Somalia: UN envoy calls for enhanced efforts to promote peace and development

The Secretary-General’s top envoy for Somalia met today with members of a group of states working to promote peace and development in the troubled Horn of Africa country to discuss ways to improve international support for that effort.

Ambassador Francois Lonsény Fall, the Secretary-General’s Special Representative, asked members of the International Contact Group to consider what additional and better coordinated support the international community might provide to the country’s Transitional Federal Institutions (TFIs).

Somalia has not had a functioning government since 1991. A transitional Government was recently set up in Baidoa while forces of the Supreme Council of Islamic Courts took over the Somali capital of Mogadishu.

Ambassador Fall called on the international community to urge the TFIs and the Islamic Courts to enter into meaningful dialogue without preconditions, which should lead to a complete cessation of hostilities.