Buyoya "100 percent happy" with trip to US, Belgium

President Pierre Buyoya is "100 percent happy" with his 10-day trip to the US and Belgium, which ended on Wednesday, a presidential spokesman, Apollinaire Gahungu, told IRIN on Friday.

"The purpose of the trip was to convey a message. Firstly, to brief people on the Burundi peace process and to ask them to put pressure - diplomatic and political - on the rebel groups to come to the negotiating table. Secondly, to ask them to materialise the pledges of US $832 million that were made to Burundi in Geneva last year."

Gahungu added that Buyoya had asked the Bretton Woods institutions - the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund - to help Burundi reconstruct its country. He said Buyoya had appealed to the US administration to put pressure on the institutions to respond positively.

The Burundi delegation, comprising Buyoya and his ministers of External Relations and Cooperation, Civil Service, and Finance, had a series of meetings with United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, US Assistant Secretary for African Affairs Walter Kansteiner, representatives from the UN Security Council, President of the European Commission Romano Prodi and World Bank President James Wolfensohn, among others.

In both the US and Belgium, those whom the delegation had approached had promised to do what they could to find positive responses to Burundi’s requests, Gahungu said. Buyoya was not told what methods would be used to bring the rebel groups to the negotiating table, but he was told that pressure would be applied, he said.

Gahungu noted that the tour of the Great Lakes region, which ended on Thursday, by British Secretary of State for International Development Clare Short and her Dutch and Norwegian counterparts, Eveline Herfkens and Hilde Frafjord, was "a signal that the European Union would sustain its efforts to help Burundi".

More than 200,000 people have been killed in Burundi since war broke out in October 1993, following the killing of Melchior Ndadaye, the country's first democratically elected leader, who was a Hutu. In August 2000 a peace accord was signed in Arusha, but the country's two main rebel groups - the Conseil national pour la defense de la democratie-Forces pour la defense de la democratie and the Forces nationale de liberation - have refused to observe the cease-fire agreed under the accord.