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NAIROBI (News Agencies) - President Abdulkassim Salat Hassan of Somali is reported to have gained a new opponent as one leader of the few armed factions supporting him backed out of the government, accusing Salat's clan of illegal land occupation.
The leader of the Rahanwein Resistance Army (RRA) said the Djibouti-led reconciliation process, under which Salat was elected, did not take into account the wishes of the people in the breakaway northwestern region and a self-declared autonomous area in the northeast. "I am no longer part of the reconciliation process that took place in Djibouti... because the executive committee of our political organization scrapped the whole process," Hassan Mohamed Nur Shatigudud, an RRA leader said. Shatigudud said he no longer recognized the authority of the transitional assembly in which he was allotted a seat. Aside from Ali Mahdi Mohamed, Salat is now left with no support at all from the warlords and faction leaders who have held sway in Somalia since the 1991 fall of president Mohamed Siad Barre, according to the reports. Fearful perhaps of losing their spheres of control and influence, the warlords have roundly dismissed the Djibouti process, warning that it would lead to further bloodshed in the African Horn country. "My people reject the peace plan as a solution to Somalia's problems," Shatigudud added, speaking from the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa. "Our land is occupied by men of the Habr Gedir clan, to which Salat belongs, and he could not end that occupation peacefully," said Shatigudud, referring to territory in Lower Shabelle, Middle Juba and Lower Juba, all areas in the RRA's southern Somalia heartland. Shatigudud also explained his decision by recalling that the reconciliation process, under which a transitional parliament, president and prime minister were named, was strongly opposed by people in the breakaway northwestern region of Somaliland and the self-declared autonomous area of Puntland. "The Djibouti process did not have the blessing of [Somaliland] and neighboring Puntland which make up more than half of Somalia," he said. The RRA controls larges swathes of south-central Somalia, including the town of Baidoa, which at one point had been mooted as the seat of the nascent government. Abdallah Deerow Isaaq, RRA's secretary general, was elected speaker of Somalia's parliament. Shatigudud and Deerow are reported to have disagreed over the distribution of the Rahanwein's quota of 44 parliamentary seats during the elections in the Djibouti resort of Arta. Shatigudud boycotted the election of the speaker. |
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