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Mandela explains Burundi impasse to UN Council

UNITED NATIONS: Former South African President Nelson Mandela addresses the U.N. Security Council on Wednesday, offering advice on what could be done to end the civil war that has killed more than 200,000 people in the central African nation of Burundi.

Mandela, the new mediator for Burundi, came to New York from Arusha, Tanzania, where he sharply criticised the country's 18 political parties and rebel leaders for allowing the slaughter in the tiny country of 6 million people.

"Please join the modern world," he told the gathering in Arusha on Sunday.

"Why do you allow yourselves to be regarded as leaders without talent, leaders without vision? When people in the West hear these things they say 'Africans are still barbarians. No human being could do what they are doing.'"

Mandela, 81, South Africa's first president of an integrated country, was appointed in December to replace Julius Nyerere as mediator to Burundi's fragile peace process, shortly after the death of the former Tanzanian president.

He was asked to address the Council by U.S. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, this month's president of the 15-member body. Holbrooke, who has held public meetings on a variety of African issues, including AIDS and refugees, has designed January as the "month of Africa" in the Security Council.

It is Mandela's first participation in a Security Council meeting, although he has visited the United Nations several times and addressed the 188-member General Assembly.

Burundi has been on and off the Council's agenda since 1993, when refugees streamed into Tanzania after Tutsi soldiers killed the country's first Hutu president, Melchior Ndadaye. The Tutsis consolidated their power in a 1995 military coup but the 85 percent Hutu majority has fought them ever since.

The Security Council had been reluctant over the years to send any peacekeepers or guards to Burundi, which has the same ethnic split as neighbouring Rwanda, where at some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed by Hutus in 1994.

The government of President Pierre Buyoya has been harshly criticised by U.N. officials and human rights groups for forcing some 250,000 Hutus to leave their homes and move into impoverished regroupment camps in a classic counter-insurgency tactic to deny Hutu rebels food and support.

Mandela has proposed disarming combatants, integrating more Hutus into the Tutsi-run army, setting up a timetable for elections and forming a transitional government.

Mandela has also suggested that world figures attend the next round of Arusha talks, saying he had invited U.S. President Bill Clinton, French President Jacques Chirac, King Fahd of Saudi Arabia and African leaders.

Clearly drawing on his experience in South Africa, Mandela said Burundi's minority Tutsi rulers could not forever maintain their ethnic dominance of the security forces and had to integrate former Hutu rebels into the army.

But the Hutu majority had to accept the principle of some form of amnesty for politically motivated crimes or the Tutsis would not bargain, he said.-Reuters