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The ongoing Arusha negotiations were suspended for 24 hours on Wednesday after the 10 pro-Tutsi parties declared a day of mourning for 28 officer cadets and six civilians killed in a rebel ambush on Sunday night, the Hirondelle news agency reported. The pro-Hutu parties carried on with their informal discussions. The leader of the small rebel group FROLINA [Front pour la liberation nationale], Joseph Karumba, said that “people have been dying for years in Burundi, and they are still being massacred.
Why a day of mourning for those killed on Sunday and not for the others?” In another departure, Hirondelle reported that delegates were trying to find their own consensus without the intervention of the facilitation team. The leader of the pro-Tutsi Parti social democrate (PSD), Godefroid Hakizimana, commented that Burundians should work out their own problems, without “outside interference”. He said the G7 and G10 groups were not ethnically-based, but “constituted on ideological grounds”.
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