Zuma wants Burundi summit
2002-05-02 12:55
Kampala - South African Deputy President Jacob Zuma has called for a regional summit to help jump-start the peace process in Burundi, sources at the Ugandan presidency said in Kampala on Wednesday.
Zuma made his appeal at a meeting in the capital with Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni on Tuesday night.
"South Africa wants Museveni, as chairman of the regional peace initiative on Burundi, to carry out consultations with regional governments on the possibility of convening a summit to salvage the situation, which has made little progress and requires a regional summit to draw its way forward," said an official at the presidency, who asked not to be named.
He said Museveni and Zuma noted that, although the first half of Pierre Buyoya's interim presidency in Burundi was almost coming to an end, fighting continued and some rebel groups had yet to be brought on board the peace process.
Forces for the Defence of Democracy (FDD) and the National
Liberation Front (FLN) rebels refused to sign a peace accord
reached in August 2000 between the other parties to the civil war.
Power-sharing unable to stop bloodshed
A power-sharing government with Buyoya, a Tutsi, as president
for the first 18 months, followed by a Hutu president for the same duration, was installed in November as part of the peace deal, but has not been able to stop the fighting.
Burundi's civil war has since 1993 pitted Hutu rebels against a Tutsi-dominated army, and claimed some 250 000 lives, most of them civilians.
The two leaders also discussed the peace process in the
Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and specifically marathon peace talks held in Sun City, South Africa, presidential spokesperson Mary Okurut said in a statement released on Wednesday.
Those talks, dubbed the Inter-Congolese Dialogue, ended
inconclusively at the end of last month, after the DRC government struck a power-sharing deal with a Ugandan-backed rebel group, the Congolese Liberation Movement (MLC).
Their pact was rejected by rival rebel movement, the
Kigali-backed Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD).
Zuma, who is mediating in the latest efforts aimed at securing a ceasefire in the Burundi conflict arrived in Kampala on Tuesday evening and immediately went into talks with Museveni.
He was due to return home later on Wednesday, stopping off in
Tanzania, where he was set to hold hold a brief meeting with President Benjamin Mkapa. - Sapa-AFP
- SAPA