Peace talks should conclude before year-end, minister says

Burundi's Peace Process Minister Ambroise Niyonsaba said in Arusha on Thursday that while he hesitated to name a date for the conclusion of talks, it should be before the end of the year. He told Hirondelle news agency that the methodology of the current session of talks - by which serious points of disagreement were noted while the discussion forged ahead - was speeding things up. However, a representative of the Tanzanian facilitators' of the peace talks warned that donors' patience may run out "given the slow rate of progress". Anthony Nyaki, head of the secretariat at the Office of the Facilitator, told journalists: "The fact that we are still at Agenda One, Item One does show the kind of problems we have to overcome to reach a settlement".