There are big challenges facing those returnees who fled Burundi in 1972 – some 60,000 since the Burundian government signed a peace agreement with rebel factions in 2000. These challenges – including identity, language skills, and land ownership – are particularly acute for people who fled overseas to escape the first major surge of violence in 1972, and for children born in Tanzania.

The GBV Coordinator will be responsible for the implementation, monitoring, evaluation and further development of the GBV program and all GBV-related activities. The primary focus is on program quality with monitoring and evaluation against quantifiable benchmarks.

The Forces nationales de libération (FNL), Burundi's remaining active rebel group, has continued to attack civilians even as it continues ceasefire negotiations with the government in Dar es Salaam, the commercial capital of Tanzania.

Burundi's army says it has killed 13 fighters from the last active rebel group, the National Liberation Forces (FNL), outside the capital, Bujumbura. The killings took place after the army learnt of the presence of a 20-strong group, including new recruits. An army spokesman denied allegations the rebels had been shot in cold blood. Peace talks in Tanzania between the government and rebels aimed at ending the 12-year civil war have been postponed.

Food security in Burundi is under threat due to fears that an incurable banana disease, which has already been reported in several neighbouring countries, could sweep across the nation, an official of an agricultural research institute has said.

The Burundians who fled the civil war in their country after 1993 are coming back. Until recently, there was still sporadic armed violence in the hills around the capital of Bujumbura, allegedly perpetrated by the one remaining rebel group which has not signed on to the peace agreement of 2004, but earlier this month the final signatories were put on the page, reports Relief Web.

The European Union (EU), a major donor to Burundi, has asked the government to investigate claims of corruption and forgery in an EU-funded programme that was set up in 2001 to rehabilitate infrastructure in the country that is emerging from 12 years of civil war. The EU's contribution to Burundi accounts for 50 percent of the country's donor aid.

Following recent drought in northern Burundi, which adversely affected the region's vegetation cover, the government has drawn a plan of action to combat desertification. The plan, whose date of implementation was not disclosed, seeks the rehabilitation of agriculture and the sustainable management of degraded land with the aim of reducing drought-linked food insecurity.

Refugees in Burundi have called for the killers of 160 people at a camp there two years ago to face justice. The refugees -- Banyamulenge Tutsis -- had fled to Burundi to escape warfare in neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo.

The Burundian government is detaining rather than rehabilitating former child soldiers associated with the rebel National Liberation Forces, Human Rights Watch said in a briefing paper released on the annual Day of the African Child.

Burundi's government and the country's last active rebel group have agreed to end hostilities and draft a permanent ceasefire deal in the next two weeks. Observers say a deal with the FNL is seen as one of the final hurdles for stability after the long civil war.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Antonio Guterres, and the European Union Commissioner for Development and Humanitarian Aid, Louis Michel, arrived on Friday 16 June in Bujumbura for a two-day visit. The officials arrived from Tanzania, where they had visited camps hosting Burundian refugees and witnessed the repatriation of some of the refugees.

Between April 2005 and March 2006, some 19,000 Rwandan asylum seekers had arrived in Burundi's northern provinces. They were reportedly fleeing persecution under Rwanda's traditional ‘gacaca’ justice system, which the government introduced to expedite trials for thousands of suspects held in connection with the 1994 genocide. Since 12 April, the Burundian government has repatriated 5,206 Rwandans from its northern provinces of Ngozi and Kirundo.

A new policy of free medical care for Burundian mothers and children was intended to improve their lives; instead it has crippled the nation's health system. Public hospitals in Burundi have recorded double, sometimes triple, the number of patients since a presidential directive for free paediatric and maternal health services was implemented on May 1.

Peace talks between the government of Burundi and the country's remaining rebel group, the Forces nationales de liberation (FNL), which began on 29 May in Tanzania, are still at an informal stage, an official of the rebel movement said on Wednesday.

Peace talks between the government of Burundi and the Forces nationales de liberation (FNL), the country's remaining rebel group, have began in Tanzania's commercial capital, Dar es Salaam. Burundi is emerging from over a decade of civil war, which erupted in 1993 following the assassination of the country's first democratically elected president, Melchior Ndadaye, who was from the ethnic Hutu majority. Paratroopers of the then-minority, Tutsi-dominated army allegedly killed Ndadaye.

Floods have killed nine people, displaced thousands others and destroyed a cemetery in Burundi's northwestern province of Bubanza, following a week of heavy rainfall that caused two rivers to burst their banks. The government and the United Nations Mission in the country, known as ONUB, have started to provide to help the affected families and to divert the floodwaters back to the riverbeds.

Free maternal healthcare, a 15 percent salary increase for workers in the public service and the setting up of anti-corruption bodies are some of the measures Burundian President Pierre Nkurunziza announced in a message to the nation on the eve of Labour Day, marked worldwide on 1 May. "Current salaries do not allow workers to make ends meet," he said in the central province of Gitega in a speech aired nationwide on state-owned Radio Burundi.

Preparations are underway for ministers in charge of water in the 10-member countries of the Nile Basin Initiative to convene their 14th ministerial meeting on Wednesday (May 3) in Burundi’s capital. The ministerial meeting will mainly assess the progress made in the common vision programme, said Patrick Kahangire, executive director of the Nile Basin Initiative. The Nile Basin Initiative was set up February 22 1999 in Dar Es- Salaam, Tanzania, with the goal of getting the countries to work together towards the development of natural resources for the benefit of all, said Kahangire.

The Burundian government has given civilians in possession of weapons three weeks to register the arms or risk being arrested for illegal ownership. "They have until 5 May to register the arms they are holding," President Pierre Nkurunziza said. He commended some 3,000 people who had already handed in their weapons, saying the law on illegal ownership of arms would apply to those who did not register.