Peace demonstration held in Mogadishu

Several thousand Somalis, mainly women and children, demonstrated in Mogadishu's main stadium on Wednesday, demanding that the war-torn country's faction leaders expedite the ongoing peace talks in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, sources said.

Organised by local NGOs, the demonstrators called on faction leaders who have boycotted the talks to respect an earlier agreement signed in Eldoret, Kenya, in 2002, in which they committed themselves to a ceasefire and promoting the peace process.

"The message from the demonstrators was that the warlords have to respect agreements and return to the talks," Abdullahi Shirwa, head of Peaceline, one of the NGOs that organised the demonstration, told IRIN from Mogadishu. "We see the conference as the best option for the Somali people."

A peace message from the Civil Society in Action, a coalition of 56 NGOs, professional bodies, youth and women's groups, was read out during the demonstration. It urged the warlords to cease hostilities and allow peace to return to the country.

A number of faction leaders walked out of peace talks in Nairobi, and started holding meetings in March in the town of Jowhar, 90 km north of Mogadishu. Awad Ashara, a spokesman for the self-declared region of Puntland in northeastern Somalia, told IRIN on Tuesday that "outstanding issues" remained from phase two of the peace talks.

About 30 out of 174 traditional elders are among those who left the talks, sources in Nairobi said.

The facilitators of the talks attempted to reconvene the Nairobi conference on Wednesday, to discuss the rules of procedure for phase three, but this did not happen, sources close to the talks told IRIN.

Participants at the Nairobi talks had been given a draft copy of the rules, and were expected to begin discussing them in a series of committees. It was important for the draft rules, which were approved by the ministers of the facilitating Inter-Governmental Authority on Development, to be discussed thoroughly by the Somalis themselves so that they could take over "ownership" of the process, a source told IRIN on Thursday.