Somali talks fail to resolve rift

Talks aimed at ending the government split which threatens the Somali peace process have ended without agreement.

Somali President Abdullahi Yusuf has been meeting the speaker of the Somali parliament, Sharif Hasan Shaykh Adan, in Yemen's capital, Sana.

They failed to agree on where the government should be based.

The president wants to go to Jowhar in central Somalia until he considers Mogadishu safe enough, but the speaker insists they should be in the capital.

Somalia has not had a functioning national government since 1991 and 14 previous attempts to end the anarchy have failed.

'Deadlocked'

Kenya, which has hosted more than two years of peace talks, recently told the exiled government to return to Somalia.

The speaker and more than 100 MPs, including key warlords, went to Mogadishu, but many others, including the president and prime minister, are refusing.

Mr Yusuf comes from the north-eastern Puntland region and does not have a support base in Mogadishu.

The talks in Yemen were also supposed to cover the deployment of UN peacekeepers in Somalia to stop armed militias disrupting the transition.

Mr Yusuf wants peacekeepers but Mr Adan's faction says they are not necessary.

"I don't want to go into detail about the peace process, but I can tell you that the negotiations were deadlocked," Mr Adan told the AFP news agency.

He is planning to convene a session of parliament in Mogadishu next week.

If half of the 275 MPs attend, they may consider a vote of no confidence in the president, further widening the rift.

Temporary

Prime Minister Mohamed Ali Ghedi arrived in Jowhar at the weekend and told Reuters news agency that they were pushing ahead with arrangements to be based there.

"My government has finally moved to Somalia. Jowhar is our base until when Mogadishu is pacified," he said.

However he added that it was a temporary measure and said they had no intention of changing the capital.

Another town, Baidoa, also appears to have been ruled out as too unsafe for the government to use as a base.

An attempt by the president to fly into Jowhar last week when he left Kenya was aborted and he instead flew on to Djibouti.

Poor lighting on the runway was blamed for the switch and work is now under way to improve Jowhar's airport.