BURUNDI: United Nations Gives Mixed Reaction to Buyoya Coup

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Jul 31 1996 (IPS) - Who is Pierre Buyoya, the Burundi Army major who last week, for the second time in nine years, assumed power in a coup?

According to a recent headline in The New York Times, he is an “Authoritarian Democrat.” The U.S. government has condemned his seizure of power and closure of a fragile coalition government last week, but also depicts him as a moderate in Burundi’s tense ethnic climate. U.N. member states are similarly divided over how strongly to criticise the former president and current coup leader.

For many U.N. diplomats, Buyoya poses a problem: although they object to the Army’s seizure of power, they prefer the moderate former president to more hardline Tutsi Army leaders, or to the possibility of increasing chaos.

A coalition between the Hutu-led Burundi Democratic Front (Frodebu) and Tutsi-led Union for National Progress (Uprona) held power until last week’s coup. But the coalition seemed increasingly unable to calm tensions amid ethnic fighting that has claimed some 50,000 lives since 1993.

U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali typifies the mixed message from the United Nations. Last Thursday, as the coup was unfolding, he warned the Burundian Army that any seizure of power was unacceptable and would only worsen Burundi’s problems.

But he also had some kind words for Buyoya. “I know Buyoya very well,” he said at a luncheon hours after the coup. The major, he noted, had recently hosted a U.N.-sponsored workshop to further understanding between the country’s Hutu majority and Tutsi minority. “But what he will do now, I don’t know,” Boutros- Ghali added.

The United States is similarly at odds. On the one hand, U.S. State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns has said Washington will “work to isolate any government that emerges in Bujumbura by extra-constitutional means.”

But Buyoya is clearly a favourite of U.S. leaders, who have praised him for transferring power democratically in 1993 after six years in office.

The major’s private foundation to foster Hutu-Tusti understanding has received at least 145,000 dollars in funds from the U.S. Agency for International Development, and Buyoya recently visited the United States as a guest of former President Jimmy Carter.

Adrien Sibomana, who served as Buyoya’s prime minister until 1993, told IPS by phone that the coup leader’s intentions should be trusted.

“There is no doubt that Buyoya is a man of peace and that he will bring Burundi back to a situation where people will be able to get along,” Sibomana contended. “People need to understand him and understand the situation that brought him there.”

The former prime minister and Tutsi parliamentarian argued that Buyoya would keep his word to restore democracy once the current tensions between the Tutsi armed forces and Hutu rebel groups settled down.

But some U.N. diplomats doubt such claims. “It does not matter if they have found someone they think is acceptable,” said Legwaila J. Legwaila, Botswana’s ambassador. “The legitimate government is the one that we recognise. The coup and its results are unacceptable.”

Mixed emotions over Buyoya are leading to some confusion at the United Nations over whether to aid Burundi by sending foreign troops — a move which many leaders in Burundi’s Tutsi-led Army oppose.

Sibomana told IPS that any intervention force “could in fact make the situation worse.” He urged the United Nations to understand the Burundi leadership’s fears about outside intervention.

Those fears helped to spark the coup after Hutu President Sylvestre Ntibantunganya and Tutsi Prime Minister Antoine Nduwayo both tentatively agreed to allow a regional force, comprising soldiers from Uganda, Tanzania and Ethiopia. Buyoya has since closed the Parliament, and Ntibantunganya remains ensconced at the U.S. Embassy, fearing his safety.

Despite Sibomana’s claims that the capital, Bujumbura, is calm, many Hutu deputies for the lead coalition partner Frodebu are also in hiding, at the U.S., French, Belgian and German embassies. The former prime minister, a member of Uprona, denied that the Hutus had reason to fear for their lives. “They have received assurances from the state for their security,” Sibomana said.

Mixed emotions over Buyoya may also be preventing the release of a long-awaited U.N. report that examines the 1993 assassination of President Melchior Ndadaye, who defeated Buyoya in elections earlier that year.

The 15 countries represented at the U.N. Security Council can read the report, but only in the Council’s private chambers. Unlike most reports, the Council is refusing to release its findings on the Ndadaye assassination.

The report’s suppression has fueled speculation that Buyoya, or other coup leaders, are named as plotters in the failed October 1993 attempt by some Tutsi Army officers to overthrow Ndadaye, the country’s first elected Hutu leader.

“In view of last week’s developments, it is again clear that impunity for past crimes begets more violence,” the U.S. Committee for Refugees said in a statement this week. “U.N. human rights workers should publish their report, and should explicitly cite the names of government officials, politicians, and military personnel culpable in the 1993 bloodshed.”

Sibomana dismissed rumours that Buyoya or his top aides could be named in the U.N. report. “There are always rumours, and rumours can be used as political weapons,” he said.