A meeting of the East African Network for the Monitoring of anti-Malaria Treatment opened on Tuesday in the Burundian capital, Bujumbura, with participants calling for the establishment of a system to monitor the use of a new anti-malarial combination therapy. The delegates, from Burundi, Rwanda, Tanzania, Zanzibar, Kenya and Uganda, said the Network should play a key role in advocacy for countries to put in place useful and acceptable anti-malaria policies.

A spokesman of President Domitien Ndayizeye said on Monday that the South African team in charge of Burundi's peace process had rejected a government proposal to extend the transitional period by one year. The spokesman, Pancrace Cimpaye, told IRIN in the Burundian capital, Bujumbura, that the mediation team had maintained that the transitional period should end on 1 November as stipulated in the Arusha Peace and Reconciliation Accord, signed in August 2000, under which the three-year transitional period in Burundi was established.

The Burundian government, in collaboration with the International Labour Organisation's (ILO) international programme for the eradication of child labour, has launched a three-year programme on the rehabilitation of former child soldiers. During the launch on Monday, Labour Minister Dismas Nditabiriye said the US $1.4-million programme would work in conjunction with a national child demobilisation and rehabilitation programme already in place.

The Burundian Agency for Cooperation and Research in Development (ACORD) has found that the country's internally displaced persons (IDPs) and returning refugees frequently experience psychological trauma due to the severe living conditions they endure. Presenting ACORD's findings at a conference in Bujumbura, researcher Julien Nimubona said the psychological problems the IDPS and refugees experience was compounded by their state of dependence on humanitarian aid and their inability to participate in decision-making.

An estimated 20,000 people have been displaced in Burundi's western province of Bujumbura Rural, following fresh fighting between the army and Forces nationales de liberation (FNL) rebels loyal to Agathon Rwasa. Most of the displaced have sought refuge in schools and at a health centre in the commune of Kabezi, where the administrator, Felix Ntahombaye, said another 30,000 displaced people had sought refuge in April.

The number of people in Burundi's camps for the displaced dropped by half between 2002 and 2004, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said in a preliminary report completed on Monday. The results of the survey, conducted between 10 March and 7 April, from which OCHA's report was produced, shows that the number of the displaced dropped from 281,000 in 2002 to 140,000 today. The survey was conducted with the Ministry for the Rehabilitation and Reintegration of Displaced and Repatriated Persons, as well as the National Commission for the Rehabilitation of Disaster-affected People.

More than a million people in Burundi are not receiving any medical treatment because they cannot afford it, says aid agency Medecins sans Frontieres. The MSF report said a government move to get people to start paying for treatment, tests and drugs meant many now went without them altogether. Burundi's impoverished government withdrew free health care to its 6.9 million citizens two years ago.

Burundian President Domitien Ndayizeye has dismissed as insincere a recent declaration of a ceasefire by one of the country's rebel factions but said that continuing insecurity would not delay the country's programme for a peaceful transition to democracy. Speaking on Friday at the private home of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni in the capital, Kampala, Ndayizeye told reporters that the Forces nationales de liberation (FNL) led by Agathon Rwasa was "not serious about this truce offer because they bombed Bujumbura the next day".

An association for HIV positive people in Burundi, the Reseau Burundais des personnes vivant avec le VIH, wants the government to enact a law protecting affected people against discrimination and stigmatisation. "We demand that the government should promulgate the law protecting HIV positive people as soon as possible, not only to protect HIV infected people but to protect the entire community," Felix Ntungumburanye, the head of the association, said during a workshop in the capital, Bujumbura.

Fighting broke out between Burundi's last active rebel group and government forces last Thursday, a day after both sides said they would cease unprovoked attacks, rebel and army sources said. Each side blamed the other for starting the clash and it was not immediately clear whether the fighting was the result of the truce not having being communicated down the lines or of rogue rebel elements.

Early in the morning, when the fog lifts, the Land Cruiser carrying a team of three lawyers from the UN refugee agency leaves the town of Muyinga in north-eastern Burundi for one of the many hills covered by eucalyptus and firs. As soon as the car stops in an open space, the first "clients" arrive. They ask the lawyers for advice. Soon there are long queues of people hoping to find answers to myriad problems facing post-war Burundi. Normally, they are related to property and domestic disputes. Many returnees find their land and houses occupied. Others arrive with new families, causing tensions with those they had left behind. UNHCR set the legal clinic in motion to help find answers to these problems before they come to a boil.

