BURUNDI-POLITICS: Travelling By Road Still Risky

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru

BUJUMBURA, Oct 9 1996 (IPS) - His speech is blurred, after an enemy bullet ripped off flesh on the right side of his mouth, and an artificial limb now replaces his right arm.

Still, Commander Bigirumwami Deo of the Burundian army is one of the lucky ones. He has just returned from Brussels, Belgium where he had a major operation.

“I was shot in the right arm and across the arm in an ambush last year. I lost 20 teeth and an arm,” Deo, who is in his mid- 30s told IPS this week.

Deo is one of thousands of Burundi’s 6.6 million people who have been maimed by escalating ethnic strife in the Central African state.

Violence erupted in October 1993 after renegade soldiers killed the first elected president, Melchior Ndadaye. The ensuing conflict between ethnic Tutsis who dominate the army and Hutu rebels has left more than 150,000 people dead, mostly non- combatants in the past three years.

Presidential spokesman Jean Luc Ndizeye told IPS this week that security in the country has improved since President Sylvestre Ntibantuganya was overthrown by Major Pierre Buyoya two months ago.

“We no longer hear of 100 or 200 or 300 people killed as we used to do before the change,” he said.

But travelling throughout the country is still risky.

Just last week 40 aid workers refused to return to their stations by road and stayed in Bujumbura until the U.N. World Food Programme (WFP) plane returned from a routine service in South Africa.

“It’s risky to venture one kilometre out of Bujumbura,” a Burundian UN employee here said. He noted that prior to the crisis, Burundians attended weddings and parties around the country. “They don’t do that any more,” he said.

The army provides escorts to and from the capital and within other destinations in this tiny country which comprises only 27, 834 square kilometres.

Most people however would rather travel in convoys to minimise the chances of being ambushed.

In September, government troops found the charred remains of Catholic Archbishop Joachim Ruhuna who was murdered when the vehicle in which he was travelling was ambushed by unknown gunmen.

Both the army and rebels denied killing the spiritual leader of 80 percent of Burundi’s population. He was buried a week later in Gitega, Central Burundi.

Sources here said the outspoken prelate, known for his criticism of growing violence in the country, had declined offers of a military escort.

Foreign journalists travelling into the country to report on the situation also have noted the hazards of moving by road and complained to the committee monitoring the sanctions on Burundi.

African leaders from Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia, Zaire, Tanzania, Cameroon and Rwanda imposed sanctions on Burundi on Jul. 31 to force Buyoya to return the country to civilian rule.

They cut air, road and water links with the landlocked Central African country only allowing humanitarian aid to get to Burundi. Last week they added foreign journalists to the list. Before the exemption, journalists used the only route available via Rwanda and by road to and from Bujumbura.

The committee monitoring the sanctions on Burundi took the decision to exempt foreign journalists after Nicholas Kotch, chairman of the Foreign Correspondents Association of East Africa, complained about the risks taken by journalists when travelling by road to Bujumbura.

“Ambushes and attacks on the main roads from the Rwandan border to Bujumbura are frequent,” Kotch said in a letter to the committee chairman, Mirisho Sarakikya of Tanzania.

“Last year one foreign journalist was killed and another badly injured in an ambush…Journalists are not able to enter Burundi from Zaire because the border is closed,” he added.

Foreign journalists, according to the new arrangement, will no longer charter aircraft from Nairobi, Kenya and Kigali, Rwanda to Bujumbura and back. They will use the existing facility provided by UN relief planes.

A 15-minute flight from the Rwandan border to the capital city revealed the magnitude of the destruction caused by the war in the rural areas.

“Those roofless houses over there were destroyed by the so- called rebels,” said the pilot. “Their owners have fled and are now in displaced camps around Burundi living on handouts like beggars.”

According to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), 70 percent of the more than 400,000 displaced persons roaming the countryside as the crsis unfolds are women and children.

“Some of the rebels hide here in this Kibira (the forest along the Rwandan, Zairean and Burundian borders, believed to be a haven for rebels),” he added.

Defiantly flying over the Kibira forest, he scoffed at the rebels’ recent threat to shoot down any plane flying into Bujumbura without their permission: “That’s an empty threat. They don’t have the capacity to bring down planes from the air.”