Peace talks will not fail, says mediator

The Kenyan special envoy for Somalia, Elijah Mwangale, on Wednesday expressed confidence that the current Somali peace talks would succeed, and could make progress fast. He said this was because the international community and the region were united in exerting pressure for success, and because all the major players in the Somali conflict were present.

Hundreds of Somali delegates have arrived for the conference, which began on Tuesday in the Kenyan town of Eldoret. It is being held under the auspices of the regional body, the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD). Mwangale heads the IGAD technical committee, which is mediating in the talks. The membership of the committee comprises representatives from the neighbouring states of Kenya, Ethiopia and Djibouti.

Addressing a press conference in Eldoret, Mwangale said the number of people attending the conference was "way beyond our expectation", and that the "key military stakeholders" in Somalia were all present. "We have literally everybody," he told reporters. "I can tell you that there is nobody who has not arrived or is not arriving. In other words, this conference will be completely different from the other conferences that we've had before on Somalia."

Mwangale said the mediation team believed that progress could now be rapid. "We believe that we have reached a stage that rather than going for three months, as we had planned in our process, that it will now take about a month for us to reach the question of constitutional structures and the governing structures that are required for Somalia. And I think that from the expressions that we had this morning [from delegates], they want to have a structure that is able to hold the whole of Somalia, and I think we are going to end up having a decentralised kind of unitary government."

Asked how this stage would be reached, Mwangale replied that the conference should be able to set up committees "in the next two weeks" to make recommendations on the key issues identified by the conference. "Now those committees are the key ones," he continued, "because they will address the key issues that will have been identified in this conference, issues such as the cessation of hostilities, demobilisation, the new constitutional structures, resumption of aid."

Mwangale told reporters that there would be "six to seven items" on the agenda, and that the committees would each have between 12 and 16 members. That meant, he said, that the number of delegates in the second phase of the negotiations would be reduced to between 75 and 100. "From now on the process will be continuous," said Mwangale, "but we'll cut down the numbers
[of delegates]. As it is, we're overwhelmed by the numbers."

The conference organisers originally invited some 300 participants, but say they now have at least 450. "We have got too many delegates," Mwangale said. "Everybody who has come as head of a delegation has come with more than the number allocated. So it means that we have now got to sit down with the leadership and cut down that number."