BURUNDI-POLITICS: Rebel Leader Issues Warning

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru

NAIROBI, Jul 29 1996 (IPS) - When East and Central African leaders meet on Wednesday to discuss Burundi, they are unlikely to treat a warning by Burundian rebel leader Leonard Nyangoma lightly.

In a statement released on Jul. 28, Nyangoma, head of the National Council for the Defence of Democracy (CNDD), warned that Burundi would slip into a genocidal civil war if the international community allowed the country’s new, Tutsi-dominated junta to remain in power.

The statement was undated but its release came one day after an incident that provided an indication that the Central African nation was, in fact, heading for more bloodshed: at least 30 people were killed by the military in the central district of Gitega on Saturday.

At first the army denied the killing, but it later said that the dead were Hutu rebels killed in a clash with the military following the burning of a coffee plantation in the area. Other reports had it that up to 50 people, mostly Hutu civilians, had died.

The incident was the first major one reported since former president Maj. Pierre Buyoya was swept to power in a military coup on Thursday, three years after he had ceded power to Burundi’s first democratically elected president, Melchior Ndadaye.

Ndadaye was murdered in an aborted coup in October 1993, about three months after he took office. His assassination led to three years of turmoil in which more than 150,000 people have thus far been killed.

Nyangoma charged that the soldiers who put Buyoya in power were the same ones who had killed Ndadaye, and “sowed chaos and death in the whole country.”

Nyangoma, who was Burundi’s interior minister, witnessed the coup and Ndadaye’s murder first hand. He escaped and later launched his rebel movement with the aim of disbanding Burundi’s mono-ethnic military force and forming a national army, made up of the country’s three ethnic groups — Hutu, Tutsi and Twa.

The CNDD leader called on Burundians to exercise caution and refrain from abuses. “Be calm and serene … do not commit crime against your compatriot or your neighbour,” he said. “Under no single pretext (should you) spill the blood of your fellow man.”

“Hundreds of thousands of Burundians have been killed because of those unconcious soldiers. Do not add the drama to the drama,” Nyangoma said. “I publicly warn you that whoever dares kill his neighbour should know that he is committing this crime on his behalf and he has not been mandated by the CNDD or (the former ruling) FRODEBU and that he himself will be answerable for this crime in the days to come.”

However, he also vowed that the CNDD would step up its armed struggle against the new junta, which has promised tough action against the rebels although Buyoya said he would negotiate with them if they lay down their arms.

While the international community has condemned Thursday’s coup, Western countries are unwilling to commit troops to prevent a Rwanda-type disaster in Burundi and seem to be pinning their hopes on some 9,000 African peacekeepers that Tanzania, Uganda and Ethiopia have promised to put together.

The plan to deploy the troops was hammered by East and Central African leaders in the Tanzanian town of Arusha late last month.

They will meet again on Wednesday, in Tanzania, to take a collective decision on Burundi, Ugandan presidential aide John Nagenda said following a meeting in Kampala on Saturday between Tanzania’s Benjamin Mwapa and Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, at which the two presidents condemned the coup.

That meeting was also attended by former Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere, the internationally-backed mediator on Burundi, who said Africa would not allow Burundi to follow the same path as Rwanda, where at least half a million people were killed in 1994.