By Moyiga Nduru
NAIROBI, Jul 12 1996 (IPS)

A Hutu rebel group Friday threatened that it would attack the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) if it sets up operations in Burundi.

UNHCR says it is taking seriously the threats, since other agencies have been attacked by the group known as the Liberation of the Hutu People (PALIPEHUTU).

“We are taking the threats very seriously, because other agencies have suffered, fatally, there,” Millicent Mutula, UNHCR spokesperson said here Friday.

The rebels killed three Red Cross workers in the strife-torn province of Cibitoke, in northwest Burundi, in June. UNHCR was planning to take relief aid to some 20,000 people in the area.

In a statement faxed to IPS Friday, the little known rebel group, said it “forbids the UNHCR from going to Cibitoke for whatever reasons”.

“If the UNHCR decides to turn a deaf ear … the FNA (the National Liberation Force, the armed wing of the group) will not accept responsibility for the consequences,” it warned.

PALIPEHUTU said its armed wing controlled 80 percent of the province bordering Zaire.

“It was a good idea that the UNHCR was moving into Cibitoke where no aid workers have ventured since the killing of the Red Cross officials,” said Ben Parker of the Integrated Regional Information Network (IRIN) of the UN Department of Humanitarian Affairs.

Parker, whose organisation monitors the political situation in the Great Lakes Region — Burundi, Rwanda, Tanzania, Zaire and Uganda — told IPS on Friday that any PALIPEHUTU statement should not be taken lightly.

“They have the ability to deliver whatever they want to do,” he said.

Created in 1980, PALIPEHUTU is the oldest of all the rebel groups operating in Burundi. It is the brainchild of Remy Gahutu, a Burundian Hutu opposition figure who was living in neighbouring Rwanda.

The rebel movement’s threat to keep aid agencies out of Cibitoke comes only one month after the Canadian Minister of International Cooperation, Pierre S. Pettigrew, appealed to Burundi’s rebels to refrain from denying access to humanitarian aid to the needy.

“The situation in the country has deteriorated markedly in the last few months making the need for humanitarian assistance even more urgent than previously … and it will be impossible to carry out such assistance if there is no respect for international humanitarian law and for human life,” he told participants at a Canadian-sponsored conference on Burundi in Geneva, Switzerland, last month.

The security situation in Cibitoke, a battle zone between rebels of the Hutu majority and the army, which is dominated by Tutsis, the minority group holding sway over the densely populated, but ethnically divided Central African state, seems to be getting out of control.

The UN World Food Programme (WFP) said 400 Burundian refugees, fleeing the fighting, arrived from Cibitoke into southwestern Cyangugu, Rwanda, on Wednesday.

“This recent influx brings the total amount of new arrivals to 3,800,” said an WFP report released this week.

According to the report, the WFP is also feeding another 1,750 Burundians in Bugarama camp in Cyangugu and in Kigeme camp in Gikongoro, all of whom arrived after the outbreak of civil unrest in Burundi in 1993.

The current disagreement between PALIPEHUTU and aid agencies erupted after Hitoshi Mise, head of the UNHCR in Burundi, announced that a U.N. aid convoy under military escort, would try to reach the displaced in Cibitoke next week.

He said the operation would be joined by the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the WFP.

It would have been the first outside assistance in Cibitoke since the Red Cross pulled out in June, after its three Swiss staff were killed in an ambush.

“Since late June, fighting has been heavy in Cibitoke,” Parker said.

The rebels have stepped up their hit-and-run guerrilla campaign as the government, army and opposition groups wrangle over a regional security plan to deploy African peacekeepers in Burundi, where ethnic clashes have reportedly claimed 150,000 lives in the past three years.

The plan, hammered out in the northern Tanzanian town of Arusha in June, has been rejected by hardliners on both sides of Burundi’s ethnic divide.

The National Council for the Defence of Democracy (CNDD), the main Hutu rebel group, as well as senior officers of Burundi’s Tutsi-dominated army, have warned that the intervention of foreign troops would trigger a full-scale war.

The delay in the deployment of the troops is likely to put at risk the lives of more than 300,000 displaced people across Burundi.

As to whether the UNHCR would negotiate with PALIPEHUTU to allow the delivery of relief aid to Cibitoke, Mutula said: “We are doing everything possible to see to it that food reaches the needy”.

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