Somali Reconciliation Talks Are Delayed Another Month

NAIROBI, June 13 -- A reconciliation conference intended to lay the groundwork for political stability in Somalia has been postponed again, the conference chairman said Wednesday.

Ali Mahdi Mohamed said various clans needed more time to decide on their delegates. Also, the building where the conference was to be held starting Thursday needs to be rehabilitated, he said. The new date for the talks, originally set for April and delayed several times, is July 15.

"This has nothing to do with security issues," Mohamed told reporters in the Somali capital of Mogadishu, where insurgents continue to carry out attacks against officials of the transitional government and the Ethiopian troops backing them.

Following the news conference, three mortar blasts shook the crumbling seaside capital. One was aimed at the Defense Ministry and two hit near a soccer stadium being used by Ethiopian troops as a base.

While Somalia has gone more than 15 years without a central government, it has long had an entrenched, if decentralized, order in the form of clans, sub-clans and sub-sub clans, each with its own set of interests and AK-47s to back them up.

Observers inside and outside the country say the only way to end the violence and move forward is to find a political solution to that clan puzzle, and the reconciliation conference was to be a major step toward that goal.

But the government of President Abdullahi Yusuf has been criticized for failing to address the demands of the capital's powerful Hawiye clan, whose leaders said Tuesday they would not participate in the conference.

The Hawiye, rivals of Yusuf's Darod clan, have major business concerns in Mogadishu. They were strong supporters of the short-lived Islamic Courts movement, ousted by Ethiopian troops early this year with support from the United States, which accused certain movement leaders of al-Qaeda ties. Leaders denied the charge.

One Hawiye businessman said that because of taxes and extortion, it is now cheaper for him to import and export goods from a port about 300 miles away, and use trucks into Mogadishu, than it is to use the city's port. Others complain of random arrests they say are aimed at extracting bribes or intimidating them.

"Everyone opposing the government, they say they belong to al-Qaeda," said Fuad Mire, 25, a computer engineer in Mogadishu. "Also, this crackdown on the opposition is using foreigners like Ethiopia and America to attack Somalis, and this will only make people more extremist."

In April, Ethiopian troops used attack helicopters and tanks in a major offensive against insurgents in Mogadishu. And since January, the United States has been conducting a military campaign in cooperation with Ethiopia that U.S. officials say is aimed at locating three suspects in the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, but which has also targeted insurgents.

Officials in the northern Puntland region told local reporters that U.S. planes have been circling that area.

In a local radio interview, Ahmed Dire, a Hawiye leader, said that the clan "has no confidence" in the reconciliation conference organizers and that Hawiye leaders had not even been formally invited.

"They don't have any respect for us," Dire said. "They say this conference is for clan leaders. We are one of the largest clans in Somalia but were not given one visit."

Despite the criticism, many Somalis and foreign diplomats consider the current transitional government the best chance Somalia has had since 1991 of establishing a workable central order.

Special correspondent Mohamed Ibrahim in Mogadishu contributed to this report.