South Africa will press on with its mediating role in Burundi to get the last active rebel group to sign a peace accord, Pretoria’s special envoy to the Great Lakes region said on Tuesday.
“We are not throwing in the towel. We will carry on,” Kingsley Mamabola told a seminar, adding that the National Liberation Forces (FNL) rebel group was “the one piece left out of the jigsaw puzzle … that is essential to peace in Burundi.”
The tiny Central African nation is emerging from the ruins of 13 years of civil strife that has claimed the lives of about 300Â 000 people.
The FNL is the only one of Burundi’s seven Hutu rebel groups to remain outside a peace process that began in 2000 and led to the election last year of a new power-sharing government headed by a former Hutu guerrilla chief.
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.
Jan van Eck, an independent facilitator in the Burundi peace process, said President Pierre Nkurunziza’s government was undermining moves to end the conflict.
“By throwing former president Domitien Ndayizeye into jail on the pretext of plotting a coup, Nkurunziza has destroyed the FNL’s faith in immunity offered by the government.
“They say ‘If he can do that to a former president he can do the same to us’,” said van Eck.
Nkurunziza’s year-old government has been harshly criticised by rights groups for torture and summary executions meted out to those suspected to be FNL sympathisers.
The president admitted to “isolated” instances of torture but said in most cases the perpetrators were punished.
Burundi has suffered several coups and attempted coups since it won independence from Belgium in 1962. — AFP