Thursday 7 April 2011

On Somalia, As UN Dodges on Mahiga Meeting in Kenya, Calls for Firing


By Matthew Russell Lee
UNITED NATIONS, April 7 -- On April 6 Inner City Press asked UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon's spokesman Martin Nesirky to respond to criticism from Somalia of Ban's envoy Augustine Mahiga scheduling a consultative meeting on Somalia this month not in that country, but in Nairobi, Kenya:
Inner City Press: on Somalia, there is quite a lot of protest within the country about a supposed consultative meeting that Mr. Mahiga is organizing in Kenya and there have been calls to boycott it. The Government has also asked that the UN move its offices to Mogadishu. So, what’s the UN’s response to these two critiques, both from clan leaders and from the TFG?
Spokesperson Nesirky: Well, Mr. Mahiga extended this invitation to various parties there to take part in some discussions and we are aware of the report or the reports that you refer to about the presence of UN offices in Somalia; we’re aware of that report. I don’t have anything further on that at the moment, simply to say that the people who work for those offices are regular visitors to Mogadishu. Indeed Mr. Mahiga was briefing the Secretary-General last week when we were in Nairobi, within hours of having just returned from Mogadishu.
On April 7 Nesirky read out a statement that Mahiga will proceeding with the meeting in Nairobi, and has gotten many commitments to attend, summarized by the UN in this way:
Augustine Mahiga, the Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Somalia, said today that the High Level Consultative Meeting will take place as scheduled on the 12 and 13 April in Nairobi. He said that he has received positive responses to the conference from Somali parties and officials who are willing to participate in strengthening the dialogue between the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) and its partners.
What Nesirky, who more and more limits questions at his noon briefing while refusing to answer the vast majority of e-mailed Press questions, did not mention is that the Somali Transitional Federal Government's prime minister himself has opposed the Kenya location, and has gotten Raila Odinga's support on this:
The Kenyan government will back efforts by the Somalia Transition Federal Government (TFG) to host an impending high-level peace meeting to resolve the crisis in the strife-torn country. Prime Minister Raila Odinga assured his Somalia counterpart Mohamed Abdullahi the government would back their bid to convince the United Nations and the African Union to hold the peace meeting in Mogadishu.”

Ban and Mahiga in Naibori, protests from Somalia not shown or answered
  Now, a major Somali cleric -- Sheikh Ahmed Abdi Dhi’isow, the chairman of the Somali religious assembly -- has asked for Ban Ki-moon to fire Mahiga:
'Mahiga disregarded all of our requests and suggestions and he continued organizing the meeting in an attempt to divide Somalis, so we are calling on the U.N. Secretary Ban Ki-moon to dismiss Augustine Mahiga from United Nations Political Office for Somalia,' he said.”
What do Ban and Nesirky say to that? The UN of late has been bragging about "its" Djibouti process. And it's come to thise? Watch this site.Continued

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