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Mali’s interim prime minister said on Monday he was open to talks with Islamist militants whose insurgency has made vast swathes of the country ungovernable, but former colonial power France signaled opposition to the idea.

Ousted former President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita said earlier this year that his government was prepared to negotiate with al Qaeda-linked militants. National talks in the aftermath of the August coup that overthrew Keita endorsed that policy.

Malian officials have provided few specifics about what kinds of compromises could emerge, but some proponents of negotiations have said they could include recognition of a greater role for Islam in public life.

Moctar Ouane, who was appointed interim prime minister last month to manage an 18-month transition after the August 18 coup that toppled Keita said his government was prepared to pursue talks.

“The conclusions of the inclusive national talks … very clearly indicated the necessity of an offer of dialogue with these armed groups,” Ouane said at a news conference in Bamako with French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian who is on a two-day visit.

“We need to see in that an opportunity to engage in far-reaching discussions with the communities in order to redefine the contours of new governance of the areas that are concerned,” he said.

Le Drian, however, indicated he was opposed, noting that the Islamist groups had not signed a 2015 peace deal that it considers a framework for restoring peace to northern Mali.

“Let’s say things very clearly: there are peace accords … and then there are terrorist groups that have not signed the peace accords,” Le Drian said. “It is simple.”

France has more than 5 000 troops in Mali and neighbouring countries in West Africa’s Sahel region to fight the jihadists, against whom it first intervened in 2013.

But the militants, many with links to al Qaeda and the Islamic State has grown stronger in recent years, stepping into vacuums left by weakened state authorities.

Pierre Buyoya, former president of Burundi, has been handed life imprisonment after he was found guilty of killing another of the Country’s former president.

The country’s top court sentenced the former president to life in prison for the 1993 murder of Melchior Ndadaye, another president who had defeated him in elections, an attack that triggered a 10-year civil war in which about 300 000 people were killed.

In the October 19, 2020 ruling that was seen by Reuters on Tuesday, the court sentenced Buyoya and 18 others for the death of Ndadaye, who had defeated Buyoya to become the central African country’s first freely elected president.

Three of those sentenced were handed 20 years each in jail.

Buyoya is at present the African Union’s High Representative for Mali and the Sahel. He could not immediately be reached for comment on the sentencing. Many of those convicted including Buyoya did not appear in court or enter a plea as they are abroad.

Ndadaye was shot dead along with several cabinet ministers in an ambush by ethnic Tutsi soldiers four months after he won the election, touching off protracted ethnic bloodshed between Tutsis and Ndadaye’s Hutu-dominated FRODEBU movement.

FRODEBU was Burundi’s largest political party before Buyoya, a Tutsi, seized power in a 1996 military coup.

Also sentenced with Buyoya were former deputy presidents Busokoza Bernard and Alphonse Marie Kadege. Busokoza fled abroad in 2015 and was charged in the same year over-involvement in a failed 2015 coup attempt.

Kadege fled in 2006 after being arrested and tortured by the SNR intelligence service for attempting to overthrow the then president Pierre Nkurunziza, who died in June.

Ndadaye’s successor Cyprien Ntaryamira and Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana died in 1994 when a plane carrying them was shot down by a rocket over Kigali in neighbouring Rwanda, triggering the Rwandan genocide in which 800,000 were killed.

The court also ordered that those sentenced collectively pay a fine of 103 billion Burundian francs ($54 million).