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Sent: Saturday, October 11, 2003 2:57 AM
Subject: Burundi rebels will wither away -S.Africa's Zuma


Burundi rebels will wither away -S.Africa's Zuma

By Patrick McLoughlin

STOCKHOLM, Oct 9 (Reuters) - A Burundi rebel group which has rejected a peace deal aimed at halting the country's bloody civil war must compromise or face extinction, South African Deputy President Jacob Zuma said Thursday.

"They could survive for a long time when there was no peace, but once everybody stopped fighting they are not going to make it," Zuma, a key mediator in Burundi's peace process, told Reuters during an official visit to Stockholm.

Burundi's war has pitted rebels from the ethnic Hutu majority against a politically powerful Tutsi minority, killing an estimated 300,000 people over the last decade.

The country's main Hutu rebel group, Pierre Nkurunziza's Forces for the Defence of Democracy (FDD), signed an accord with the government in South Africa on Wednesday, raising hopes for an end to the conflict.

But a second, smaller Hutu rebel group, the Forces for National Liberation (FNL), rejected the pact and dismissed the negotiators as liars.

Zuma said the accord would stick and that the FNL would come around to signing sooner rather than later, or they would "wither away."

"IRRELEVANT"

"The best thing for them is to join the process and stop fighting, otherwise they will become completely irrelevant in Burundi. It's only a matter of time."

Zuma said he would contact FNL again and ask them to join the process in about two weeks when he returned to South Africa. "I am again going to formally communicate with them," he said.

After the FDD and the Burundi government signed the deal, both sides agreed to immediately halt hostilities -- leaving the less powerful FNL fighting the government on its own.

While the Burundi peace deal has been praised from Pretoria to Washington as a significant step toward peace in the region, the United Nations refugee agency said on Thursday it was still too dangerous for hundreds of thousands of Burundian refugees to return home.

"The southern provinces are not safe yet for the refugees to return," said Ivana Unluova, a UNHCR spokeswoman in Tanzania, home to the largest single group of the estimated one million Burundians displaced or living outside their own country.

"Fighting between the rebels, and between the rebels and the army, means we are not there to monitor conditions for returning refugees," she said.

The International Crisis Group (ICG) thinktank said many refugees were also victims of land expropriation, a problem that could create political opportunities for the FNL if the refugees' return was not properly planned.

"The foreseeable disappointment of a large number of refugees who will be unable to recover their property on return offers ideal political opportunities for the one rebel group still not involved in the peace process: the FNL," the ICG said.


   
10/09/03 12:17 ET
    
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