Summary here and here.

Shorter version: They came, they met, they left.

Organisers of Somalia’s national reconciliation conference hailed the meeting as a success even as analysts expressed doubts over the outcome, saying major parties in the current crisis had been left out of the peace-making process.

“The conference will come to a close today [30 August]. It has been a success,” said Abdulkadir Walayo, media adviser to the National Governance and Reconciliation Commission (NGRC), which organised the conference.

[snip]

According to analysts, however, the conference did not achieve much and failed in its main task of reconciliation. “Reconciliation is the most urgent priority for Somalia but the TFG defined it in deliberately narrow terms, related to clans only. The conference achieved very little since none of the key issues essential to restoring security, as well as a broader peace, was discussed,” said Salim Lone, a newspaper columnist and political commentator based in Nairobi, Kenya.

Timothy Othieno, Horn of Africa analyst at the Institute for Global Dialogue in Johannesburg, described the conference as “a total failure” because of the way the participants were chosen and the arbitrary tactics of the TFG. “The TFG determined who was going to attend and who wasn’t. You cannot place conditions on participants if you are trying to reconcile a nation.”

The Hawiye clan, the dominant group in Mogadishu, and the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC) were left out of the process, he said. “This indeed signalled the end of the ‘conference’ even before it began,” Othieno said. The TFG forgot that it was an interim government created to “to facilitate a process that would legitimise whoever is chosen by the people - via credible elections”, he added.

A civil society source in Mogadishu, who said they had not been invited to the conference, complained that it was “a missed opportunity”. The gathering should have been all-inclusive, and held at a neutral venue, he said.

“Unfortunately neither the armed nor the unarmed opposition was invited,” he said. Mogadishu was not a neutral venue for the meeting, he added.

Added Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed of the UIC: “From beginning to end [the conference] was not about the interests of the Somali people but to legitimise the occupation.” Ethiopia sent its troops to Mogadishu in late 2006 to help the TFG defeat UIC forces and its soldiers, who are widely seen as occupiers, are still in the city.

Sheikh Ahmed said those who participated in the conference represented no one but themselves. “If anything, the conference has worsened the plight of the population in Mogadishu”, pointing out that thousands of people continue to leave the city due to the insecurity. Article