A team of South African officials will leave on Wednesday to attend the Burundi peace talks in the Tanzanian capital Dar es Salaam, South African presidency sources said Tuesday.
The three weeks of talks to broker an end to the nearly 10-year-old war were due to begin on Tuesday but were delayed amid confusion.
This week’s discussion were expected to focus initially on procedural matters, with the negotiations proper starting next week.
Tuesday’s delay also came as officials in Burundi said seven people, including a two-year-old child and a Ugandan priest, were killed there on Monday in three separate attacks blamed on Hutu insurgents.
The South African team will be headed by Welile Nhlapo, former South African ambassador to the Organisation of African Unity, special presidential envoy to central Africa’s Great Lakes region, and currently head of the Presidential Support Unit, sources said.
Sources said the list of other members was still being finalised late on Tuesday.
”The technical talks this week will be on a bilateral basis with each group examining a text prepared by a technical team,” said a South African official close to the negotiations.
”The object will be to identify the areas of agreement and to isolate the most problematic issues that will have to be negotiated next week. We will also identify the details that can only be dealt with once a peace process is underway, so that these do not bog down talks about peace itself.”
South African Deputy President Jacob Zuma, who will be one of the mediators, is due to arrive in Dar es Salaam on Sunday. Some members of the Forces for the Defence of Democracy (FDD), the main Hutu rebel group in Burundi that has been fighting the central African country’s Tutsi-dominated army in a war that has claimed 250 000 lives since 1993, were in Dar es Salaam on Tuesday, while a Bujumbura government delegation also arrived on Tuesday evening.
South African sources said the presence of the second largest rebel group, the National Liberation Forces (FNL) was by no means guaranteed. – Sapa-AFP