Burundi president to meet FNL rebel boss-mediator
Source: Reuters
By Patrick Nduwimana BUJUMBURA, June 14 (Reuters) - Burundi's President Pierre Nkurunziza will meet the leader of his country's last remaining rebel group in Tanzania this weekend to try break a deadlock in peace talks, a South African mediator said on Thursday. Agathon Rwasa's Forces for National Liberation (FNL) signed a peace deal with the government in September to bury more than a decade of broader ethnic war that killed 300,000 people. But progress since then has been slow, and South African special envoy Kingsley Mamabolo said face-to-face talks between the two men on Sunday in Tanzania's commercial capital Dar es Salaam was aimed at ending the impasse. "We hope that meeting will help us to move the process faster than it is moving right now," Mamabolo told a news conference in Bujumbura after discussions with Nkurunziza. "It is an opportunity for the two leaders to sit down and unblock whatever obstacles there might be to the implementation of the ceasefire." The pair last met at the signing in September. The Hutu FNL has been blamed for delaying the work of a truce monitoring team and has called for fresh negotiations on its role after its fighters are absorbed into the national army under the terms of the ceasefire. Failure to implement the deal has prevented a return to stability in the small coffee-growing nation of seven million.
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