By Hassan Yare
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
By Hassan Yare
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BAIDOA, Somalia, Jan 17 (Reuters) - Somalia's parliament on Wednesday ousted powerful speaker Sharif Hassan Sheikh Adan, who split with the president and prime minister late last year over his peace overtures to rival Islamists.
"The speaker is out," Somali legislator Ali Basha told Reuters by phone from the parliament in a converted grain warehouse in the provincial town of Baidoa. He said 183 voted against Adan, while eight voted in his favour and one abstained.
The ouster of Adan was widely seen as an attempt by the interim government to consolidate power after its troops, backed by Ethiopia's military, ran the Islamists out of strongholds in Mogadishu and most of southern Somalia at the New Year.
"They want to send a clear signal to those who supported the Islamic courts that they don't have a place in the present political dispensation. But that may be a mis-calculation," Somali expert Matt Bryden said.
President Abdullahi Yusuf's administration is being urged by many to reach out to opponents to ensure peace and stability in the chaotic Horn of Africa nation.
Member of parliament Mohamed Isak Fanah, who opposed the motion, said it would foster conflict. "What happened in the parliament today is a new problem for Somalia. Somalia needs a reconciliation process," he said.
The speaker, who had close ties to the Mogadishu businessmen who financed the Somalia Islamic Courts Council (SICC), made several attempts to strike peace deals between the government and the Islamist movement when it controlled most of the south.
But his manoeuvres incurred the wrath of Yusuf and Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi, who said the power-sharing deal he cut did not have any government authority. Adan's overtures preceded the late December offensive against the Islamists.
The speaker, who has not been in parliament for months and was in Brussels on Tuesday to meet EU aid chief Louis Michel, could not be reached for comment. Local media reports said he was in Djibouti, but that could not immediately be confirmed.
Ibrahim Adan Hassan, one of 31 members of parliament (MPs) who proposed the no-confidence vote, blamed Adan for rifts in the administration. "The speaker was at the head of the conflict in parliament for the last two years," Hassan said.
PEACEKEEPERS WANTED
Officials said a new speaker would be appointed in 15 days.
Somali sources close to the government said Yusuf's office had also ordered a reshuffle on Wednesday to trim the cabinet.
But government spokesman Abdirahman Dinari, speaking by telephone from the capital Mogadishu, dismissed that.
"The government is busy disarming Somalia, and MPs are in parliament impeaching the speaker, so those reports are absolutely not true," he told Reuters.
Yusuf and Gedi are trying to bring the volatile nation of 10 million to heel after the routing of the Islamists, who have fled to the south near Kenya. Police in Kenya are checking rumours some top Islamists want to surrender at the border.
The Somali government wants an African Union (AU) peacekeeping force -- approved by the U.N. Security Council before the war -- in Somalia by the end of the month.
Though some momentum seems to be gathering for such a mission, that timetable looks highly optimistic, given that most analysts believe it will take far longer to organise.
Ethiopia wants to pull out its soldiers in weeks.
In South Africa, Deputy Foreign Minister Aziz Pahad said the continent would be unable to move in quickly to replace Ethiopian troops. "We are overstretched," Pahad said of South Africa, which Gedi has mentioned as a probable contributor.
Pahad also criticised a U.S. air raid on suspected al Qaeda targets last week in south Somalia, saying it added "oil to the fires that are burning in Africa and the Middle East".
Even if an African force does move into Somalia, it faces a mammoth task to tame a nation which has been in anarchy since the 1991 ouster of a dictator and which defied the best efforts of U.S. and U.N. peacekeepers in the early 1990s.
As well as the threat of a guerrilla war from Islamist remnants who are hiding in the south, other security threats include the return of warlords, the prevalence of weapons across the country and long-running clan feuds. (Additional reporting by Bryson Hull, Andrew Cawthorne in Nairobi, Sahal Abdulle in Mogadishu, Tsegaye Tadesse in Addis Ababa, Sarah McGregor in Pretoria)
Source: Reuters, Jan 17, 2007