Burundi’s political leaders failed to agree on a timetable for holding elections following four days of talks in Pretoria, setting the stage for a showdown on the thorny issue at a weekend summit, an official said on Tuesday.
Burundian President Domitien Ndayizeye and leaders of former rebel groups have been meeting since Saturday to try to agree on an election date and a progress report to be presented to a regional summit in Dar es Salaam.
”We had wanted to have something cut and dried to take to the summit. But this is not to be,” an official close to the mediation team said.
The official said that regional leaders will have to tackle the issue at the Dar es Salaam summit on Saturday and probably impose a decision.
”Now we will be in the hands of the regional leaders and if there are complaints after the summit that they [the participants in the peace process] have been bulldozed then we will have to accept that,” said the official.
South African Deputy President Jacob Zuma, who is the chief mediator in negotiations aimed at bringing lasting peace to Burundi after 10-and-a-half years of civil war, consulted with the political leaders over the past four days after the Burundi government announced it wants to delay elections by a year.
Pierre Nkurunziza, leader of one of the main former rebel groups, the Forces for the Defence of Democracy, has rejected the delay, which will push back elections to October 2005.
Zuma is also insistent that to maintain credibility, the transitional government has to meet targets set out in a peace accord, which set up an interim government in 2001 that shares ower between Hutus and Tutsis, the two main rivals in Burundi’s war.
Elections are seen as crucial for advancing peace in the Central African country.
The Burundi leaders were due to attend a final plenary session in Pretoria late on Tuesday.
”We may be in a position to make a statement this afternoon,” Zuma’s spokesperson Lakela Kaunda said on Tuesday.
Zuma was due to meet representatives of the National Liberation Forces (FNL), the last rebel group still fighting in Burundi, before the summit on Saturday but the venue for that meeting is not yet known.
Leaders in Dar es Salaam are to take stock of progress since a peace accord signed in Arusha in August 2000, which saw the establishment of a three-year transitional government the following year.
Its creation was to pave the way for elections in Burundi, where about 300 000 people have died since 1993, when war broke out, pitting rebels from the Hutu majority against the army and the government, run then by Tutsis.
Under the peace accord, the interim power-sharing government was led for 18 months by Tutsi Pierre Buyoya, seconded by Ndayizeye, a Hutu, who took over for the second half of the transition period in May last year.
Six of the seven rebel groups have signed on to the peace process and fighting has ceased in 16 of the 17 provinces in the country. — Sapa-AFP