IGAD delegates praise Sudan, raise concerns over Somalia

The annual Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD) conference, involving six heads of state from East Africa, opened on Friday with universal praise for Sudan’s new peace efforts, and hopes expressed that Somalia will soon follow suite. Heads of state from Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia and Mozambique (representing the African Union) arrived in the Ugandan capital, Kampala, for the conference chaired this year by Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni. Also present was the UN special adviser to Secretary-General Kofi Annan, Mohamed Sahnoun, who, after praising Sudan for its "encouraging progress", warned that the UN Security Council had "expressed its concern about the persistent cycle of violence in Somalia and the continued flow of weapons and ammunition supplies". He said the Security Council had decided to re-establish a Panel of Experts to investigate suspected violations of the UN arms embargo on Somalia. In his opening remarks, Museveni appealed to the warring factions in Somalia to realise that their best interests lay in cooperation, "as the factions in Sudan have done". "The problem is they do not have the glasses to see that their interests lie in trade, not through fighting," he said. On Thursday, at a news conference at the Sudanese embassy in Kampala, Sudanese Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Isma'il said peace in Sudan had to be seen "in the context of peace in the whole region, in which we all must participate". "There should be settlements in northern Uganda, Somalia, Eritrea and Ethiopia. The Sudan settlement cannot hold in isolation," he added.