September 21 2004 at 05:08PM
By Bryson Hull
Nairobi - Fresh fighting in Somalia, the only country without a central government, cast a shadow over an anti-war rally by Somali politicians on Tuesday for International Peace Day.
Hundreds of Somalis have fled to Kenya this month to escape violence in the volatile south of the country stirred by warring militias battling for control of the port of Kismayo.
"It is a pity to see there are some people who don't believe that the state of fighting is over," Joseph Nyaga, Kenya's assistant minister of East African and Regional Co-operation, told the rally.
"The region and the world will no longer allow a situation where people fight the way you fought," he told his audience, which included several militia bosses who gathered with mediators to celebrate the United Nations' International Day of Peace.
Several small peace marches were due also to take place in in the Somali capital Mogadishu.
The country disintegrated into anarchy after former dictator Mohammed Siad Barre was toppled in 1991 as clans pressured by famine and political turmoil launched battles for territory.
For 21 months, Somalis working with international mediators in Kenya, have laboured to form a new national government. A new clan-based parliament last week elected a speaker and is due to elect a president on October 10.
But for the moment clans and their rifles, truck-mounted machineguns and rocket launchers still rule the rubble-strewn streets of the capital of an estimated one million people.
"It will be the first priority of the new Somali parliament to restore peace in the country. The Somali people need peace more than anything else in the world today," parliament speaker Sharif Hassan Sheikh Adan told the gathering.
The fighting involves a militia controlled by warlord Mohamed Said Hersi, known as General Morgan, who three weeks ago began advancing on Kismayo, in hopes of taking it back from the rival Juba Valley Alliance (JVA) militia coalition.
General Morgan controlled Kismayo for six years until the JVA usurped him in 1999, and they again ejected him after his militia seized control of the town for a few days in 2001.
Winston Tubman, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan's special representative for Somalia, said without elaborating that the warring militias faced punishment if they fought on.
"They must come together with their Somali brothers and sisters otherwise the international community will treat them as fighters and punish them accordingly," he told the rally.