BURUNDI-POLITICS: Talk of Talks as the Blood Keeps Flowing

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru and Jean Baptiste Kayigamba

NAIROBI, May 6 1996 (IPS) - Less than a month ago, Burundi’s main Hutu rebel group vowed to step up its activities and overthrow the coalition government in Bujumbura.

Now the National Council for the Defence of Democracy (CNDD) wants dialogue, if Innocent Nimpagariste, its representative here, is to be taken seriously. He says the council is ready to negotiate and has proposed Rome as the venue for the talks.

Burundi’s government accuses most of its neighbours, especially Zaire, where the CNDD is based, of backing the rebels. “This is why we think Rome is a neutral venue,” said Stanley Claver Kaduga, another top CNDD official. “We also believe that the safety of our delegation can be ensured in Rome.”

However, the CNDD says it will negotiate only with the military, widely seen as the real seat of power in Burundi, and not with the ruling coalition, made up of President Sylvestre Ntibantunganya’s Front for Democracy in Burundi (FRODEBU) and smaller parties led by the Union for National Progress (UPRONA).

Ntibantunganya, a Hutu, 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.

He said while on a recent visit here that his country’s constitution did not allow the army to interfere in politics. “The Burundi army is not the government,” he said. “Any peace talks on Burundi will be handled by the government not the army.”

But before that can happen, the ruling coalition will have to resolve the division between the Hutu-dominated FRODEBU and the UPRONA bloc, which is mainly Tutsi.

So far former Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere, the internationally-backed mediator on Burundi, has failed to persuade Prime Minister Antoine Nduwayo, his UPRONA party and the army to drop their objection to negotiations with the rebels.

FRODEBU and the UPRONA bloc failed to resolve their differences at talks held in late April in the northern Tanzanian town of Mwanza. The only result of the parley, chaired by Nyerere, was a declaration that the two sides had agreed to condemn violence and crime in Burundi.

The CNDD has described the Mwanza talks, billed to resume on May 22, as a “futile exercise”. “The two parties don’t have power,” says Nimpagariste. “The real power lies in the hands of the army. And we shall negotiate with the army.”

He said the international community should put pressure on the army to accept negotiations. Reiterating an earlier threat, he added: “If they don’t want to negotiate, we shall fight until we chase them out of Bujumbura.”

Amid all the talk about negotiations, Burundi continues to suffer from the depredations of both the Tutsi-led army and the Hutu rebels.

About 200 rebels Saturday carried out a pre-dawn attack on the Khaled hospital in the heart of the capital, killing one person and wounding four, according to official sources in Bujumbura.

The attack following fresh fighting early last week in the north-western border province of Cibitoke in which several people, including a parliamentarian, were massacred, and about 2,000 others forced to flee to neighbouring Zaire which closed its border to stop the influx.

And, over the weekend, officials of relief agencies in the Bujumbura reported that there was evidence that the army killed more than 200 people in the centre of Burundi about 10 days ago.

More than 100,000 people are reported to have died in two and a half years of unrest sparked by the death in October 1993 of Burundi’s first Hutu president, Melchior Ndadaye, killed in an aborted military coup by Tutsi hardliners who felt he was threatening their traditional grip on power.

During a visit here last week, U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali urged the leaders of the Great Lakes Region (Burundi, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda and Zaire) to continue efforts to arrest the political and economic deterioration of Burundi.

Earlier this year, Boutros-Ghali had called on U.N. member countries to put 25,000 soldiers on standby, ready to intervene if the situation in Burundi worsened.

However, a subsequent U.N. Security Council resolution on Burundi did not mention a standby force. It merely encouraged the Secretary-General “to continue his consultations … on contingency planning” in case Burundi’s political situation took a turn for the worse.

Referring to the original proposal, Nimpagariste said: “We are surprised that the force will not be stationed in Burundi, that it will not be protecting civilians. Then, what’s the use of such a force?”

Observers feel that there is little doubt that things will get worse in Burundi.

“My honest assessment is that if the government and Hutu rebels refuse to negotiate soon it will be too late for Burundi,” an aid official based in Bujumbura told IPS here. “Burundi is plunging into anarchy. It’s becoming unsafe for everybody. People are murdered, threatened and some disappear.”