POLITICS-BURUNDI: African Leaders Push for Final Peace Deal

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Jean-Jacques Cornish

PRETORIA, Nov 19 2003 (IPS) - Burundi’s largest rebel group is locked into that country’s transitional government and peace process after a signing ceremony before regional leaders in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, at the weekend.

The Conseil national pour la defence de la democratie-Forces pour la defence de la democratie (CNDD-FDD) leader Pierre Nkurunziza and Burundi President Domitien Ndayizeye signed an agreement they initiated in South Africa’s capital Pretoria on Oct. 8 and Nov. 2.

It endorsed the sharing of political, defence and security powers in the country that has lost more than 300,000 people in a decade of civil war.

“It is our conviction that the war will end. We have proved that the so-called experts who predicted the failure of the Arusha process were wrong,” said Ndayizeye.

Even as the ink was drying on the documents, the leaders summoned by Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni – the convenor of the regional peace initiative on Burundi – were pressing the National Liberation Front (FNL) of Agaton Rwasa to join the process.

They said Rwasa had three months to enter negotiations with the government or “face the consequences of regional action”.

The move is reminiscent of the treatment meted out to the FNL and the CNDD-FDD after the Arusha Agreement was signed in August 2001. Both rebel groups were excluded from the negotiations by the original convenor, the late Julius Nyerere.

The groups maintained that if they were to be drawn in, the agreement had to be unpacked to accommodate them. Nkurunziza managed to achieve this, but the arrangements for the enlarged transitional government make no provision for the FNL.

The South African mediation team of President Thabo Mbeki and Deputy President Jacob Zuma has dismissed the FNL as a “small problem”.

The rebel group is no longer supplied by the CNDD-FDD. It has, however, continued to attack the capital Bujumbura – the latest of these incidents coming just last week.

The heads of Mozambique, Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) joined Museveni and Ndayizeye together with ministerial representatives of South Africa, Tanzania, Gabon, Rwanda, Kenya and Zambia at the summit.

Their statement ordered the FNL to “immediately suspend hostilities and take part in negotiations within three months”.

“After this deadline, and in the case of a categorical refusal to join in the negotiation process, the Burundi people, the regional initiative on Burundi and the African Union will consider it an organisation that is against peace and stability in Burundi and will treat it as such,” the statement said.

Ndayizeye adopted a conciliatory tone towards the FNL, saying it would be welcomed into the negotiations. His Defence Minister Vincent Niyungeke sounded more muscular with his assertion that without the support of the larger rebel group, the FNL might not be able to inflict a final showdown on exhausted Burundians.

“We now have the support of the CNDD-FDD and they will help with measures against the FNL who they know well,” said the minister.

“The population is sick and tired of the war and of paying protection to the FNL. The FNL will not be able to collect this now they no longer have the support of the CNDD-FDD.”

Nkurunziza denies ever fighting with the FNL. However it is common cause that the CNDD-FDD was happy to provide the FNL with the means to keep the Burundi forces occupied by the FNL close to the capital while it operated further afield.

Meanwhile, South Africa has committed its peacekeeping troops to Burundi until the country is able to set up its own security services, contributing the bulk of the 3,128 African Union peacekeepers currently deployed in Burundi.

The African Mission in Burundi (AMIB) also includes 1,297 Ethiopians and 202 Mozambicans.

Deputy President Zuma told parliament in Cape Town that the cost of deploying South Africans troops has reached R800 million (around 119 million dollars).

South Africa has rotated 600 troops in and out of Burundi since 2001 to protect politicians who returned to participate in the transitional government established in terms of the Arusha Agreement.

The African Union is meant to reimburse the countries providing peacekeepers to Burundi until such time as the United Nations gets involved. But the new African body does not have the funds to do this. The United States and Britain have financially assisted the Ethiopian and Mozambican governments to send their soldiers to Burundi.

Zuma told parliament that South Africa could not be safe and stable on an unstable continent.

South Africa is exerting maximum diplomatic pressure on the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council to approve deployment of a UN peacekeeping force to Burundi now that the overwhelming majority of participants – 99 percent says Mbeki – are committed to the peace process.

South African Foreign Minister Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma has contacted Security Council ambassadors asking them, in effect, to circumvent the UN rules of engagement for peacekeeping that require a comprehensive deadline.

This provision, South Africa argues, allows the FNL to hold the peacekeeping process to ransom.

The summit backed the South African call for a UN peacekeeping force in Burundi given the “qualitative change that has taken place following the signing of the Pretoria protocols that have created a total condition of peace and stability in more than 95 percent of the territory in Burundi”.

AMIB costs 120 million dollars a year and only 20 million dollars of this has been made available by foreign donors.

A pledging conference scheduled for Pretoria early next month has been postponed until next year – possibly to coincide with a Belgian-hosted gathering designed to attract donors for Burundian redevelopment.