Burundi's new leader backed

2005-08-24 15:14

Bujumbara - Leaders from at least 10 African nations will gather this week for the inauguration of Burundi's first post-transition president in a display of support for the war-ravaged nation's peace process and development, said officials on Wednesday.

They said the leaders, many of them from Africa's volatile Great Lakes region, planned to offer their joint backing to Hutu ex-rebel chief, Pierre Nkurunziza, who would be sworn in on Friday with a mandate to unify Burundi as it struggled to emerge from a bloody 12-year civil war.

Karenga Ramadhani, a spokesperson for Nkurunziza, said: "We expect about 10 heads of state for this historic event."

He said the presidents of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Gabon, Kenya, Mozambique, Rwanda, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia as well as the prime minister of Ethiopia and senior officials from the African Union, the European Union, the United Nations and the United States were expected to attend.

Five-year-old peace process

Ramadhani said other high-profile African and international guests might also attend the inauguration that might be followed by a mini-summit of Great Lakes leaders to discuss the situation in Burundi.

Those leaders had played a key role in the five-year-old peace process aimed at ending Burundi's ethnically driven civil war that erupted in 1993, after the assassination of the country's first democratically elected president, a Hutu.

Some 300 000 people had been killed in the conflict, which had largely pitted majority Hutu rebel groups against the minority Tutsi-dominated military and political machine in Bujumbura.

Nkurunziza, 40, was elected president last week by parliament in a vote that was one of the last steps in the regionally backed peace process and transitional period that saw his ex-rebel, Forces for the Defence of Democracy, sweep local and national polls in June and July.

Political administration

The new president would lead a power-sharing government under the terms of the new constitution - adopted overwhelmingly in a February referendum - that called for a 60-40 split between Hutus and Tutsis in the country's political administration.

But, the youthful Nkurunziza and his government faced huge challenges in repairing Burundi's war-shattered economy and infrastructure as well as coping with the continued insurgency by the country's lone remaining Hutu rebel group.

The only one of Burundi's seven ex-rebel groups still fighting the National Liberation Forces (FNL) had kept up attacks mainly in the south and west of the country, despite a nominal truce and efforts to bring them into the peace process.

A spokesperson for outgoing transitional president Domitien Ndayizeye, Pancrace Cimpaye, said the mini-summit would discuss issues related to the FNL and the UN Operation in Burundi.

- AFP