Museveni to hold consultations ahead of leaders' retreat

Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, current chairman of the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD), is expected to hold consultations with Somali leaders ahead of a proposed retreat to promote the peace process, an IGAD official said. Museveni is expected to arrive on Thursday in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, to "hold consultations with Somali leaders separately", said Ziyad Du'ale of IGAD, which is facilitating the peace talks. "It will be a day-long thing and the president will seek the views of the leaders on the way forward," Du'ale added. Museveni would then launch the 10-day retreat on Friday, and on Saturday it would move to Mombasa, he said. The retreat - which had originally been fixed for 9 December, and was then put back to 18 December - is expected to bring Somali leaders together and "is an opportunity to jump-start the process and move it from the current impasse," said James Kiboi, another IGAD official. Kiboi told IRIN that "everything will be in place, and we hope that everybody [invited leaders] will show up". He noted that so far 42 leaders had been invited, "but that will probably not be the final list". The invitation list has been a bone of contention, with some leaders arguing that the number of participants should be limited to 25, while IGAD has argued 42 leaders should attend. Awad Ahmad Ashara, the spokesman of the self-declared autonomous region of Puntland, who is also the region's justice and religious affairs minister, told IRIN that "participation in the retreat should be limited to the 24 leaders who signed the Cessation of Hostilities Agreement [in Eldoret in October 2002] plus [Transitional National Government President] Abdiqassim Salad Hassan". He added: "Anything beyond the 25 is unacceptable." Ashara noted that some of those being invited "are people who were not in the process and have no influence on the ground and will not contribute to the process". He added that "some of those invited will only serve to exacerbate the conflict". "We are flexible, but if this [the retreat] means going back and opening up issues like the charter [interim constitution] that has been already covered, then we will not be part of it," he warned. The IGAD-sponsored talks, which began in Kenya over a year ago, have been dogged by wrangles over issues such as an interim charter, the number of participants and the selection of future parliamentarians. Many Somalis and international observers have described the retreat as the last chance to salvage the peace process.