South Africa is in danger of being excluded from a summit on peace and development in the Great Lakes where it has brokered the two most important peace deals.
Arrangements for these meetings have been limited to the so-called core countries: Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda.
Exclusion would be a slap in the face for South Africa, which spent months brokering settlements in Burundi and the DRC.
At the preparatory meeting in Nairobi last week for the first summit, which is scheduled for June 2004, delegates spoke of involving ”countries in the region and development partners”.
They also appealed to the international community to support the peace processes politically and financially.
No mention was made of South Africa, which has, for more than a year, put Deputy President Jacob Zuma and Minister of Provincial and Local Government Sydney Mufamadi at the disposal of the Burundians and the Congolese respectively.
This week the African National Congress government took heat for spending R600-million of South African taxpayers’ money on peacekeeping operations in the DRC.
The resentment and suspicion of South Africa became apparent during the visit to the Great Lakes region earlier this month by the ambassadors of the 15 members of the United Nations Security Council.
The fact that neither of the South African-brokered deals has yet borne fruit is ascribed by belligerents to the high-pressure tactics applied by the mediation.
Zuma is unapologetic about this. He recalls that persistent pressure got the ANC to the negotiating table with the apartheid government and kept both sides there through the convoluted Codesa process.
This tendency to use South Africa as a template for other settlements is resented in Burundi and the DRC. Nelson Mandela’s comparison of Tutsi-ruled Burundi to apartheid South Africa was cited several times in discussions in Bujumbura.
More damaging is the perception that South Africa has sided with the governments in Rwanda and Burundi.
This has had a particularly damaging impact on peace efforts in the DRC, where embattled transitional President Joseph Kabila believes the mediator is biased.
Rwanda and Burundi believe Kabila continues to shelter fugitive Hutus responsible for genocide against the ruling Tutsis.
Both therefore support the DRC rebel movements fighting against the perpetrators of genocide.
Jan van Eck, the internationally respected South African conflict analyst, believes suspicion of South African bias in the Great Lakes is unfounded. Van Eck, who is unashamedly critical of South Africa’s high pressure negotiating method in Burundi, says South Africa is being punished for its careful neutrality.
”In this very suspicious climate, if you are not actively anti-Tutsi you can easily be branded pro-Tutsi,” says Van Eck, who broadly supports the South Africa peacemaking efforts.
The resentment in Burundi goes further back to the days when Mandela used his unassailable international standing to bully the signatories to sign the Arusha Agreement in 2001.
”You can twist a man’s arm hard enough to make him sign, but you cannot keep doing it long enough to make him implement what he was forced to agree with,” a Burundian rebel representative in Dar es Salaam told me.
The largest of those rebel groups, the Forces for the Defence of Democracy (FDD) of Pierre Nkurunziza, came into the process more than a year late and is now calling for the agreement to be unpacked and renegotiated.
This presents a real poser for Tanzania, which claims authorship of the agreement but continues to shelter the leadership of the FDD and the National Liberation Front that has shunned the process.
Tanzania has for some time sought to regain from South Africa the role of mediator in the Burundi process initially occupied by former president Julius Nyerere.