Officials in Kampala to discuss elections

Burundian electoral commissioners are in Uganda for talks on the country's elections timetable with the chairman of the regional initiative on Burundi, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, and the facilitator of the Burundi peace process, South African Vice-President Jacob Zuma, an official told IRIN on Tuesday. "The electoral officials are already here and we are expecting Vice-President Zuma later in the afternoon before a meeting scheduled in the evening," Adonia Ayebale, Uganda's ambassador to Burundi, said. He said the Burundian team would present a report to the two leaders, the details of which he did not know. However, he said the talks would mainly focus on the electoral process in the central African nation, which has been ravaged by 11 years of civil war. National Independent Electoral Commission Chairman Paul Ngarambe had announced on Saturday in the Burundian capital, Bujumbura, that the meeting would not only focus on the delayed release of an election calendar, but would also help the commission work in concert with regional leaders on all aspects of organising the polls. The elections are due by the end of October and would mark the end of a three-year transitional period and usher in a democratically elected government. Museveni chairs the initiative of heads of state in the Great Lakes region. It was set up to oversee the peace process in Burundi, where several armed Hutu groups took up arms in 1993 against the government after the Tutsi-dominated army assassinated the first elected Hutu president, Melchoir Ndadaye. Zuma is the peace process' facilitator. Some 300,000 Burundians have been killed since the war started in 1993. Fighting has ceased in most parts of the country, with the exception of the western province of Bujumbura Rural, which is the stronghold of the only rebel movement that is still fighting government forces. Several other former rebel movements have signed ceasefire and power-sharing agreements with the transitional government. Under the Peace and Reconciliation Accord that Burundian parties signed in August 2000 in Arusha, Tanzania, President Domitien Ndayizeye is due to hand over power to a head of state elected by parliament. The deadline was 1 November, but it now seems a difficult goal to meet, as preparations for the elections are incomplete.