A group of 20 Burundian political parties said last Thursday they would not accept the revised electoral calendar issued recently by the Independent Electoral Commission. "The change of the electoral calendar by the commission is unconstitutional," Terence Nsanze, the leader of the Alliance Burundo Africain pour le Salut, said on behalf of the parties on at a news conference in Bujumbura, the capital.

Burundi's remaining rebel group, the Forces nationales de liberation (FNL) will end the war only when government troops stopped attacking its forces, rebel leader Agathon Rwasa said on Wednesday. "We are committed to lasting peace in Burundi," he told a news conference in Tanzania's commercial city of Dar es Salaam. "But the government must also respect our position. If we are attacked we are going to hit back."

Search for Common Ground's (SFCG) mission is to transform how individuals, organisations and governments deal with conflict - away from adversarial approaches and toward cooperative solutions. With headquarters in Washington, DC and Brussels, we design and implement multifaceted programmes that aim to resolve conflict and prevent violence.

Nurses in Burundi's public hospitals resumed work on Friday after a month-long strike, following the signing of an agreement between their trades union and the government. The nurses' strike had paralysed health services in the hospitals.

Burundi's electoral body, the CENI, is preparing an electoral timetable now that President Domitien Ndayizeye has promulgated the country's new constitution and the National Assembly has approved the communal law and electoral code, which are required for the polls due on 22 April. "It [the timetable] needs careful study," Paul Ngarambe, chairman of the National Independent Electoral Commission, or CENI, said at a news conference on Friday in the capital, Bujumbura.

With an area of 27,834 sq km, landlocked Burundi is a battleground between the Rwandan army and militia from the Congo, and is plagued by a protracted civil war, which has claimed the lives of thousands of Burundi civilians. The over 5 million Burundi population is unevenly distributed geographically, with large populations displaced by economic crisis and war, forced to change their livelihoods. In a country with a long term legacy of colonial rule by successive Dutch and Belgian colonization --added to pre-colonial divisions and problems between landlords and communal farmers-- lack of access to land has been a major cause of deforestation. The forests, once extensive, today account for some 9% of total land area.

Services in public hospitals across Burundi continued to be paralysed as an indefinite strike by nurses entered its fifth day on Friday. The nurses are demanding better pay and working conditions. Although nurses have been reporting for duty at most hospitals in Bujumbura, Burundi's capital, they have not been working as normal. "We are working as we would on weekends or on holidays," Melance Hakizimana, chairman of the nurses' trade union, le Syndicat National de Travailleurs de la Sante, told IRIN on Wednesday.

Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni and South African Deputy President Jacob Zuma on Tuesday rejected a proposal from Burundi's electoral commission to postpone the country's final round of elections by two months, a senior Ugandan government official told IRIN. The deadline for the next poll had been 22 April 2005. A senior official in the Ugandan government, who asked to remain anonymous, said that IEC officials had wanted the next poll to be delayed because they felt that laws required to organise voting more efficiently were not yet in place.

Amnesty International welcomes the referendum on the Burundian Constitution, likely to be overwhelmingly approved, and urges the Government of Burundi to take all possible measures to ensure that the human rights provisions enshrined in the Constitution quickly become a reality for Burundians. The organisation also strongly encourages politicians vying for the presidency and other public office to adopt and publicly commit to following an explicit human rights agenda in their campaign platforms.

Based on interim results announced on Tuesday, 91.2 percent of Burundi's estimated three million registered voters polled "yes" for a new constitution that slashes the imbalance of power between the minority Tutsis and the majority Hutus; the country's main ethnic groups. The key elements in the constitution are its power sharing arrangements. The president, to be elected by parliament from the winning political party, must have as one of his deputies someone of a different ethnic group and political party. In addition, the new constitution provides for a 60-percent Hutu 40-percent Tutsi representation in all institutions of government, except the army and the police where the ratio is 50-50. This gives greater power to the Hutu who had, despite their superior number, been the political underdogs of the two ethnic groups.

Since the early 1990s, hundreds of thousands of Burundians have fled their homes to escape fighting between the government and Hutu rebel groups seeking to put an end to the political dominance of the Tutsi minority. Many others, predominantly Hutus, were forcibly displaced into camps by the government in the second part of the 1990s. The UN and the Burundian government have carried out a comprehensive survey of the IDPs in camps in Burundi in 2004, which gives precious information about the location of IDPs, their vulnerabilities and their aspirations.

The Environmental Health Technical Coordinator is in charge of technical standards and quality in IRC Burundi's environmental health programs across the country, and strengthens the capacity of national environmental health staff.

Burundian independent radio station Radio Publique Africaine (RPA) has resumed broadcasting after authorities suspended the station on Friday for two days, accusing it of violating the country's press law. Private news agency Net-Press, which was also summarily banned on Friday for seven days following libel complaints, remained shuttered. Local journalists believe that authorities are trying to muzzle the press in the run-up to elections scheduled this year.

A group of farmers in Burundi's northwestern province of Cibitoke, who were recently banned from a forest reserve, have appealed to the government to allow them to harvest their crops, their representative said on Monday. "In [the northern province of] Kirundo people are dying because of food shortage; we are worried that the government will not allow us to harvest our crops in the Masango Zone yet it has not been able to feed all people starving in Kirundo," Michel Niyonsaba, 44, the farmers' representative, said.

Burundi's remaining active rebel group, the Forces nationales de liberation (FNL), said on Thursday it was ready for talks with the transitional government, on condition that South African Deputy President Jacob Zuma does not act as mediator. FNL spokesman Pasteur Habimana said Zuma, who is also the facilitator of Burundi's peace process under an initiative of the Great Lakes regional heads of state, had in the past rejected FNL's proposal to hold talks with the Burundian government.

Burundi's transitional President Domitien Ndayizeye has been warned against changing the draft constitution to allow himself to run in elections. The chief mediator in Burundi's peace talks, South African deputy President Jacob Zuma, said the move could damage efforts to end the 10-year war. About 5,000 United Nations peacekeepers are in the country to support the South African-brokered peace process.

The small central African country of Burundi has repeatedly been wracked by conflict since its independence in 1962. Since 1993 a fully-fledged civil war has raged, with enormous human and economic cost. Tragically, the most promising episodes of Burundi’s history in terms of democratisation and reform have repeatedly been turned into the triggers for the most violent and deadly confrontations. This study is concerned with the role that the exploitation and control over the country’s agricultural produce has already played in fuelling the conflict.

Thousands of civilians have been displaced following fierce fighting on Saturday in Burundi's western province of Bujumbura Rural. The internally displaced persons (IDPs) have not received aid, the governor of the province, Ignace Ntawembarira, said.

Burundi began on Monday a weeklong health protection campaign targeting over three million children and 17,000 pregnant women, in an effort to reduce the country's high infant and maternal mortality rates. During the campaign, medical teams are due to deworm an estimated three million children aged from one year to 14 years; provide vitamin A for another one million infants aged from six months to 59 months; immunise 17,000 pregnant women against tetanus, and distribute mineral salts and folic acid to them.

After a decade of civil war, Burundi has a chance for real peace but only if it holds to its tight election schedule - five months with a constitutional referendum, local, national assembly and senate elections, and finally selection of the president by parliament. The sequence is ambitious but necessary to finalise a difficult peace process, says the International Crisis Group in a new report, available in French from their website.
* Related Link: New delay to Burundi referendum
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/4095961.stm