BURUNDI-POLITICS: Ex-Tanzanian Head Seeks to Revive Talks

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Paul Chintowa and Moyiga Nduru

DAR ES SALAAM/NAIROBI, Apr 6 1998 (IPS) - Burundi’s belligerents will meet sometime soon in the northern Tanzanian town of Arusha if former Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere succeeds in a bid to revive negotiations broken off eight months ago.

Nyerere is the internationally recognised mediator in the conflict between Burundi’s government and rebels from the country’s Hutu majority.

The talks collapsed in August 1997 after Burundi’s strongman Major Pierre Buyoya, a minority Tutsi, accused Nyerere of supporting the rebels’ views, something which he said should have automatically disqualified the ex-president as a mediator.

Last week, however, Nyerere, egged on by the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), sent a delegation, headed by Tanzanian envoy Felix Mosha, to Bujumbura to hold talks with Burundi officials and politicians.

“No announcement has been made here yet about the proposed conference in Arusha,” said a government official in the capital, Bujumbura, who told IPS by phone on Monday that Burundians were anxiously awaiting the outcome of the visit.

Buyoya, who seized power in a military coup in July 1996, preferred the venue of the talks to be changed to either Ethiopia, South Africa, Zimbabwe or Zambia.

Last week, the OAU secretary-general Salim Ahmed Salim told IPS in the Tanzanian capital, Dar es Salaam, that the resumption of the talks would depend on the outcome of the meeting between Nyerere’s envoy and the junta in Bujumbura.

Salim, whose organisation mandated Nyerere to try to end the fighting between Burundi’s military regime and the rebels, was in Dar es Salaam for consultations with Nyerere and Tanzanian President Benjamin Mkapa as part of the OAU’s efforts to solve the political instability in Burundi.

“We all believe that the peace process has been stalled largely because of the internal situation in Burundi,” Salim told IPS.

Burundi began slipping into chaos in October 1993, when renegade soldiers killed Melchior Ndadaye, the country’s first Hutu president, in an aborted coup three months after he was elected. Ndadaye had been perceived by Tutsi hardliners in the army as threatening their traditional grip on power. His death triggered mass killings and fighting between Hutus and the minority Tutsis.

Since then more than 200,000 people have been killed in Burundi, according to aid agencies operating in the Central African country. The killings have been blamed on the Tutsi-led army as well as armed Hutu groups infiltrating from refugee camps in Tanzania and from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

To reduce the tension, U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Sadako Ogata said in February that the “small” number of Tanzanian police in refugee camps in the west of the country, which host mainly Burundians, would be beefed up so as to maintain the “civilian character” of those camps.

She told a press conference in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, that some 500 police officers would be drafted to maintain order in the camps, which host 260,000 refugees. “We shall train, provide logistics and stipends to the police,” she said.

Late last year the Burundi and Tanzanian armies exchanged fire across their common borders, resulting in the death of a number of people, mostly civilians. Buyoya charged that Tanzania was training and arming Hutu elements among the refugees to invade Burundi, but Mkapa denied the allegations.

Burundi is also unhappy with Tanzania for getting its neighbours to impose economic sanctions against it in July 1996. Instead of lifting the embargo, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, DRC, Zambia, Ethiopia and Eritrea decided on Feb. 21 at a heads of state meeting in the Ugandan capital, Kampala, to maintain it until Buyoya restores civilian rule in Burundi.

Burundi’s foreign minister Luc Rukingama, who met Mosha on Apr. 3, urged neighbouring states to lift the embargo. “I told him (Mosha) that the people of Burundi want the sanctions lifted since their government has fulfilled most of the conditions demanded by the neighbours,” he told journalists shortly after the meeting.

Bujumbura has restored parliament and freedom of speech, and released former president Jean-Baptiste Bagaza and the speaker of the national assembly from detention.

In February, church leaders from Rwanda and Burundi also added their voice to the call to lift the sanctions which, they said, hurt the poor. Last month, the chairman of the Kenya National Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Kassim Owango, echoed similar sentiments, charging that the sanctions were harmful to regional economies. He said Kenya was losing Kshs 600 million (one US dollar is equal to 57.75 shillings) every month due to the sanctions.

But groups like the US-based Central Africa Action Network disagree. In a statement released on the eve of President Bill Clinton’s 12-day African tour of Ghana, Uganda, Rwanda, South Africa, Botswana and Senegal, the Network urged the U.S. government to impose arms sanctions against belligerents in Central Africa.

It said the embargo would be a meaningful strike against genocide in a region that has experienced far too much bloodshed. Up to one million people, mainly Tutsis and moderate Hutus in Rwanda, were slaughtered by hardline Hutu militias in 1994.

For many groups in the Central Africa Action Network, the arms boycott gives a chance for Washington to correct, partially, the US failure in the region.

One of them, Human Rights Watch, says the proposed arms-supply sanctions are an excellent chance for Clinton to show the U.S. is committed to preventing a recurrence of the 1994 tragedy.

Despite the recent clashes between rebels and government troops around Bujumbura, Salim appears optimistic. “If the commitment given by the Burundi government is confirmed, then the peace process under Nyerere could start,” he said. “We would like to have meaningful talks where all the stakeholders participate,” said Salim.

He said the OAU as well as Nyerere and the Great Lakes Region — Rwanda, the DRC, Tanzania, Uganda and Burundi — want the talks to continue in Arusha.