BURUNDI-POLITICS: African Leaders Inch Towards Lifting Sanctions

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru

NAIROBI, Aug 11 1997 (IPS) - The sanctions imposed on Burundi by East and Central African nations a year ago are being gradually relaxed.

Kenya, a key player in the region, has permitted Burundi to import a “limited amount” of petroleum products on humanitarian grounds.

It has also removed sanctions on air travel between the two countries. As a result, transporters, including the United Nations and aid agencies, no longer require clearance on flights from Kenyan authorities.

The move followed a similar decision by Tanzania on Jul. 17 to allow a Kenya-based commercial airline to fly the Nairobi- Bujumbura route.

Although belated, these moves are likely to please the authorities in the Burundian capital of Bujumbura. The officials there have argued that the embargo, imposed in the Northern Tanzanian town of Arusha in July last year, and which cut off sea, land and air links with Burundi, was hurting the poor more.

The embargo was imposed by Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Cameroon, Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire), six days after junta leader Major Pierre Buyoya — a member of the minority Tutsi ethnic group — deposed the country’s elected President Sylvestre Ntibantunganya, who is from Burundi’s Hutu majority.

This is the second time within a year that sanctions have been relaxed on the tiny Central African country. In April, a regional summit meeting in Nairobi took the first decision to ease sanctions on a wide range of goods like medicines, food products, items related to education, fertilisers and other agricultural inputs to alleviate hardships faced by Burundi’s estimated six million impoverished people.

Kenya’s recent decision to relax the embargo further followed a petition by Buyoya, according to Sheldon Muchilwa, Kenya’s Assistant Minister for Foreign Affairs, when he briefed legislators here on Aug. 8 (last week).

Also, Kenya, with enormous economic interests in the region, says it has been influenced by recent political changes in the Great Lakes Region of Africa, made up of Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

“It is the government’s view that the political situation in the Great Lakes Region has fundamentally changed and warrants a fresh examination of the sanctions issue,” Muchilwa was quoted as saying by Kenya’s largest-selling independent newspaper, the ‘Daily Nation’.

Landlocked Burundi is one of Kenya’s largest trading partners in the region. It imports all its fuel and also relies for 90 percent of its revenue on coffee and tea exports.

Tanzania’s Indian Ocean port of Dar es Salaam handles 80 percent of Burundi’s exports and Mombasa in Kenya, the remaining 20 percent.

Despite the apparent move towards lifting the sanctions, Tanzanian President Benjamin Mkapa insisted last Friday that the embargo had not failed. “Regional governments should persist and see to it that it works,” he told a joint press conference with his Ugandan counterpart Yoweri Museveni in the Ugandan capital, Kampala.

Former Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere, who has been mandated by African leaders to brocker the peace in Burundi, is scheduled to chair fresh talks between Burundi’s belligerents — the government and the National Council for the Defence of Democracy (CNDD) — in Arusha on Aug. 25.

In March, the Burundi government representatives and CNDD officials met in Rome, Italy, where they signed a secret agreement to secure a cease-fire. Major Buyoya told foreign journalists late last month that the purpose of the Rome talks, brokered by the Saint Egidio Community, was to provide a condusive atmosphere for future negotiations.

However, the proposed Arusha talks hinges precariously on the CNDD. The rebel movement has condemned last week’s execution by the Buyoya regime of six suspects, accused of taking part in ethnic massacres following the assassination of Burundi’s first elected president, Melchior Ndadaye, in October 1993.

Ndadaye, from the majority Hutu ethnic group, was perceived by Tutsi elements within the army as threatening their traditional grip on power. His death, only three-months into office, triggered mass killings across the country in which more than 150,000 died, according to aid agencies operating in that country.

The hangings have also been condemned by the Organisation of African Unity (OAU).

President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, who is the current OAU chairman, called on the authorities in Burundi to refrain from any such hangings, if peace is to return to the strife-torn country.

He said Burundi did not have a legally-constituted government and cannot therefore claim to have the legitimacy and a judicial system which is apolitical and impartial.

In a statement issued in the Zimbabwean capital of Harare last week, Mugabe said Major Buyoya had created a situation which did not augur well for the forthcoming all-party talks on the crisis facing his country.