London - Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud on Tuesday urged the international community to seize the moment, at an international conference in London aimed at rebuilding Somalia after two decades of conflict.
"We cannot allow the immense progress we have made to be wasted," he said at a joint press conference with British Prime Minister David Cameron.
In his government, elected in September, "the world has a partner it can trust," Mohamud said after talks with representatives from more than 50 countries and international organizations. "We have been given a chance in the eyes of the world and we will deliver."
The president, whose government is the first to be recognized by the United States in two decades, faces a tough job. Somalia has been mired in chaos since 1991, when military dictator Mohamed Said Barre was ousted.
A 2010-12 famine claimed more than a quarter of a million lives and the militant group al-Shabaab, which controls large swathes of south and central Somalia, has been waging an insurgency against the government since 2007.
The Islamist insurgents have been pushed out of the capital Mogadishu and most major towns by African peacekeepers. But al-Shabaab continues to stage attacks, including a car bombing on a Qatari delegation on Sunday.
Cameron said Somalia had made "remarkable" progress in the past year and that Mohamud's plans for a transparent and accountable administration presented a "fundamental break with the corruption of the past."
Pirate attacks, for which the waters around the troubled East African nation are notorious, had been reduced by 80 per cent, according to Cameron, with no attacks this year.
However, the premier said that "huge challenges" remained. Somalia faced some of the worst rates of poverty in the world with just under half of Somalis living on less than one dollar a day, he said.
Cameron said that countries including Britain, China, the US and South Africa had agreed to contribute to a 50-million-pound (77-million-dollar) fund to develop Somalia's army, police force and improve maritime security.
A failure to support Somalia in its recovery would allow young people to be radicalized and their minds "poisoned," he said.
"If we ignore it we will be making the same mistakes in Somalia that we made in Afghanistan in the 1990s. I'm not prepared to let that happen," he said.
Tuesday's conference followed two held last year in Istanbul and London. Representatives from the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, United Nations and African Union were among those attending.
A final communique said the Somali government had outlined its commitment to hold democratic elections in 2016 and implement federalism, in a country that is sharply divided along clan lines. Somalia and its partners also agreed to tackle intercourseual violence.
"It will be a Somali-owned solution that will fix Somalia, but no country has ever recovered from such social and economic collapse without the help of the world," Mohamud said in his opening speech.
A meeting on Somalia will also take place on the sidelines of an African development summit in Tokyo at the end of May and the European Union is to hold a Somalia conference in September. - Sapa-dpa
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