Somali ministers resign to help peace talks

MOGADISHU, July 27: Eighteen Somali ministers and other top officials today quit the fragile interim government to facilitate peace talks with rival Islamists, while some lawmakers also moved to oust their prime minister.

Government sources said both moves were meant to prepare ground before hoped-for talks between both sides where power-sharing is seen as the main option to avert more violence in the conflict-plagued Horn of Africa nation.

The Islamists took Mogadishu in June and control a swathe of the south, threatening the authority of the government, set up in 2004 in the 14th attempt to restore central rule since the 1991 ousting of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre.

Lawmakers said a vote of no confidence in Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi had been presented to the speaker of Somalia's parliament and would be debated on Saturday in Baidoa, seat of the Western-backed interim authorities.

The list of high-level resignations included seven ministers, seven assistant ministers and four state ministers.

''We have resigned because we have failed to fulfil the needs of the Somali people. We have decided to vacate all the seats for the Khartoum talks,'' outgoing state minister of parliament and government relations Abdirahman Haji Adan told Reuters.

Ahmed Abdirahman Mohamed, outgoing assistant minister for higher education, said the government had compromised itself by becoming too close to Ethiopia, which is believed to have sent troops into Somalia to curb the Islamists' expansion.

''(The government) was taking orders from Addis Ababa. Somalis now have an opportunity to reconstitute their government,'' he told Reuters from Baidoa.

SAVING PEACE Regional diplomats and analysts believe offering the prime minister's and some other ministerial posts could be the best chance to bring the Islamists into formal government and save the peace deal reached in 2004 in neighbouring in Kenya. ''They want to go to Khartoum without a prime minister and see if they can hammer out a deal with the Islamic courts,'' said a source close to Somalia's parliamentary speaker. ''After that is when the president will appoint the prime minister.'' The government's interim charter says that once a vote of no confidence is passed against a prime minister, the president is required to appoint a new one within 30 days.

''The (no confidence) motion is supported and even funded by Islamists who want to take the position once talks with the government commence in Khartoum,'' a government source said.

First talks took place in Sudan in June, but the government boycotted a second round this month in protest at suspected Islamist violations of a pact against military expansion.

On the other side, the Islamists' leader, hardline cleric Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, has ruled out a meeting unless Ethiopia stops its ''invasion'' of Somalia.

''We don't care who is removed and who remains in the government. Our only worry is Ethiopia and until they get out, we will not rest,'' Aweys told Reuters.

Ethiopia denies sending troops and today accused neighbour and foe Eritrea of supplying arms to the Islamists, including via a plane that landed in Mogadishu yesterday.

''Eritrea's action ... could escalate into violence in the region,'' said Information Ministry spokesman Zemedhun Tekle.

In another development giving the Islamists full control in Mogadishu, militiamen said gunmen loyal to a warlord who controlled a former presidential palace -- known as Villa Somalia -- were preparing to hand it over.

Although the Islamists seized Mogadishu from warlords last month, some pockets remained under warlord control.

REUTERS