BURUNDI-HUMAN RIGHTS: Burundi Divided over Need for U.N. Help

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Jun 23 1995 (IPS) - For a year and a half, human rights groups and the government of Burundi have asked the United Nations for help in investigating the killing of some 50,000 people in 1993.

But today, Burundi’s government seems caught between wanting accountability for those crimes and keeping the lid on simmering ethnic tensions.

More than 18 months after the massacres killed some 50,000 Burundians, the United Nations itself appears unsure how to help the country’s fragile coalition government keep the peace between the Hutu majority and Tutsi minority.

Human rights groups want an investigation into who was responsible for the Oct 1993 coup attempt that killed then- President Melchior Ndadaye and sparked a wave of Hutu-Tutsi killings.

“It is 18 months since the Burundian authorities requested this inquiry, and everyone we spoke to in Burundi stressed how central such an inquiry is to breaking the impasse over impunity,” says Andrew Clapham, the U.N. representative of Amnesty International.

“The fact that killings continue with no one brought to justice is fuelling the tensions and setting the stage for more human rights abuses,” Clapham adds.

“There certainly is a lack of accountability,” agrees Tharcisse Ntakibirora, Burundi’s U.N. ambassador. “The state of impunity is general in Burundi.”

But an inquiry is stalled, and the coalition government in Bujumbura is uncertain that it even wants U.N. help to hold one. The subject has become a political hot potato for both the United Nations and Burundi’s government.

Ntakibirora concedes that inquiries into atrocities may be helpful in societies ranging from El Salvador to South Africa. But Burundi’s population is currently too poor and too volatile to deal with such an examination of the past, he argues.

Now the situation is more tense than ever. Last week, Burundian President Sylvestre Ntibantuganya declared a state of emergency.

So far the U.N. response has been limited. Boutros-Ghali has sent a special human rights envoy, Paulo Pinheiro of Brazil, to Burundi for a two-week trip to examine the situation. Pinheiro is expected to report back once his mission ends Jul 4.

Part of the problem lies with the current government, a coalition of the Hutu FRODEBU and Tutsi UPRONA parties. Both sides want to avoid worsening tensions, and to protect their own ethnic groups from responsibility for the killings.

The Hutus blame the Tutsi-dominated Army for killing Ndadaye, the country’s first elected president. But the Tutsis blame the Hutus for a fierce wave of ethnic reprisals in the wake of the assassination.

“There cannot be partial accountability,” Ntakibirora warns. But with ethnic massacres still fresh in the minds of many, he adds that “sometimes we are unable to say the truth and only the truth.”

In May 1994, the United Nations sent two ambassadors — Martin Huslid of Norway and Simeon Ake of Cote d’Ivoire — on a fact- finding mission to investigate the Oct 1993 massacres.

They recommended two possible options for the United Nations: send in an international judicial mission to apportion blame for the coup and the killings that followed, or help oversee an investigation by Burundi’s own judicial system.

The ambassadors’ report was withheld by U.N. officials for ten months. Three months after its publication in March, the recommendations have not been followed up.

Instead, U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali has suggested setting up an international ‘Truth Commission,’ similar to one which investigated human rights abuses in El Salvador. But this has been rejected by Bujumbura.

“It doesn’t work,” Ntakibirora says of the proposed Truth Commission. “There is no good export product when it comes to the national unity of a multi-ethnic society.”

Ntakibirora has asked Boutros-Ghali instead to take up the Huslid-Ake recommendation to strengthen Burundi’s own justice system.

If a panel of international judges could help oversee Burundi’s judicial system and establish a Code of Conduct for the massacre inquiry, he argues, the Tutsi-dominated judiciary could garner the trust of all Burundians.

But Amnesty International, in a recent report, worries the United Nations has not devoted enough planning on how to bolster the human rights climate to achieve such a goal. The report, released last week, says previous U.N. human rights observer work in Haiti and Guatemala followed detailed studies.

“No proper feasibility study or assessment has been made as to how to mount such an operation,” the report says. “For any mission to be credible and successful it needs proper planning.”

Part of the problem, Amnesty adds, is that coordination between the United Nations and Burundi remains low.

Despite repeated calls for U.N. assistance from Bujumbura, the report says, “the Burundi representatives are left in no doubt that there is unlikely to be any meaningful response to their requests.”

Burundi’s U.N. envoy adds that the outside world has done little to relieve the country of the threat posed by Hutu extremists who have fled into Burundi and other neighbouring countries following last year’s killings in Rwanda.