Peace talks aimed at finally ending Burundi’s civil war foundered on Monday as the country’s last active rebel group stormed out of the negotiations, officials said.
A senior Tanzanian official participating in the discussions between Bujumbura and the National Liberation Forces (FNL) said the rebels walked out after threats from South African mediators.
”They stormed out of the meeting,” the official told Agence France-Presse on condition of anonymity. ”They are annoyed because they were threatened by the mediator.”
Officials said the talks ran aground after the South Africans told the FNL they would be attacked by neighbouring countries if they refused to sign a comprehensive ceasefire to halt more than a decade of fighting.
”The mediators said if we don’t sign a ceasefire, they will organise foreign armies to attack us,” FNL spokesperson Pasteur Habimana told AFP, adding that Bujumbura was also hindering the talks.
”We will not sign the truce and join the army because the government does not respect human rights,” he said.
A senior Burundian official, Lazare Nduwayo, meanwhile, accused the FNL, the only one of the country’s seven Hutu rebel groups not to have signed on to a 2000 peace process, of stalling.
”We have not gotten very far,” he told AFP. ”Nothing allows me to say that we will have finished our discussions within the agreed time frame.”
After reaching a tentative agreement on June 18 in which the government pledged immunity for FNL fighters and recognition of the group as a political party after a formal pact is signed, the two sides set a July 2 deadline to forge a permanent truce.
But the start of the second round, which had been set to begin in the middle of last week, was postponed twice.
Despite Monday’s developments, the chief mediator, South Africa’s Minister of Safety and Security Charles Nqakula, told reporters in Pretoria that a full cease-fire would be signed at the weekend.
”Negotiators in the Burundi peace process are expected to sign a comprehensive ceasefire agreement by Saturday July 1,” he said.
The parties opened direct talks on May 29 in a new push to reach a lasting peace in Burundi, which is emerging from the devastation of more than a decade of civil war that has claimed about 300 000 lives.
The FNL, which has between 1 500 and 3 000 fighters, has shunned a government elected last year under a new power-sharing Constitution that is headed by a former Hutu rebel leader.
Burundi’s war erupted in 1993 with the assassination of the country’s first democratically elected president, a member of the Hutu majority, by officers in the then minority Tutsi-dominated army. — AFP
