BURUNDI-ZAIRE: Ethnic Quagmire

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru

GATUMBA, Burundi, Oct 16 1996 (IPS) - There is little sign of activity at this once bustling border outpost except for the birds that fly over the Zairean and Burundian checkpoints as immigration and customs officers sit idly by.

Some sip tea. Others drink beer. None has anything to do. The Zairean authorities closed the border early this year to stop would-be refugees from crossing over into their country.

Gatumba proper is a sprawling commune about 25km west of the capital, Bujumbura, and about a kilometre from the outpost where Burundian soldiers carrying AK-47 rifles guard their side of the border.

From here, one can easily see blocks of houses spread along the foot of the imposing Mitumba mountains: Uvira. A few weeks ago, hardly anyone in the outside world knew of the town’s existence. Now the ethnic conflict that has been raging in and around it has earned it notoriety.

“The town is under the control of the Zairean army, while the Banyamulenge are in the mountains,” said a European aid worker in Bujumbura.

The Banyamulenge are ethnic Tutsis who arrived in eastern Zaire from present-day Rwanda and Burundi in successive migrations that started more than two centuries ago. The authorities in South Kivu, the province where Uvira is located, have denied them Zairean citizenship and around July began whipping up anti- Banyamulenge sentiments among other ethnic groups in the area.

Claims by the authorities there that armed Banyamulenge had received training from Rwanda’s Tutsi-led military were accompanied by arbitrary arrests and other atrocities against the community, according to reports from various human rights NGOs and other sources.

On Oct. 7, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Sadako Ogata, noted that “cross-border raids, the targeting of survivors of the (Rwandan) genocide and attacks on Tutsi residents in the Kivu region of Zaire, resulting in armed resistance, are causing more deaths…”

Things came to a head last week when South Kivu Deputy Governor Lwasi Ngabo Lwabangi gave the Banyamulenge seven days to come down from their mountains or face all-out war. “We will not accept to have two armies on Zairean territory,” he told journalists in the provincial capital, Bukavu.

Lwabangi said that Banyamulenge rebels had attacked the town of Lemera, midway between Bukavu and Uvira, on Oct. 6, killing patients and medical staff.

Aubin Mulaga, a doctor who worked at the institution and who escaped unharmed, told journalists the rebels “killed 28 patients in their beds, and four male nurses and two doctors.” He added that they attacked the hospital because it was treating Rwandan Hutus who were wounded while helping the Zairean army fight the Banyamulenge.

Two days after the attack, Zairean soldiers went on a rampage in Uvira, seizing cars belonging to Care International, a humanitarian NGO, and robbing its staff at gunpoint, according to Care’s Chris Anderson, who is based in Bujumbura.

Uvira was the second district in eastern Zaire to have been affected by ethnic unrest this year. A few months before, thousands of Banyarwanda, Zaireans of Tutsi origin, were forced to flee Masisi to the north for Rwanda and Uganda. They had been victims of pogroms carried out by armed Hutu refugees and people from other local ethnic groups, and in which the Zairean military reportedly participated.

While Zaire has accused Rwanda of training and arming the some 400,000 Banyamulenge as well as the Banyarwanda, the authorities in Kigali say that Zaire is supporting the 40,000-strong former Rwandan army (FAR) which was defeated by the Rwandese Patriotic Army in 1994.

The FAR, along with the Hutu militiamen who did much of the killing during Rwanda’s genocide, fled with their weapons to Zaire. Until now, they have not been disarmed and there have been reports that they have been receiving weapons, mainly from Eastern Europe, in their camps in Eastern Zaire.

Tension between Zaire and Rwanda reached boiling point late last month when Zairean troops in Bukavu exchanged fire with RPA soldiers across the border in Cyangugu.

Last week about 500 Banyamulenge refugees crossed over into Rwanda, but that country’s president, Pasteur Bizimungu, said Kigali would accept only women and children. “We will be persuading the Banyamulenge men who are in Rwanda to return to Zaire,” he said in Cyangugu. “Zaire needs to accept that the Banyamulenge are also Zaireans.

Unconfirmed reports here have it that Banyamulenge soldiers are deserting the Zairean army en masse to join their kinsfolk in the Mitumba Mountains.

“It does not seem that the conflict between the Zaire army and armed Banyamulenge groups will stop soon and it may lead to increased insecurity in Uvira town,” the World Food Programme (WFP) said in a report released here.

The WFP, in collaboration with the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is now assisting 568 Banyamulenge refugees in Burundi. Most of them fled towns and villages in the Ruzizi plain near Uvira, where they are in the minority. The bulk of their ethnic group live in the Mitumba Mountains.

In Bukavu, WFP’s Jemme Wahab said the fighting could cause hundreds of thousands of people to flee to Rwanda and Burundi.

Another WFP official, Jean-Luc Siblot, said in Bujumbura this week that “the possibility of large population movements to Burundi should not be discounted, even though it is thought that displaced Banyamulenge would more likely move further into the interior of Zaire.”