RWANDA/BURUNDI: Rebels Resort to New Tactics to Scare Opponents

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru

NAIROBI, Jan 8 1998 (IPS) - Rebels seeking to topple the Tutsi- dominated governments in Rwanda and Burundi appear to be resorting to new tactics to scare their opponents.

In Rwanda, a group calling itself the Rwandan Liberation Front (RLF), has distributed leaflets threatening to chop people into pieces.

“All those who try to fight us will be beheaded. No one will be spared,” read the leaflet left by the rebels following an attack on Nyabikenke, a town in western Rwanda, this week.

Soon after the incident, a military spokesman told Radio Rwanda in the capital Kigali that 14 people were killed by the rebels — said to be Hutus — using automatic guns, grenades, machetes and small hoes. A local administrator was the only one among the 14 killed who was beheaded.

The incident in Nyabikenke was followed by a pre-dawn attack in nearby Nyakabanda where 52 people, some of them badly mutilated, were slaughtered on Tuesday.

A regional political analyst says he fears that similar tactics of beheading will spread to Burundi, a tiny neighbouring nation, with a similar ethnic composition and crisis as Rwanda.

Although Tutsis form a minority in both Rwanda and Burundi, they wield enormous political and military power, a “domination” which is being challenged by the Hutus who make up about 85 percent of the population in both countries.

The analyst, who refused to be named, told IPS on Thursday that the rebels in Rwanda, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) were coordinating their military activities against their perceived enemies in the region.

His claims were backed by a top Burundian official who said the Hutu rebels in Burundi, backed by the defeated ex-Zairean army and the notorious Interahamwe militias accused of killing up to a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus in Rwanda in 1994, were behind the attacks in the two army posts near the capital Bujumbura in the past one week.

“But we have uprooted them and are chasing them. They are now fleeing towards the Rwandan and the DRC borders,” said Colonel Bosco Daradangwe, in charge of Security in Burundi.

He told IPS by telephone from Bujumbura on Thursday that the government of Major Pierre Buyoya was now rushing in food and medicines to alleviate the plight of the victims of the rebel attack.

“Everything is under control now,” he said. “And, residents of Bujumbura should not fear, because this city is well protected.”

Condemning the rebel attack, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Sadako Ogata, Thursday said the violence would have major implications for hundreds of thousands of returnees and refugees.

The attack in Maramvya village in Bujumbura province on Tuesday caused around 8,000 civilians to flee. They included around 3,000 survivors of last week’s massacre at the nearby village of Rukaramu, which left more than 150 people dead.

“These attacks are aimed at destabilizing areas where thousands of people have returned and are trying to restart their lives,” Ogata said. “UNHCR is deeply concerned about the implications for some 170,000 returnees it assists in Burundi and the 200,000 Burundi refugees it cares for abroad. The current cycle of violence severely jeopardizes returnees’ security and the refugees’ ability to return.”

She said in a statement on Thursday that innocent civilians were clearly the targets. “As in the attacks on Congolese refugees in Rwanda, most of the victims are women and children who are being chased further and further from their homes,” she said.

Ogata was referring to the death of over 1,500 Congolese refugees killed by rebels in Rwanda in December.

Adding his voice to the cycle of violence in his country, Seth Sendashonga of the exiled opposition Resistance Forces for Democracy (RFD) told IPS on Thursday that he had only read about the alleged RLF’s threat to behead victims in newspapers.

“I have not seen any copy of these leaflets,” he said. “But I must make it abundantly clear that I am, personally, oppose to that kind of tactics.”

He said the Rwandan army was capable of committing similar atrocities and distributing such leaflets to attract sympathy from the international community.

“Human rights groups have pointed out that the RPF (the Rwandese Patriotic Front) have been responsible for most of the killings in Rwanda after the overthrow of the regime of the late President Juvenal Habyarimana in 1994,” he said.

Sendashonga, a minister of interior in the RPF government between 1994 and 1995, said the killings by the army were forcing “innocent peasants” to join the rebellion, as they did during Habyarimana’s period.

“History is repeating itself. And I’m afraid that it’s going to be a cycle of winners and losers. In the process, the whole society will be the loser,” he said.

“Already we are losing resources, manpower and infrastructure,” said Sendashonga.