Africa, Headlines, Human Rights

BURUNDI: Sackings Of Army Chiefs May Not End Massacres – Amnesty

LONDON, Aug 23 1996 (IPS) - Amnesty International said Friday that the order from Burundi’s new president Pierre Buyoya to sack army chiefs implicated in inter-ethnic massacres was no guarantee that human rights abuses by the army will stop.

“This is the same army we’re talking about here and there are no guarantees that just shuffling a few colonels about is going to put a stop to massacres and other abuses,” says Godfrey Byaruhanga, spokesperson for the worldwide human rights group.

“It is not going to lead to an overnight change in the culture of the army.”

In what is widely perceived as a move to ease international pressure and economic sanctions, Buyoya Tuesday dismissed three senior commanders from the Tutsi minority-led army, among them Colonel Jean Bikomago, the army chief of staff implicated in the 1993 assassination of the country’s first democratically-elected leader, President Melchior Ndadaye, a Hutu.

The sanctions on the land-locked central African state were imposed by Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda immediately after the Jul. 25 coup which replaced the divided civilian government of president Sylvestre Ntibantunganya with a Tutsi-led junta headed by Buyoya, who ruled the country from 1987 to 1993.

On assuming power Buyoya promised negotiations with rebels of the Hutu-led National Council for the Defence of Democracy (CNDD) and an end to killings by the Tutsi-dominated army.

However, according to Amnesty International, more than 6,000 largely Hutu civilians have been killed in various parts of Burundi in the three weeks since the Buyoya putsch removed the democratically-elected government from office.

As many people have been killed since the coup as in the three months preceding it, undermining Buyoya’s claims that the coup was needed to restore ethnic peace in the country.

Amnesty has reports that at least 4,000 unarmed civilians were extrajudicially-executed between 27 July and 10 August by the army and Tutsi militias in Gitega province. This figure does not include those who may have died from their wounds or drowned in rivers while fleeing.

Most of the victims were reportedly killed when soldiers surrounded their villages to supposedly gather information about rebel movements.

Killings have also been recorded in Bujumbura and the Muramvya, Kayanza and Cibitoke provinces, says Amnesty. On Jul. 29 the wife and four children, one aged three, of Honorata Murishi were executed in the rural provicne of Bujumbura, and 39 more people in Mutimbuzi district.

On Aug. 8, according to Byaruhanga, an affluent Hutu businessman and six members of his family were killed by soldiers, while two days later a group of about 30 peasants working their fields in Gasenyi, near Bujumbura, “disappeared” after a raid by government troops. Five unarmed civilians, including two teachers at Bujumbura’s Higher Technical School and a secretary at the nearby parish church, were reportedly killed by soldiers on Aug. 20.

The Amnesty spokesperson believes that many more such killings would have been unearthed had the army not sealed off tracts of the country. But he adds that Hutu rebels have also committed rights abuses, among them the execution of captured Tutsi combatants.

There are also reports that Rwandan Hutu refugees are being forcibly repatriated to Rwanda and subjected to torture, despite Buyoya’s undertaking to respect international human rights standards in the treatment of refugees.

“The army is making it clear that the same fate awaits the refugees who remain in the camps,” said the spokesman. “It appears that Major Buyoya has either gone back on his word or is not in control of the forces which brought him to power. ”

Ray Wilkinson, London spokesperson for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), added: “This only confirms our belief that the refugees have not been returning to Rwanda voluntarily. We find this unacceptable and we are calling for firm international action to prevent the spiral of violence continuing or getting worse.”

During his stint as military dictator, Buyoya presided over the massacres of majority Hutu civilians in August 1988 and in November and December of 1991 and early 1992. U.S. intelligence sources say there is evidence to link him to the attempted coup of 1993 which led to President Ndadaye’s assassination and the slaughter of an estimated 100,000 Hutus.

Buyoya’s choice of new commander of the gendarmerie, colonel Georges Mukorako, also headed the gendarmerie during his 1991-92 rule, when it was blamed for massacres of Hutu civilians.

The sanctions include a ban on commercial flights, a blockade of oil shipments — vital to the army’s ‘war effort’ — and the refusal of passage for other consumer essentials and the country’s exports through its neighbours’ territories.

Relief agencies working in the country report that the sanctions have already begun to bite, precipitating steep price hikes for basic consumer items. The agencies say the sanctions could lead to violence against their staff as looters try to get at stockpiled supplies.

“Sanctions are biting bitterly and if they continue, the pressure could increase on the agencies,” said Martin Cottingham, London spokesperson for the British emergency aid agency Christian Aid.

“The sanctions are hitting where it is likely to hurt most, by preventing the army and the powerful Tutsi business community from getting at their main source of finance,” added Ahmed Rajab, the London-based editor of Africa Analysis magazine. “This could help in the efforts at mediation.”

 
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