African Summit Leaders Back Peace Proposal for Somalia

African regional leaders endorsed a peace proposal for war-torn Somalia on Friday that was aimed at undermining the power of the warlords.

During a one-day summit in neighboring Djibouti, the leaders of Kenya, Sudan, Ethiopia and Djibouti embraced the plan introduced earlier this year by Djibouti President Ismael Omar Guelleh.

The four nations, along with Eritrea and Uganda, make up the regional Internal-Governmental Authority on Development, or IGAD. Eritrea and Uganda did not attend the Nairobi summit.

Peace in Somalia has been an improbable prospect until now. The country has been divided into warring fiefdoms since political rivals ousted President Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991. In subsequent years, a dozen peace initiatives have come to naught, scuttled by one warlord or another.

But lately, support for the warlords has been waning. They cannot pay fighters or buy weapons. Businessmen in the capital, Mogadishu, have begun funding Islamic courts whose private militias police the city.

While Guelleh’s plan does not exclude warlord participation in rebuilding the country, it suggests involving leaders of a devastated civil society, “including intellectuals, artists and mothers,” in political negotiations.

The plan calls for the warlords to disarm, turn their factions into political parties and submit to a formal legal system.

Most of the warlords have opposed the plan. But African regional governments, Arab League states, the United States and the European Union have endorsed it, as have two Somali leaders.

In advance of the summit, Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, the self-styled president of Puntland in northeastern Somalia, and warlord Mohamed Saeed Hirsi, known as General Morgan, met with Kenyan President Daniel Arap Moi to promote the Guelleh initiative.

Two warlords controlling the southern half of Mogadishu also traveled to Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, to try to debunk the proposal, but Moi apparently was unconvinced.

“Those so-called leaders, or warmongers, must understand,” Yusuf said, “that with the entire Somali population fed up with war, they will lose.”

Some observers, though, are skeptical about the chances of the Ethiopian-backed initiative at a time when the Ethiopian-Eritrean war has spilled over into Somalia. Eritrea has armed warlord Hussein Mohammed Aidid, and Ethiopia is backing his rivals.

At the Friday summit, the leaders agreed that the IGAD standing committee, which includes the six member countries, donors, the United Nations and the European Commission, would meet in Nairobi on Dec. 15 to discuss implementation of the plan.