POLITICS-BURUNDI: One Rebel Group Signs Peace Accord, Another Stays Out

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Jean-Jacques Cornish

PRETORIA, Nov 3 2003 (IPS) - South Africa believes it has notched up yet another Africa conflict resolution success with the signing in Pretoria on Sunday of the final details of a power-sharing agreement between Burundi’s transitional government led by President Domitien Ndayizeye and rebel leader Pierre Nkurunziza.

The points agreed on Sunday – after three days of intensive negotiations in which South African President Thabo Mbeki was personally involved – completes the Pretoria Protocol signed on Oct. 8.

It will result in the transitional government being reconstituted to include Nkurunziza’s Forces for the Defence of Democracy (FDD). Ndayizeye said at the signing ceremony that this would happen within three weeks.

Mbeki said he was positive the agreement would be implemented. He said with the FDD aboard, the peace process now represented the efforts of 99.9 percent of Burundians. He said he was sending Deputy President Jacob Zuma to Bujumbura, the capital of Burundi, in the next few days to ensure implementation of the Pretoria protocol.

Zuma, the chief facilitator in the Burundi peace process, addressed regional jealousy over South Africa’s role in the process by giving an assurance that South Africa’s agenda was nothing more than to see the continent being rebuilt and “to see Africans at peace with themselves”.

The agreement reached in Burundi follows on an inclusive accord jointly brokered by South Africa and the United Nations earlier this year that has set the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) on the road to its first-ever democratic elections.

South Africa’s Foreign Minister Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma is already in contact with United Nations Security Council members urging them speedily to undertake their peacekeeping responsibilities in Burundi where a decade of civil war has cost the country more than 300,000 lives.

Mbeki said he was confident the United Nations would accept its responsibilities. However the criteria for the world body to send in blue berets has not been met. The smaller, but increasingly active National Liberation Front (FNL) of Agaton Rwasa, has rejected the peace process.

As the government and rebels were engaged in negotiations in Pretoria at the weekend, four FNL fighters and two Burundi army soldiers died in an action near Bujumbura. Mbeki dismissed the FNL as small problems saying its refusal to negotiate was not a major hurdle to the peace process or to implementing the power-sharing deal.

He said that in terms of the technical agreement agreed in Pretoria, the FDD and the Burundi army were jointly committed to fighting the National Liberation Front. Nkurunziza pointedly referred to the Pretoria agreement as an important step towards a global and inclusive agreement – indicating that this goal has yet to be achieved.

The two other points agreed at the weekend were the registration of the FDD as a political party and the granting of temporary immunity to FDD fighters and government soldiers.

The FDD felt unable to participate in the Senate as it is presently constituted. Since the upper house does not have the power to block any appointments, it was felt this matter could be held over until the regional summit to be summoned by Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, the convener of the regional peace initiative on Burundi.

The negotiating success in Pretoria will give more impetus to the donor conference in Brussels later this month designed to raise money for Burundi’s social and developmental needs. The power sharing will give the FDD four cabinet posts and 20 percent of the seats in the national assembly. It will also give the rebels 40 percent of the officers’ corps in the army and police.

Until the United Nations finds the political will to deploy blue berets to Burundi the peacekeeping task will continue to be performed by the African Union (AU) led by South Africa with 1,600 troops.

The remainder of the force comprises 1,300 Ethiopians and 350 Mozambicans.

The African Military Force in Burundi (AMIB) is responsible for the cantonment of rebel fighters during the process of demobilisation, disarmament and reintegration.

The pressure is now for Nkurunziza to see that his fighters fit into the process. This will entail bringing dissident elements to heel. More importantly he has to bring the FNL to heel. There never has been any love lost between the FDD and the older National Liberation Front (FNL). It suited the purposes of the larger FDD to have the FNL keep government forces occupied around the capital.

To this end, the FDD provided arms and ammunition to the FNL, many of these coming from Hutu rebels hiding out in the Democratic Republic of Congo. This conduit has since dried up, but the FNL is determined to prove that it still has the means to continue rebel actions.

South Africa’s conflict analyst Jan van Eck of the Institute for Security Studies commends the Pretoria Protocol but regrets its continued exclusion of the FNL. Both the FNL and the FDD were excluded from the original Arusha process that has now completed more than two thirds of its lifespan.

The FNL has refused to join this later without unpacking some of the points agreed by the original signatories. Negotiations with the FDD established a precedent for this. By signing and sealing a new deal, however, the facilitators have set themselves up for having to repeat the process if and when the FNL comes aboard.

Van Eck, who spends half his time in Burundi, says the country is divided into pro and anti Arusha camps. The opponents of the process, many of them from the former Tutsi minority leadership clique are ironically being drawn to the FNL – the original Hutu liberation movement – by the sheer opposition of the Arusha process. This is a relationship of convenience and does not indicate any breakdown in the ethnic divisions that are at the heart of the country’s woes.

The real test of Arusha (the main town in northern Tanzanian where the accord was clinched) will come in less than a year when Burundi is due to have democratic elections. Nothing illustrates the extent of suspicion and distrust still existent in Burundi than the fact that Hutu politicians who returned to their country after the Arusha accord as signed in Aug. 2001 still require 24-hour close protection by South African soldiers.

Electioneering under these circumstances would be problematic, not to say impossible.