Dar invites Bujumbura for FNL peace talks

Burundi has received an invitation from Tanzania to attend peace negotiations with the country's remaining rebel group, the Forces nationales de liberation (FNL) led by Agathon Rwasa, the spokesman of the Burundian government, Ramadhan Karenga, has said. "We will first send an exploratory team to go and listen to the Tanzanian government as nothing has been mentioned as to the agenda of the talks," he said on national radio on Wednesday. However, Karenga said despite the government's wish to negotiate with the FNL, its priority was national reconstruction after a 10-year civil war. "We now need to focus our talks more on reconstruction than the movement which is still killing people," he said. On 11 March, Rwasa announced in the Tanzanian commercial capital, Dar es Salaam, that his movement was ready to hold unconditional peace negotiations with the Burundian government. Previously, the FNL had declined to hold talks with the government, arguing that it had not taken part in general elections held in the country in 2005, in which former rebel leader Pierre Nkurunziza emerged as president. It was only after preliminary contacts by the Tanzanian government that the movement recently agreed to unconditional peace talks. Karenga said the government now considered the FNL issue a regional one. An initiative by countries in Africa's Great Lakes region to bring peace to Burundi, chaired by Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, has already declared the FNL a terrorist organisation. This declaration was made following the killing, in August 2004, of at least 150 Congolese refugees in Gatumba, near the Burundi-Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) border. The FNL had claimed responsibility for the attack. Tanzania's ambassador to Burundi, Francis Mdolwa, said on state-owned Radio Burundi on Wednesday that his country was "ready to mediate the talks". He said Rwasa had been in Dar es Salaam for over one week.