The delayed implementation of a landmark truce between the Burundi government and the country’s last active rebel group is to kick off next week, officials said Sunday.
They said a joint verification and follow-up committee tasked with overseeing the enforcement of the September 7 ceasefire deal will be set up by Tuesday and hold its first meeting the following day.
”We now have a list of names of members of the committee. The joint committee will be put in place on Tuesday and hold its first meeting on Wednesday,” said Kingsley Mamabulo, South Africa’s special envoy to the Great Lakes region, whose country brokered the accord.
The committee comprising representatives of the Burundi government, the National Liberation Forces (FNL), the African Union and the United Nations, was to be put in place a week after the ceasefire was signed.
The announcement appeared to alter Mamabulo’s announcement last week that the committee was to be set up within two weeks.
The ceasefire deal principally calls on the insurgents to assemble in camps from where they will either be integrated into the army or police force or be demobilised.
It says nothing however about the rebels’ key demands to have significant representation in the armed forces and the power-sharing government.
The FNL is the only one of Burundi’s seven Hutu rebel groups to remain outside a peace process that began in 2000 and that led to the election of a new power-sharing government headed by a former Hutu guerrilla chief last year.
The war erupted in 1993 with the assassination of Melchior Ndadaye, a member of the Hutu majority and the country’s first democratically elected president by elements of the then minority Tutsi-dominated military. – Sapa-AFP