UN Urges Somalis To Focus On Country's Future With Transition Deadline Near

Bernama
Tuesday, July 10, 2012

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With just over a month to go before Somalia's current transitional governing period comes to end, the top United Nations political official for the Horn of Africa nation has called on all Somalis to help their country on its path to peace and stability.

"The end of the transitional period will be an important benchmark, but it is time for us all to begin to look past 20 August and think about the future political dispensation of Somalia," the UN Secretary-General's Special Representative and head of the UN Political Office for Somalia (UNPOS), Augustine Mahiga, said in an open letter to the people of Somalia Monday.

"Let me urge all Somalis who are stakeholders in the peace process to sustain the political commitment for a broad-based, inclusive and representative post-transitional arrangement. Somalia deserves a political dispensation based on election, not just selection. Somalia deserves peace, prosperity and development," he added.

After decades of warfare, Somalia has been undergoing a peace and national reconciliation process, with the country's Transitional Federal Institutions currently implementing the so-called Roadmap for the End of Transition in Somalia, devised in September last year, that spells out priority measures to be carried out before the current transitional governing arrangements end on Aug 20.

Mahiga pointed to recent events as key steps in Somalia's transition process, including the agreement on a provisional constitution by the Roadmap signatories, major meetings on international support for the Horn of Africa country, and the withdrawal of Al-Shabaab militants from around capital Mogadishu.

In late June, at a meeting in Nairobi, Kenya, the so-called Joint Communique of the Consultative Meeting of the Signatories of the Process for Ending the Transition, which included an official draft constitution, was agreed on by all the Roadmap signatories.

The signatories included President Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed of the Transitional Federal Government (TFG), Speaker of the Transitional Federal Parliament, Sharif Hassan Sheikh Aden, and Prime Minister Abdiweli Mohamed Ali.

The principals also agreed on a number of mechanisms to help move the process forward in the small amount of time left before Aug 20.

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