MICHEL CARIOU, Kinshasa | Tuesday
SOUTH African Deputy President Jacob Zuma has met with the leader of a main Burundian rebel group as part of mediation efforts to bring peace to the war-ravaged country.
Zuma met separately with Democratic Republic of Congo President Joseph Kabila and a delegation of the Forces for the Defence of Democracy (FDD) headed by its leader Jean-Bosco Ndayikengurukiye.
No participants commented on the talks, which coincided with heavy fighting between army and FDD forces on the outskirts of Burundi’s second city Gitega.
In Pretoria, a South African official said Zuma’s “visit aims to advance efforts to get rebel groups on board for peace negotiations for Burundi”.
Zuma’s secretary, Mathula Magubane, added that representatives of both of Burundi’s main rebel groups – the FDD and the National Liberation Forces (FNL) – were expected to attend the meeting in Kinshasa.
The presence of FNL representatives could not be confirmed.
Civil war between rebel extremist groups of Burundi’s Hutu majority and the mainly Tutsi army has killed more than 200_000 people, mainly civilians, in the past eight years.
That war is tied in with conflict which has ravaged the DRC. Though Burundi long officially denied involvement, its troops have operated across the western border with the DRC, where Burundian Hutu rebels and Hutu militias from Rwanda have bases.
The regime of Burundian President Pierre Buyoya accuses Kinshasa of backing the rebels, while the Kinshasa government has accused Burundi of supporting DRC rebels who in August 1998 launched an insurgency to topple Kabila’s father, the late president Laurent Kabila.
This year, authorities in the DRC and Burundi have agreed to settle their own differences as part of the complex process of bringing peace to the whole central African Great Lakes region, extending from the rebel-held north and east of the DRC across Burundi and Rwanda, Uganda and Tanzania.
Kabila has launched a major effort to revive the peace process in his own country, which has since mid-March seen the withdrawal of troops on rival sides from front-line positions and the start of the deployment of UN soldiers who will protect ceasefire monitors. – AFP
09