Burundi is rare success for Africa's great statesman

The popular view that anyone who could bring a peaceful end to apartheid must have a special touch has seen Nelson Mandela proposed as a potential saviour of regions from the Middle East and the Balkans to blighted swaths of Africa. Yet faith in the man frequently described as a living saint has rarely produced results.

The Israelis did not want any friend of Yasser Arafat's as a mediator, and European governments did not really want an African solving problems on their turf.

Besides, Mr Mandela's loyalty to "pariah" leaders who supported him when the US and Britain backed the apartheid regime - Fidel Castro, Mr Arafat and, most contentiously, Colonel Muammar Gadafy - has left western leaders wondering about his judgment.

Some of his ventures into international mediation have embarrassed his supporters and angered South Africa's allies, without achieving much.

He visited Indonesia in 1997 to plead for the release of East Timor's rebel leader, Xanana Gusmao. But his status as a peacemaker was undermined when it emerged that during the meeting he sold President Suharto an array of South African arms, including jet fighters, armoured personnel carriers and machine guns that would have proved useful in crushing the East Timor uprising.

In 1995, he took on Nigeria's military dictator, Sani Abacha, after the general defied a personal plea not to hang Ken Saro-Wiwa. The Ogoni writer's execution so angered Mr Mandela that he called Abacha barbaric and said he was "sitting on a volcano and I am going to explode it under him". But his calls for Britain and the US to impose oil sanctions on Nigeria fell flat because profits were at stake.

Mr Mandela's greatest success is his least noticed outside Africa. After he retired as South Africa's president in 1999, he agreed to mediate an end to Burundi's civil war and the genocide of about 250,000 people.

He was warned that dealing with Burundi would make negotiating with the apartheid regime look easy. Yet he persuaded the Tutsi minority - which ran its own form of apartheid to keep control of the government, military and economy - to share power with an oppressed Hutu minority which was conducting a brutal civil war to win majority rule.

While the war is not over, the prospects for peace in Burundi are better than they have been in years.