Arab League offers to host reconciliation conference

In Cairo on Monday, Arab League secretary-general, Esmat Abdel Meguid, said the League was “ready to host a reconciliation conference with all the interested parties and all countries in the region concerned by the Somali crisis” and called on Somali leaders “to work for a restoration of security and stability”. Meguid was speaking after a meeting with Somali faction leaders Hussein Aideed and Ali Mahdi Mohamed, who control south and north Mogadishu, respectively, and who claimed all Somali leaders were seeking all-party peace talks to be convened with Arab League support, Reuters news agency reported. A regional analyst told IRIN on Thursday that Aideed’s political credibility was at a low ebb and the Arab League was unlikely to follow through with hosting such a reconciliation conference unless it was a serious and representative national conference - along the lines of that being proposed for Hargeisa by Mohamed Egal, president of the self-declared state of Somaliland. Details of ‘Egal’s proposal’, as it has been called, have been slow to emerge but one political analyst told IRIN it would be up for discussion at a meeting of the key players in the Somalia peace process in Addis Ababa in late July. NGO network calls for new UN initiative However, the Somali Human Rights and Peace Network (SHRPN) - an umbrella grouping of 21 Somali NGOs - on Tuesday appealed to the UN Security Council to appoint a team to spearhead a peace process for Somalia, alleging that the regional organisations mandated with establishing peace in Somalia had become entangled and taken sides in the conflict. The statement referred to the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD), of which Ethiopia and Eritrea are members and are blamed for rearming warring Somali factions, and the Arab League, two members of which, Egypt and Libya, have supported the so-called Mogadishu Joint Authority of Aideed and Ali Mahdi, and therefore compromised their neutrality, according to SHRPN. Qatar implicated in arms shipment In Mogadishu, meanwhile, media reports on Monday claimed that Qatar and other Arab states had financed and arranged logistics for a shipment of weapons to Somalia for Aideed’s faction, said to have arrived in the central Somali village of Faah on Thursday from Eritrea. The other Arab countries said to be involved were not named, but Aideed’s rivals have claimed that Libya and Egypt have been supplying him, in addition to Eritrea. Asmara and Cairo have repeatedly denied sending weapons to Somalia. Ethiopia, in turn, is reported to be strongly backing anti-Aideed militias, including the Rahanwein Resistance Army (RRA), a claim it too has repeatedly denied. This was the first time an oil-rich Arab country had been implicated in shipping arms to Somalia, AFP news agency reported. Libya denies arming any Somali factions The Libyan deputy foreign minister, Ali Abdulsalaam Attaricki, on Tuesday denied reports that Libya was supplying Aideed with weapons. Speaking in Addis Ababa during a visit aimed at brokering an Ethiopia-Eritrea peace deal, Attaricki told reporters: “Libya has not provided any arms to any of the Somali factions; European sources are providing arms to the Somali factions”, AP news agency reported.