Ceasefire offers hope of an end to Burundi's misery

Fresh hopes for an end to Burundi's nine-year war were generated yesterday when the Tutsi-led government signed a ceasefire with the main Hutu rebel group.

After months of tortuous, stop-start negotiations, President Pierre Buyoya and the Forces for the Defence of Democracy (FDD) signed the breakthrough deal in Arusha, in neighbouring Tanzania.

The truce will take hold on 30 December. "We would like to see peace in Burundi," said the FDD leader, Pierre Nkurunziza, who is due to start talks on political and military power sharing next month. According to estimates, war in the tiny central African nation has claimed between 200,000 and 300,000 lives since 1993.

But peace is by no means guaranteed. Although the deal throws a lifeline to the year-old transitional government, which has looked increasingly brittle, it fails to include the other Hutu rebels, the smaller National Liberation Front (FNL). Instead of entering talks, the 3,000-strong FNL remains perched on the hills above the capital, Bujumbura, from where it regularly shells the city outskirts or mounts guerrilla attacks on army positions. The Tutsi-led army responds with equal, or often greater, violence.

The FNL says it is fighting to restore the status quo of 1993, when a democratically elected Hutu briefly held power before being assassinated by Tutsi paratroops. A few months later, the genocide swept through neighbouring Rwanda. In a rough shelter at the foot of the rebel-held hills, Yusuf, a man with four bullet wounds in his shin, said: "Tutsis killed our president. And those same soldiers are still in charge of the army." The three men sitting beside him, one missing half his foot, nodded in silent agreement.

Yesterday regional leaders threatened to use sanctions to force the FNL into talks. When asked for details, the talks chairman, President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, said: "You will see."

Last year, Nelson Mandela suggested sending an African peace-keeping force to enforce any political settlement. South Africa has dispatched more than 700 troops to provide "VIP" protection to about 30 prominent Hutus. The interminable peace talks have severely taxed the patience of the 14-nation mediation team. The agreement was delayed on Sunday by a photocopying error. "It did not come easily," Jacob Zuma, Vice-President of South Africa, acknowledged.

But the result was important. The FDD, with an estimated 15,000 fighters, had been considered one of the greatest obstacles to peace. Many ordinary Burundians are sick of both Hutu and Tutsi combatants, who commit frequent human rights atrocities. On a recent morning the Ndayishimiye family huddled from the seasonal rains in their tin-roof hut. The women wept softly, the men were stony-faced. An army soldier had just murdered their daughter Jeanine, a Tutsi. "A soldier demanded to see her ID card," said Renovat, a cousin standing by a puddle stained with her blood. "She handed him the Bible and said that was her identity. He got angry and started shooting."

They have little faith in their politicians, either, who have presided over a catastrophic slide into misery. One in five children dies before the age of five and average life expectancy is 41. More than one million people are at risk of starvation. The United Nations ranks Burundi the third-poorest country in the world.

President Buyoya has agreed to hand power to a Hutu next May. But myriad dangers lie ahead. Failure to secure an FNL disarmament could easily derail the government. Hostility between the two sides is raw: an army spokesman said the rebels were nothing more than "ethnic extremists fighting to obtain power through genocide".

Hutu ranks are being destabilised by competition for political positions – guaranteed at 60 per cent of government – between the FNL and the Frodebu political party. And there are risks within the army ranks too. Last year saw two attempted army coups against President Buyoya, who himself came to power through a putsch. In recent weeks there have been rumours of a third.

"This deal is a good sign," said a Burundian source yesterday. "But in this country, anything can happen."