Africa, Headlines

BURUNDI-POLITICS: Army Refuses To Accept U.N. Troops

Jean-Baptiste Kayigamba

KIGALI, Jan 5 1996 (IPS) - A proposal by U.N. secretary general Boutros Boutros-Ghali for a rapid deployment force to be used in Burundi to prevent the central African country’s ethnic conflict degenerating into all out civil war has been rejected by the Burundi army.

“Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s proposals are his own. The interposition between whom and whom?” asked army spokesman, Major Lambert Sinarinzi in a telephone interview with IPS.

Boutros-Ghali had called for the stationing of a quick reaction force of U.N. soldiers on the Zairean border and the deployment of armed guards to protect international relief workers in Burundi ahead of a security council meeting Friday to condemn the spreading violence.

“The Burundi army will never accept such a plan aimed at trampling on our national sovereignty,” Sinarinzi said.

The spokesman said the situation in Burundi was being distorted by the foreign media. “There is no Hutu-Tutsi war going on in Burundi,” he stressed. “What we have here is the army battling armed gangs, terrorists sowing terror, killing indiscriminately Hutus and Tutsis. And this should be made clear.”

Rejecting any idea of foreign intervention, Sinarinzi accused Boutros-Ghali of acting on behalf of unnamed foreign powers. “These powers are not happy that we (the army) prevented the genocide of an ethnic group from occurring here are seeking all means to demonise us and propose foreign intervention and call for talks with Hutus,” he said.

The human rights watchdog Amnesty International says that more than 1,000 people are killed by government forces or paramilitary groups each month in Burundi.

The worst violence has occurred in the inaccessible provinces of Bubanza and Cibitoke in the north-west an area of heavy infiltration by Hutu rebels from across the border in Zaire heading for bases in the Kibira forest. Most victims are unarmed women, children and the aged, Amnesty reports.

“The government has shown itself incapable of preventing its security forces from unlawfully killing unarmed civilians and carrying out other human rights violations,” said a spokesman for the group before the New Year holiday.

Ranged against the Tutsi-dominated army are the Palipehutu militia and the FDD of former interior minister Leonard Nyangoma. In the north-east, armed Hutu bands also operate from Tanzania. The gunmen target Tutsi civilians as well as the military.

Tutsi militia, frequently operating in the same area as the army, have stepped up their training.

“I fear there is a real danger of the situation in Burundi degenerating to the point where it might explode into ethnic violence on a massive scale,” says Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, the U.N. Special Rapporteur of the Commission on Human Rights.

An estimated 100,000 people have been slaughtered in Burundi since the current civil conflict broke out in October 1993 with the death of the country’s first freely elected president, Melchior Ndadaye, in an attempted coup.

Ndadaye’s successor, also a Hutu, died in a plane crash in April 1994 which also claimed the life of neighbouring Rwanda’s president.

A power-sharing agreement signed in September 1994 gives the largely Hutu FRODEBU party, which won the election by a landslide, just 55 percent of ministerial jobs, with the Tutsi-based UPRONA taking the remainder. A largely powerless presidency is under Hutu leader Sylvestre Ntibantunganya.

The army, with its officer corps almost exclusively Tutsi, is the real power in the land. It has refused to accept FRODEBU’s long-standing demands for reform, regarding itself as the only institution capable of preventing the genocide against Tutsis that occurred in Rwanda in 1994. Its intransigence merely fuels support for the Hutu militia.

“The problem of ethnic imbalance in the army is the fault of the history of our country,” Sinarinzi said. “Tremendous steps have been made to change the configuration but many are eager to destroy the army for the sake of imposing an ethno-democracy.”

In his New Year’s address, Ntibantunganya warned that fanatics on both sides of the ethnic divide were driving the country into an abyss. “The political discourse must be a coherent one and should respond to the worries of every citizens,” he said.

“What we need today in Burundi is help, help to track down the Nyangomas who are fueling the Nazi ideology in the region and not Boutros-Ghali’s blue helmets,” Sinarinzi said.

 
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BURUNDI-POLITICS: Army Refuses To Accept U.N. Troops

Jean-Baptiste Kayigamba

KIGALI, Jan 5 1996 (IPS) - A proposal by U.N. secretary general Boutros Boutros-Ghali for a rapid deployment force to be used in Burundi to prevent the central African country’s ethnic conflict degenerating into all out civil war has been rejected by the Burundi army.
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