BURUNDI-POLITICS: Civil Conflict Takes a Turn for the Worse

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru

NAIROBI, May 21 1996 (IPS) - The low-intensity civil war in Burundi seems to be taking a turn for the worse, with hardline Hutu rebels threatening the capital, Bujumbura.

“We have been around Bujumbura for the past three months,” Innocent Nimpagariste, the Nairobi representative of the rebel National Council for the Defence of Democracy (CCDD), told IPS.

He claimed that Hutu rebels controlled all the roads leading into the city. “Our programme is not to attack Bujumbura, but to persuade the army to talk,” he said.

The rebels are deliberately sidelining a power-sharing government, calculating that the real authority in the country is the military. But the army, dominated by the country’s minority Tutsis, refuses to negotiate with the CCDD or any other rebel group.

Its position is backed by Prime Minister Antonie Nduwayo, a Tutsi, and his Union for National Progress (UPRONA), which has been part of a coalition government foisted on the mainly-Hutu Front for Democracy in Burundi (FRODEBU) since 1994.

To break the logjam, former Tanzania president Julius Nyerere, the internationally-backed mediator on Burundi, has been shuttling between the Tanzanian capital, Dar es Salaam, and Bujumbura to try to get the army to the negotiating table.

“We want to give Nyerere a chance,” says Nimpagariste. “If he fails, CCNN will have no choice but to change its strategy.”

Last week a senior U.S. official visiting Burundi stressed that Washington would not recognise any government that comes to power by force of arms — a warning to both the army and the rebels.

John Shattuck, Assistant Secretary for Human Rights, Democracy and Labour, told journalists in Bujumbura that there must be the political will to end the violence in the Central African country. “This violence will only drive Burundi to political suicide,” he said. “The country must enter into dialogue.”

Nimpagariste told IPS the CCDD was in contact with Washington. “We are talking with former U.S. president Jimmy Carter and other authorities in America,” he said.

Carter has been holding talks with the presidents of the Great Lakes Region — Mobuto Sese Seko of Zaire, Burundi’s Sylvestre Ntibantunganya, Pasteur Bizimungu of Rwanda, Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni and Benjamin Mkapa of Tanzania — in an attempt to resolve the conflicts in the volatile region.

Thus far his effort has achieved little if any tangible result. The Hutu rebels appear to have been more effective. Pressure from them forced Ntibantuganya, himself a Hutu, to call on Burundi’s army to stop the ethnic violence from becoming full-scale civil war.

“We are giving you a week, which is already a lot of time to get yourselves together, to organise or reorganise,” he was quoted as saying last week by the state-run Radio Burundi. “Either we do something or we are damned,” he told heads of the army, gendarmerie, security services and police.

Just two months ago, a map released by the Organisation of African Unity mission to Burundi, a copy of which was made available to IPS, showed that only three provinces were free of rebel activity. “Now our forces are found everywhere in the country,” said Nimpagariste.

Early this month, CCDD said it was ready for talks and proposed Rome, Italy, as the venue for talks with the army. But Ntibantunganya, has maintained that if negotiations are to be held with the rebels, it is the government and not the army that will do the talking.

“The Burundi army is not the government,” he said during a recent visit to Nairobi. “Any peace talks on Burundi will be handled by the government, not the army.”

But the CCDD argues that the real power in Burundi lies with the army. “I think, it’s fair enough to let the belligerents talk,” says former deputy speaker of parliament Stanley Claver Kaduga, now a top CCDD official.

His remark was echoed by Leonard Nyangoma, the leader of the CCDD, who visited Rome last week. While there, the former home affairs minister told journalists that the army must return to the barracks, “then they should come to the negotiating table because we are prepared for a dialogue with them.”

Burundi, with a total population of about six million people, began slipping into chaos when its first elected president, Melchior Ndadaye, a Hutu, was murdered by renegade soldiers in October 1993.

Since then, more than 100,000 people, mainly non-combatants, have died in the Central African country, according to a recent U.N. report.