The South African mediator in the Burundi peace talks on Tuesday shot down claims of a walkout by the country’s last remaining rebel group, while officials here said they were ”unaware” of any threats against the rebel group.
South African Minister of Safety and Security Charles Nqakula said the perceived walkout at the talks to cement the central African country’s future was ”participants breaking into small groups to continue talks and this is what has happened in Dar es Salaam”.
”There certainly has not been a walkout,” he told Agence France-Presse in Pretoria.
But officials in the Tanzanian commercial capital on Monday said the meeting to finally end Burundi’s 13-year-long civil war foundered when National Liberation Forces (FNL) rebels left.
”They stormed out of the meeting,” an official told AFP 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.
Briefing reporters on Tuesday in Pretoria, South Africa’s Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Aziz Pahad said he was unaware of the FNL delegation feeling threatened by the mediation.
”I’ve not heard of any walkout,” said Pahad. ”I assume they have gone into small groups to continue negotiations. I am not aware of the FNL feeling threatened by the facilitation team or anyone else in the regional initiative.
”I am hoping reports to this effect are either exaggerated or untrue,” 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, is the only one of Burundi’s seven Hutu rebel groups not to have signed on to a 2000 peace deal.
It has also 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 minority Tutsi-dominated army. — Sapa-AFP