Inauguration of proposed interim parliament postponed

The inauguration of Somalia's proposed transitional parliament has been postponed because some clans had not completed the process of nominating members, sources close to the Somali reconciliation conference said on Friday.

Foreign ministers of member states of the regional Inter-Governmental Authority on Drought and Development (IGAD), which is mediating Somalia's peace talks, had on July 19 said that delegates attending the talks had invited them to launch the parliament on 30 July.

But the process of allocating seats to the various sub-clans that make up the larger clans has been fraught with disputes, slowing down the process of constituting the proposed 275-member Somali Transitional Federal Assembly.

The inauguration of the parliament has now been tentatively scheduled for 4 August, when it is hoped that all the clans would have handed in their lists of nominated MPs to the foreign ministers, who make up the IGAD Facilitation Committee steering the peace process.

Each of Somalia's four major clans has been allocated 61 seats in the proposed parliament, while an alliance of minority clans will have 31 MPs. A speaker and two deputy speakers to be elected from among the parliamentarians will preside over the election of the president, who will in turn appoint a prime minister mandated to form a government.

The mediators had earlier urged the delegates to honour a 31 July 2004 deadline earlier set by IGAD for the end of Phase III, the last stage of the peace talks.

IGAD groups Djibouti, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Kenya, Sudan and Uganda. Somalia is also a member, but is not fully represented in the organisation because it has been without an effective government since the toppling in 1991 of the regime of Muhammad Siyad Barre.

The IGAD-sponsored Somali National Reconciliation Conference began in October 2002 in the western Kenyan town of Eldoret, and was moved to Nairobi in February 2003.