Regional leaders gather for final summit on Burundi

A five-nation summit, the last under the Great Lakes Regional Initiative, to achieve peace in war-torn Burundi is due to begin Monday in the Tanzanian commercial capital, Dar es Salaam. The presidents of Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Tanzania, Uganda and South Africa, are being joined at the summit by chief mediator and former South African President Nelson Mandela, foreign ministers, representatives of the United Nations and of the African Union. They are to assess the Burundi peace process and decide on action to end the nine-year war, observers told IRIN. Following preliminary meetings on Sunday, the chairman of the ceasefire talks and South African deputy president, Jacob Zuma, is due to report to the summit on the ongoing ceasefire negotiations between the Transitional Government of Burundi and the rebel groups and factions, the facilitators said. However, given the lack of tangible results of recent peace talks, those close to the negotiations said much of the focus of the Monday meeting would be on how best to deal with the armed groups that had not yet signed a ceasefire agreement. This has led to calls for the rebels to be punished. Of the various rebel factions, only Jean-Bosco Ndayikengurukiye's Conseil national pour la defense de la democratie-Forces pour la defense de la democratie (CNDD-FDD) has signed an agreement with the government. "There is a lot of pressure from different people urging that sanctions be imposed on Monday," Jan van Eck, an analyst of the Burundian conflict, told IRIN. However, most people are also sceptical as to how sanction can be effectively applied on rebels." Citing the 1996-1998 embargo on Burundi as an example, he said that the logistics of sanctions might be difficult to control as some countries might be unable to impose them, while others might have vested interests in not doing so. Diplomats in Dar es Salaam have said that following the Burundian government's recent allegations that Tanzania had been supporting the rebels, uncertainty prevailed regarding who might be affected by sanctions and what form they would take.