The Contribution of Women to Peace and Reconciliation

opportunity to emerge from the violence. Once again, the international
community was turning its back on Somalia and its people.
Once the international peacekeepers left Somalia, the ruthless warlords
and their armed militias re-asserted their power and control over the impoverished
and war-ravaged people. From 1994 to 2006, Somalia re -
mained a stateless nation run by violent warlords and their militias. From
early 1990s until 2008, the international community sponsored sixteen
peace and reconciliation conferences; however, all these international
efforts failed to solve the political problems in Somalia, the reason being
that they were not Somali owned. They were designed and organized
by external sponsors and not the Somalis who were supposed to do the
actual reconciliation. In addition, the warlords were the main Somali participants
in the conferences, and they did not support the transitional
governments which emerged from these meetings. One of them, the
Arta peace process in Djibouti, was noted by all Somalis as the only participatory
and successful peace conference where members of the civil
society, women, youth, Somalis from the diaspora, traditional leaders
and intellectuals participated and collectively drafted political solutions
for their war-torn nation.
The Arta Conference offered an opportunity for Somalis to rebuild a state
and recover from violence, and also produced the Transitional National
Government (TNG), witha two-year mandate to establish the rule of law
and reconstitute state institutions. In 2002, when the TNG’s mandate
ended, another peace conference was held in Nairobi, Kenya, which
lasted until 2004 and led to the formation of Transitional Federal Government
(TFG), with a similar five-year mandate. The TFG led by Abdullahi
Yusuf spent its first year in Nairobi, as it was unable to relocate to Mogadishu,
which was still under the control of warlords. In 2005, it succeeded
in establishing itself in Jowhar, a small town outside of Mo gadishu,
for a year and a half, and moved to Baidoa in south-central Somalia
the next year. Like its predecessor, this TFG too faced a number of challenges,
including religious opposition groups like the United Islamic
Courts (UIC), which succeeded in dismantling the control of warlords in
southern and central Somalia. The UIC did not support the TFG, and considered
themselves the legitimate rulers.
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