Burundi cease-fire sought

DAR ES SALAAM, Tanzania -- Regional leaders urged the international community Saturday to fulfill pledges to help finance the implementation of a peace process intended to end more than a decade of civil war in Burundi.\nBurundian President Domitien Ndayizeye, who held talks with his counterparts from Tanzania and Uganda, told reporters that $1.5 billion was needed to complete the peace process, but he gave no details about what it was needed for or how much has been pledged by donors.\n"The leaders urged the international community to live up to their undertakings to give their financial contributions to expedite the implementation of the cease-fire agreement, especially the process of the integration and reform of the armed forces," Ndayizeye said in a joint statement with Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni and President Benjamin Mkapa of Tanzania.\nNdayizeye heads a transitional government that is supposed to implement a series of peace deals, under which former rebels are supposed to be integrated into a new army and police force.\nA three-year transition period is scheduled to end in November, after which elections are to be held.\nEfforts to end the conflict have made progress since the largest rebel group, the Forces for the Defense of Democracy, or FDD, signed a peace deal in November, agreeing to take up posts in the transitional government and integrate its forces into a new national army. But the former rebel group suspended its participation in the transitional administration May 3, accusing the two dominant political parties in the administration of not consulting with other parties and failing to abide by the peace accords.\nThe FDD, whose members come from the Hutu majority, also complained about the slow progress of integrating former rebels into the army.\nThe regional leaders made no mention of the FDD's pullout Saturday.\nMinority Tutsis have effectively run Burundi for all but a few months since independence in 1962. War broke out in 1993, when Hutus took up arms after Tutsi paratroopers assassinated the country's first democratically elected president, a Hutu.\nSome 260,000 people, mostly civilians, have been killed in the conflict, according to the United Nations.\nTwo smaller rebel factions have also joined the government. A fourth rebel group, the National Liberation Forces, has refused to join the peace process.\nThe leaders' statement said a regional summit would be called to "decisively deal with obstruction" by the National Liberation Forces.