IGAD ministerial meeting to be held on Friday

A meeting of the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD) ministerial committee on Somalia is scheduled to take place on Friday in the Kenyan capital Nairobi, an IGAD source told IRIN on Thursday.

The IGAD meeting - originally meant to bring together the so-called frontline states of Djibouti, Ethiopia and Kenya - has now been expanded to include all IGAD member states, the source said.

The three countries had been mandated to take the lead in preparing for the Somali reconciliation conference, which is to be held in Eldoret, western Kenya. However their work has been affected by a number of delays arising from differences between them.

Diplomatic sources told IRIN that "representatives of all members of the ministerial committee on Somalia will be there". The full IGAD committee on Somalia comprises Djibouti, Kenya, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Sudan, and Uganda. The meeting, to be held at Nairobi's Grand Regency Hotel, will open on Friday morning "and will discuss, among other things, the technical committee report", the sources said.

The technical committee completed its report last month, after ending a fact-finding mission to Somalia, during which it held talks with the Transitional National Government (TNG) and other groups. The committee was established by the foreign ministers of the IGAD member states when they met in Nairobi in February.

The ministers are also expected to decide on the number of participants to be invited to the conference and set a definitive date for it, the diplomatic sources added.

However a regional analyst told IRIN the meeting was unlikely to push the Somali peace process forward. "I don't expect anything positive to come out of this meeting," he said. He pointed out that not all the countries had seen the technical committee's report, "much less study it".

He also noted that Friday's meeting had been delayed for "over four months due to differences between the IGAD countries".

"Those differences have not been resolved, and will in all probability play themselves out in the meeting. It is almost as though the Somali peace talks have been hijacked by non-Somalis, with the Somalis playing a peripheral role," he said.

The reconciliation conference, expected to bring together the TNG and other Somali parties, was originally scheduled for April, but has been repeatedly postponed. It is now due to take place on 16 September.

However, the diplomatic sources expressed strong doubt that the talks would take place anytime soon, and said the September date was "over-optimistic, given the lack of real and serious preparation on the part of IGAD".

"IGAD needs to do a lot more preparation and to bring on board all Somali parties, including the regional administrations such as Somaliland, which have so far stayed away from all Somali peace conferences," they noted.