Burundi summit postponed to September

A regional summit to ratify a power-sharing agreement in Burundi that had been scheduled to take place this week in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, has been postponed to early September, a Ugandan official announced on Tuesday. Uganda is the current chair of the region's initiative on Burundi. "It was postponed because the facilitator [South African Deputy President Jacob Zuma] was not going to be available this week and we thought it was important that he attends," Julius Onen, the acting permanent secretary in the Ugandan Foreign Ministry, told reporters in the capital, Kampala. However, Onen said a lot of progress had been made during a recent meeting of Burundian parties in Pretoria, where the power-sharing agreement was signed. "Most of the parties made an undertaking to implement the elections time table and the facilitator will continue to monitor and report to the chairman [of the Regional Initiative on Burundi, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni]," he said. Uganda's acting foreign minister, Tom Butime, said Uganda was hoping that the electoral process in Burundi would begin, including the passing of an electoral law and registration of voters to facilitate presidential and parliamentary elections by the transitional government's deadline of 31 October. "We hope that a lot of work would have been covered by September when we shall meet, because after October 31, we would have lost the documents that are guiding the process," Butime said at a news conference. He had called the news conference to announce the preparatory meeting ahead of an international conference on peace, security, democracy and development in the Great Lakes region, organised by the UN and the African Union (AU) for December. He said the December conference would focus on the conditions that engender the cycle of conflicts within the constituent states and the whole region. It would also highlight the causes of conflicts in order to seek lasting solutions. Butime said the December conference would also look at the political, economic and social objectives of the armed opposition groups in the region and how dialogue could be initiated while also establishing a mechanism that would ensure sustained collaboration in the quest for peace and the promotion of a harmonised regional approach to development. National preparatory meetings are scheduled to start later in August.