Somali parliament votes to oust dissident speaker

BAIDOA, Somalia, Jan 17 (Reuters) Somalia's parliament voted today to oust powerful speaker Sharif Hassan Sheikh Adan, who fell out with the president and prime minister late last year after he made peace overtures to Islamists.

''The speaker is out,'' Somali legislator Ali Basha told Reuters by phone from the parliament in a converted grain warehouse in the interim capital Baidoa.

He said 183 MPs voted against Adan, while eight voted in his favour and one abstained.

''In two weeks we'll vote for another speaker,'' Basha added.

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 President Abdullahi Yusuf and Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi, who said the power-sharing deal he cut did not have any government authority.

That preceded a late December offensive in which government troops bolstered by Ethiopian air and armour ran the Islamists out of their strongholds in Mogadishu and most of the south.

Adan, who has not been in parliament for months and was in Brussels yesterday 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 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 before the ballot.

PEACEKEEPERS WANTED Somali sources close to the government said Yusuf's office had also ordered a reshuffle today to trim the cabinet.

But government spokesman Abdirahman Dinari, speaking by telephone from the capital Mogadishu, dismissed the reports.

''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 government soldiers, backed by Ethiopian troops, tanks and warplanes, routed Islamists in late December.

Yesterday, Gedi said he expected an African Union (AU) peacekeeping force -- approved by the UN Security Council before the war -- to arrive in Somalia by the end of the month.

Although some momentum seems to be gathering for such a mission, his prediction still looked optimistic given that most analysts believe it will take far longer to organise.

Ethiopia wants to pull out its soldiers in weeks, but a government spokesman said that process had not started yet.

''Ethiopian troops inside Somalia will be withdrawn at a time designated by the government,'' the spokesman said in Addis Ababa. ''The withdrawal will be a big event and will be announced officially to the international community.'' 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 US and UN 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.

REUTERS MS RK1758