with the UN and in particular with Mr.
Fall on resolving the current difficulties, the spokesman said. In a June
report, the Secretary-General noted that although the interim government
had been formed in Nairobi more than eight months ago, deep splits between
President Yusef and Parliament speaker Sharif Hassan Sheikh Adan over its
location within the country had stalled a move either to the Somali capital
Mogadishu, or nearby Jowhar.