Former South African president Mr Nelson Mandela led five other African leaders today in talks on ending civil war in the central African state of Burundi, sources at the African summit said.
Mr Mandela is mediator in the feud between Burundi's majority Hutu and minority Tutsi that has killed more than 200,000 people since 1993.
The talks opened on the eve of a summit of the 38-year-old Organisation of African Unity which is due to be transformed at the Lusaka meeting into a much stronger African Union.
Mr Mandela entered the closed-door meeting with the presidents of Burundi's neighbours, Uganda, Rwanda and Tanzania, and Libyan leader Mr Muammar Gaddafi.
Senior OAU sources said Mr Gaddafi, who is promoting himself as champion of African integration, invited himself to the Burundi talks.
Burundi President Mr Pierre Buyoya, whose 1993 coup triggered fighting between his Tutsidominated army and Hutu rebels, was kept in a separate room, conference sources said. He was expected to join in the talks later.
The fighting in Burundi has raised fears of massacres similar to the 1994 genocide of minority Tutsis in neighbouring Rwanda, which shares the same ethnic and historical profile.
Nearly a million Tutsis and their sympathisers died during the Rwandan crisis, which further poisoned the climate of hate in the Great Lakes region of Africa and is a factor in the conflict in neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo.