Mandela to visit for 4 hours

The facilitator of the Burundi negotiations, former South African Nelson Mandela, will visit Burundi on 28 April for a duration of four hours. "The purpose of the visit is to hold discussions on peace with the army and then pay a courtesy call on President [Pierre] Buyoya for 10 minutes or so, it is a working visit not a state visit," a senior aide to Mandela
told IRIN.

The visit has attracted mixed reactions from Burundi political groups. The opposition parties and rebels are against the visit on the grounds it will "legitimise" Buyoya's regime, while government officials say the visit will give Mandela an idea about the complexities of the Burundi situation.
Independent analysts say Mandela's visit is a compromise between not going at all and a longer visit. "There is a strong feeling among a section of the Burundi people that though it is important to talk to the army, he should also be meeting the anti-negotiations lobby groups which are a major factor in the peace process," said Fabienne Hara of the International Crisis Group (ICG) think tank. "It is unfortunate that the
visit has been politicised."

Meanwhile, committee two of the peace process, charged with negotiating issues of democracy and governance, ended its meeting in the northern Tanzanian town of Arusha without consensus. "We are not yet in a position to say there is an agreement on the critical issues," Hayson Nicholas,
chairman of the committee, told a news conference on Tuesday, according to the Internews agency. "Delegates seemed to have exhausted their capacity to reach each other's demands on critical issues and it was not time to put forward a compromise that deals with the issues that have been raised," he was quoted as saying. The facilitation team is planning to meet in May to draft a compromise proposal.