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DAR ES SALAAM, June 8 (AFP) - Rwandan government and Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) rebels but have asked for extension of their peace parley in Arusha, northern Tanzania, to Saturday, they announced Tuesday in a joint statement.
They said they were determined to conclude a peace accord at their negotiations.
The protracted 11-month talks were scheduled to end last Sunday, but were still going on due to deadlock over a key issue of representation in a new army to be formed under the proposed peace accord.
The statement said that there was good progress at the negotiations on the repatriation and resettlement of Rwandese refugeees, mainly the minority Tutsis who fled the country during bloody ethnic upheavals in the early 1960s.
The talks are being chaired by Tanzanian home ministry's director for refugees Johnson Ibrahim Kama, without giving further details.
The joint statement came only a day after Tanzanian Prime Minister John Malecela made a one-day goodwill visit to Rwanda on Monday in an effort to break the army representation deadlock, which was the final agenda in the negotiations.
The RPF demands a representation of not less that 50 percent in the proposed 13,000-man army, but the Rwandan government feels that this would be giving the rebels and the minority Tutsis "too much ground".
Reports from the Rwandan capital, Kigali, said Malecela had held separate talks with Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana and Prime Minister Dismas Nsengiremye, and an RPF delegation at Byumba in rebel-held northern Rwanda.
Speaking before his departure from Kigali, Malecela appealed to the two sides to speed up their negotiations so that a peace agreement could be signed as soon as possible to usher in lasting peace to the tiny war-torn central African nation.
The RPF comprises mostly minority Tutsi refugees who have lived in Uganda for more than 30 years and who were serving in the Uganda army before absconding with their arms and unsuccessfully invading their country in an attempt to topple Habyarimana's 20-year-old majority Hutu regime in Kigali.
The minority Tutsis were the traditional rulers of Rwanda until they were overthrown by the majority Hutus in an uprising in 1959.
hb/lto/nb AFP AFP SEQN-0257