Extreme care will have to be taken to ensure that Burundi’s forthcoming November election will strengthen and reinforce the progress that has been made thus far in securing peace rather than reversing the gains that have been made, argues a report from the South Africa-based Institute for Security Studies (ISS). "In short, elections should not merely be regarded as a necessary formality in a country that is again trying to democratise. Far more is at stake. Any contestation of the election outcome and the conflict it may precipitate will merely further weaken the fragile belief that the present process can actually deliver durable peace," says the ICG.

This year UNHCR plans to repatriate 150,000 out of 300,000 Burundian refugees who fled to Tanzania in the past decade. The UNHCR facilitated repatriation process is moving at a rapid pace, perhaps too rapid. Refugees International (RI) is concerned that the pace of the repatriation threatens the security of the returning refugees for two reasons. First, UNHCR Burundi lacks the capacity to protect the returnees at the current levels of repatriation. Second, conditions inside Burundi are unstable, with continued violence in rural areas and fundamental issues, such as land rights, unresolved.

Some 85 Burundians representing families of returnees based at the Gatumba transit site near the border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), staged a sit-in on Wednesday at the offices of the Burundian human rights group, Iteka, to demand food aid and shelter. "We came to Iteka because all our attempts to get the CNRS [the National Commission for the Rehabilitation of Displaced Persons and Refugees] assistance have failed," the returnees told IRIN. The returnees, who were repatriated in 2002 from the DRC, Tanzania and Rwanda, complained that since their return the CNRS had left them on their own. They said the commission kept promising food aid, which it had failed to deliver.

Fighting last week near Burundi's capital of Bujumbura has prompted nearly 30,000 Burundians to flee their homes, officials said Saturday. On Friday, fighting between the government and the National Liberation Forces, the only rebel group still actively fighting in Burundi, left one soldier and six rebels dead, a military source said. The violence began on Tuesday about 15 kilometres southeast of Bujumbura.

The UN Security Council has given Secretary-General Kofi Annan the go-ahead to plan a peacekeeping operation in Burundi. Mr Annan had called on the body last month to send some 5,500 troops to Burundi, which is emerging from a decade of civil war. The Security Council has not yet approved the mission. But it says the secretary-general can begin consulting countries that could provide troops for a UN force. It would replace 2,500 African Union peacekeepers currently in Burundi, whose mandate has been extended until the beginning of May.

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. More than one in seven Burundians has fled his or her home over the past ten years. Prospects for the return of internally displaced people (IDPs) improved significantly at the end of 2003, following the signing of ceasefire agreements between the government and several rebel groups. Many challenges lie ahead though, such as conflicting land claims and the lack of preparation of communities in areas of origin to receive returnees may complicate the process.

A Burundian human rights NGO, Ligue Iteka, said on Monday it had begun the second phase of a programme aimed at training youths in human rights law. Launched at the weekend in collaboration with the French NGO Agir ensemble pour les droits de l'homme (Collective Action for Human Rights), some 25 youths aged 16 to 26 years from 18 human rights organisations will take part in the training.

Amnesty International is calling on the government of Burundi and the leaders of all current and former armed political groups to immediately cease the use and recruitment of child soldiers and genuinely engage in the demobilisation and reintegration of child soldiers. Military leaders have fuelled Burundi's 10-year armed conflict by recruiting and abducting children, destroying their childhood and jeopardizing their future Amnesty International stated in a new report entitled 'Burundi: Child soldiers - the challenge of demobilisation'.

Members of the United Nations Security Council have expressed concern about the continued fighting in Burundi and urged all parties to show restraint and finish peace negotiations. Talks between the Force nationals de liberation (Palipehutu-FNL) and the Government should be completed "with a view to promote, as soon as possible, a complete cessation of hostilities and the participation of the Palipehutu-FNL in the transitional institutions," said the Council President for March, Ambassador Jean-Marc de La Sablière of France, in a statement to the press.