BURUNDI: Persuading Burundi's last rebel group to enter talks to end 10 years of ethnic conflict is the top priority of a UN peacekeeping mission, its leader said yesterday.
The UN launched its latest peacekeeping effort on June 1st to end a civil war in the central African country that has killed some 300,000 people, and to help organise elections later this year.
But political disagreements threaten to delay the vote and the Hutu Forces for National Liberation (FNL) has continued its armed campaign while rejecting a plan for sharing power between the country's Hutu majority and Tutsi minority. "Almost everything depends on them. Solving the FNL problem is critical to army integration, elections and to giving Burundi the image of a place that is no longer at war," said Ms Carolyn McAskie, UN Secretary General Mr Kofi Annan's special representative. "We have to get everyone to the table." She said the FNL was ready to hold negotiations with the interim government to end the fighting, despite the failure of previous talks.
The government has agreed to meet the FNL, with the UN acting as observers, said Ms McAskie. "That's major progress," she said, explaining that persuading the FNL to negotiate after years of refusal was her top priority on arrival in Burundi six weeks ago.
Yesterday local pastors accused the FNL, which has 3,000 to 3,500 fighters mainly around Bujumbura, of attacking and robbing a convoy of church officials.
Burundi's war broadly pits the politically dominant Tutsi minority against rebels from the Hutu majority. Under a deal agreed nearly three years ago, the interim government is supposed to hold polls by October 31st, but three months before the deadline, Burundi has no independent electoral commission, no electoral law and has not drafted a constitution.
Talks on a power-sharing formula brokered in South Africa last week failed, with Hutus accepting the proposal while Tutsis rejected it. South Africa's deputy president and chief mediator in Burundi, Mr Jacob Zuma, said the government would become illegitimate on November 1st if polls were not held by then.
Ms McAskie warned that if there was no agreement, a solution could be imposed by leaders at a regional summit on the sidelines of a meeting of the Southern African Development Community in Mauritius this week or in September.