SA to host Burundi peace talks

2003-08-20 13:22

Pretoria - Burundi's president and rebel leaders are expected to meet face-to-face in talks facilitated by South Africa on Wednesday in a bid to kick-start a faltering ceasefire deal, an official said.

South African Deputy President Jacob Zuma, the chief mediator in the Burundi peace process, is overseeing the negotiations at an undisclosed venue in northwestern South Africa.

Zuma held proximity talks on Tuesday with the president of the transitional government, Domitien Ndayizeye, and Hutu rebel leader Pierre Nkurunziza, head of the Forces for Defence of Democracy (FDD), the largest rebel group in the central African country.

The deputy president met separately with the government and rebel delegations "to receive their proposals on power-sharing," Zuma's spokesperson Lakela Kaunda said.

Zuma is facilitating the talks until Thursday, ahead of a Southern African Development Community summit in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania next week.

The event will be preceded on Sunday by a Great Lakes summit on Burundi, also in Dar es Salaam, where regional heads of state could be under pressure to evaluate whether the armed movements in Burundi show genuine willingness to negotiate.

The country's second largest rebel group, the National Liberation Forces (FNL), was not party to the December ceasefire and has repeatedly refused to enter into talks with the government.

Both the FDD and the FNL have been blamed for recent violence in the country, whose civil war broke out in 1993 between rebels from the Hutu majority and the Tutsi-dominated army, and has claimed some 300 000 mainly civilian lives.

Following an August 2000 peace deal that provides for ethnic power-sharing, Ndayizeye took over as the head of Burundi's transitional government in May.

But a ceasefire agreed between the government and the FDD in December last year has never been implemented with each side accusing the other of violations.

Kaunda said talks focused on "power-sharing, the technical arrangements involving transformation of the army, the integration of the FDD into the military, the cabinet, government and parliament".

"Deputy President Zuma is optimistic that common ground can be found between the parties. The two delegations will spend the morning fine-tuning their proposals in preparation for direct face-to-face talks in the afternoon," Kaunda said.

- AFP