Thursday, May 24, 2007
The peace conference, planned for June 14, has been delayed several times due to insecurity in the Somali capital Mogadishu and difficulties in gathering funding.
Speaking to reporters in Asmara late Wednesday, top Islamist leader Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed and former parliament speaker Sheikh Sharif Hassan Aden said the proposed peace talks would be futile.
"We would like to call for the Somali people to boycott this so-called reconciliation conference, which will be unsuccessful," they said in a joint statement issued in Somali and Arabic.
The leaders, surrounded by Somali opposition lawmakers, reiterated that "all Somali stakeholders" must take part in any conference to forge a national unity government.
The Somali interim government has repeatedly said that Islamist leaders can only take part as representatives of their clans, not of their movement.
Ethiopian-Somali forces ousted the Islamic Courts Union from their six-month rule of south and central Somalia at the start of the year.
An Ethiopian-Somali offensive last month ended weeks of clashes with Islamist-led insurgents that killed hundreds of civilians and forced tens of thousands to flee Mogadishu.
The renegade leaders called on Somalis to keep fighting Ethiopian troops and the Somali interim government.
The planned conference was organized to create a "sense of false legitimacy for the Ethiopian occupying forces", the statement said, calling for an international boycott.
Somalia has been without an effective government since the 1991 ouster of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre sparked a bloody power struggle that has defied numerous attempts to restore stability.
Source: AFP, May 24, 2007