From: wolda002@umn.edu
Date: Thu May 14 2009 - 18:33:34 EDT
Somali leader urges president to step down
NAIROBI (AFP) — Hardline Somali leader Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, who has
spearheaded a deadly military offensive in Mogadishu in recent days, on
Thursday urged President Sharif Sheikh Ahmed to leave office.
"I am calling on Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed to abandon his self-proclaimed
presidential job in order to spare the lives of Somalis," Aweys told AFP by
phone from the Somali capital.
Dozens of people have been killed since last week when insurgent forces
including the radical Islamist Shebab group and Aweys' armed organisation
Hezb al-Islam launched an unprecedented offensive to remove Ahmed from
power.
The internationally-backed president of Somalia's transitional federal
administration only controls a handful of streets and buildings in
Mogadishu.
On Thursday, insurgent fighters were deployed around the presidency and the
capital's key institutions, in a tense standoff with African Union
peacekeepers and government forces.
"We have no real Somali government to speak of but foreign puppets who call
themselves the leaders of Somalia," Aweys said, brushing off accusations by
the United Nations that he was masterminding a coup.
"No country in the world will accept an imported leadership. The Somalis
are equally free to reject that," he said.
Aweys and Sharif were two of the Islamist leaders who took over most of
Somalia in 2006 before being ousted by an Ethiopian invasion in support of
the TFG.
Sharif eventually joined the UN-sponsored reconciliation process based in
Djibouti and was elected Somalia's president in January, days after
Ethiopia, which intervened in 2006 to prop up the weak transitional
government, completed its military pullout.
Aweys has always rejected the Djibouti process and returned from exile in
Eritrea last month, vowing he would continue to oppose the government as
long as African Union peacekeepers remained on Somali soil.
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