Burundi’s last active rebel group is demanding to have more than half of the slots in the country’s army in peace talks with the government that have repeatedly faltered on the issue of the military, officials said Monday.
Representatives of the National Liberation Forces (FNL) in the South Africa-mediated talks being held in Tanzania are also demanding the post of the national army chief as a pre-condition to reaching a permanent ceasefire with Bujumbura.
“For the first time, the National Liberation Forces are forwarding concrete conditions. They are demanding the post of army general and 60% representation in the army as well as an expanded government,” a diplomat told Agence France-Presse (AFP) on conditions of anonymity.
FNL spokesperson Pasteur Habimana confirmed the conditions.
“These are our conditions for peace to return to Burundi, but we are in Dar es Salaam to negotiate,” Habimana told AFP from Tanzania’s commercial capital Dar es Salaam, which is hosting the talks.
The FNL has been demanding the dissolution or at least major reform of Burundi’s army as a condition to enter into a permanent ceasefire, while Bujumbura has rejected that stance as inappropriate for truce negotiations.
“The FNL put the same conditions when the talks resumed but we flatly rejected them,” said Bernard Bandonkeye, head of the government delegation.
In addition, the FNL, the only one of Burundi’s seven Hutu rebel groups to remain outside a 2000 peace process, want the army to reflect the country’s ethnic make-up, mediators said.
That would give the 85% Hutu majority vast superiority in numbers to the 14% Tutsi minority, which had dominated the government and armed forces since independence until the adoption last year of a power-sharing Constitution.
Under the constitution, army representation is split equally between the two tribes.
“The FNL are no longer talking about disbanding [the army]; they concede that there should be reforms in the army, but the positions are still irreconcilable,” said the diplomat.
The tiny Central Africa nation is still struggling from the devastation of a 13-year-old civil war that has claimed about 300 000 lives since it erupted with the assassination of the country’s first democratically elected president, a member of the Hutu majority, by members of the then minority Tutsi-dominated army. — AFP