BURUNDI-POLITICS: Repentant Junta Arrests Killer Troops

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru

NAIROBI, Oct 29 1996 (IPS) - The next time the Sunday market in one of Burundi’s many villages reopens, some of the people who visited it two weeks ago will not be among the vendors and buyers there.

On Oct. 13, about 112 people were picked up by soldiers while returning from the market and taken for interrogation. The villagers — men, women and children — belonged to Burundi’s largest ethnic group, the Hutus, who make up 80 percent of the country’s estimated six million people.

They were arrested in the south-western village of Matana and, days later, dozens of them were executed by the Tutsi-controlled army, which had accused them of aiding Hutu rebels.

But unlike many other army massacres perpetrated in Burundi, this one was not followed by a chorus of denials from military officials. The news of their execution was announced by the army this week in the capital, Bujumbura.

Army spokesman Lt-Col. Isaie Nibizi said the soldiers involved in the killings had been arrested. “It is a nasty case. They killed these people,” he said.

Some reports said they did it to avenge the murder by Hutu guerillas of more than 20 Tutsis in a neighbouring village on October 11.

The arrest of the soldiers is one sign that the country’s strongman, Major Pierre Buyoya, may be working hard to keep his promise of reinjecting discipline into the long-unaccountable army — from whose ranks the murderers of Melchior Ndadaye, Burundi’s first elected Hutu president, came.

Buyoya, a former head of state between 1987 and 1993, seized power on July 25, pledging to restore law and order in the strife- torn Central African country. Immediately after assuming office, he sacked Burundi’s army chief-of-staff and the head of gendarmerie, as part of his programme to rein in the military.

“I think the security situation in Burundi has improved since Buyoya came to power in July. You don’t hear people killed here and there now and then as it used to be in the past,” presidential spokesman, Jean-Luc Ndizeye, told IPS in Burundi earlier this month.

Ndizeye’s views were supported a Zairean living in Bujumbura who told IPS that gunshots fired by unknown persons used to be heard in the city everyday. “Sometimes, you see bodies lying in a pool of blood in the streets of Bujumbura. All that has stopped since the new government came to power on July 25,” he said.

A Hutu member of parliament told IPS about two weeks ago that members of his community never used to hang out after sunset when former president Sylvestre Ntibantunganya, himself a Hutu, was in power.

“It was dangerous for us to be out late. But now we can stay out until curfew time (10 pm to 6 am),” he said.

But while there is relative calm in Bujumbura, the countryside is still unsafe as the Oct. 13 massacre and reported attacks against Tutsis by Hutu rebels show.

The National Council for the Defence of Democracy (CNDD), a mostly Hutu rebel group, maintains that the Burundi army has continued to kill innocent people, although it has said little about attacks by its armed wing, the Forces for the Defence of Democracy (FDD) against unarmed Tutsis.

“They kill civilians, and burn and destroy houses as they like,” said CNDD representative in Kenya, Innocent Nimpagariste.

The failed coup of October 1993, in which Ndadaye was killed, marked the descent of Burundi into profound chaos that preceded Buyoya’s return to power.

Aid agencies estimated earlier this year that around 1,000 Burundians — mostly non-combatants, were dying monthly in violence between the army and the rebels.

CNDD, led by former interior minister Leonard Nyangoma, is demanding that the ethnic balance in the army be restructured to include more Hutus, who make up just 35 percent of the military and few of the senior officers.

To reduce the ethnic tension in the country, Lt-Col. Gedeon Karibwami, the commander of Burundi’s Military Training School, announced recently that all school leavers would have to undergo a two-month civic education course in an army barrack.

The first batch, transported in four buses, began their training on October 7. “The students are from all ethnic groups — the Hutu, Tutsi and Twa,” Karibwami told IPS in mid-October. “The idea is to forge harmonious relations among Burundi’s youth.”

However, killings such as the latest massacre could reduce that effort to naught.