Somalian factions agree to recognize each other

KHARTOUM, Sudan (AFP) — Somalia’s rival leaders on Thursday reached an agreement to recognize each other after Arab League-sponsored talks aimed at ending fighting in the war-ravaged country, officials said.

The agreement was signed in Khartoum after a delegation from the Islamic alliance, which ousted U.S.-backed warlords from the Somali capital on June 5 after four months of fighting, went into talks with members of the transitional government.

The agreement recognizes “the legality of the transitional government and the presence of the alliance of Islamic tribunals,” Arab League Secretary General Amr Mussa told reporters after heading talks between the two sides.

The text calls for an “end to media and military campaigns... the pursuit of dialogue without preconditions in the framework of mutual recognition” and “the judgment of war criminals,” Mussa said.

The Islamists have regarded President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed as no more than just another warlord, while the president regarded the Islamists as a grouping of unlawful anarchists.

The accord was signed by a prominent scholar representing the Islamic courts, Ali Mohammed Ibrahim, and Somali Foreign Minister Abdullah al-Sheikh Ismail.

The meeting came after both sides held separate consultations with Arab officials — including Mussa — as well as Sudanese President Omar al-Beshir, who holds the rotating chair of the pan-Arab body.

Beshir described the accord as “the beginning of the end of conflicts in Somalia.”

The parties are to resume talks aimed at resolving outstanding security disputes on July 15 in Khartoum.

“We have come to the negotiations to find a solution to Somalia’s problems, with assistance from our Arab brothers,” said Ibrahim between sessions and before the accord was signed.

Upon his arrival in Khartoum, Mussa said the mediation was aimed at “paving the way for dialogue and for a Somali consensus,” the official Sudanese news agency SUNA reported.

The Khartoum talks were the first mediation effort for the conflict that has killed about 360 people and wounded 2,000 in recent weeks.

Somalia’s embattled transitional government sent a team that included its president, Prime Minister Ali Mohammed Gedi and Parliament Speaker Sharif Hassan Sheikh Adan.

The Joint Islamic Courts militia, which has seized control of much of southern Somalia, has vowed to re-establish order and begun imposing Sharia Islamic law in the areas it controls.

Fearful of attacks in the capital, officials of Somalia’s transitional authority operate from Baidoa, west of Mogadishu, and exert little control over the country. The official government suspects Islamists want to overrun all of Somalia.

Previous attempts at negotiations between the two sides had failed. The Somali president said Tuesday he would not talk to the Islamists until they recogniszd his go The Islamists charge that Yemen and Ethiopia, which are also sponsoring the peace talks, are biased in favour of the Baidoa government.

Quoted by SUNA, Beshir stressed “the need to put an end to the conflict and instability in Somalia in order to foil any plans for foreign interference in the affairs of a member of the Arab League.”

Beshir is also trying to resist growing pressure for a troop deployment in his own country, with UN officials currently campaigning in Sudan in a bid to secure approval for sending peacekeepers in war-torn Darfur.

The United States, worried that Somalia could develop into a Taliban-like state, is widely believed to have supported the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism, a group of secular warlords opposing the Islamists. But the Islamists won after more than four months of fighting.

Somalia has lacked an effective government since dictator Mohammed Siad Barre was toppled in 1991. More than 14 international efforts have failed to restore a functioning administration in the lawless nation of 10 million.

Copyright 2006 Agence France-Presse.vernment and gave up all the territories they had seized.