Situation Report: Burundi: The End of the Tunnel? Henri Boshoff, Jean Marie Gasana and Richard Cornwell

At the moment, the political mood in Burundi might be said to be one of cautious optimism. At the end of December 2008, it appeared that the final obstacles were being cleared away to the implementation of a peace accord between the government and the insurgent Parti pour la Libération du Peuple Hutu/Forces Nationales de Libération  (PALIPEHUTU-FNL) as prefigured in their ceasefire agreement of 7 September 2006. As the UN Secretary General had continued  to emphasise in his regular reports on the situation, this was a matter of urgency not only in the light of preparations for elections to be held in 2010, but so that the country should enjoy a more stable platform from which to tackle its myriad economic and social problems. This promising phase of a protracted process was marked by the government’s release of the first batch of rebel prisoners and by a belated agreement by PALIPEHUTU-FNL to drop the first part of its name, “Party for the Liberation of the Hutu People”, a requirement if it intended to enter constitutionally sanctioned politics.