POLITICS-BURUNDI: Split in Rebel Movement

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Jean Baptiste Kayigamba

KIGALI, May 13 1998 (IPS) - A split in Burundi’s main armed opposition group, the CNDD, came as no surprise as the armed Hutu guerilla movement had been undermined by serious internal squables.

As if not enough, the National Council for the Defence of Democracy (CNDD) has further been weakened by military clashes between it and the Burundi’s oldest rebel movement, Palipehutu (Party for the Liberation of the Hutu People) in the past three months.

Fierce fighting has been reported between the two groups in Cibitoke and Buyanza provinces.

The rift within the rebel group surfaced late last week when a group of top CNDD officials announced that they had toppled their chairman, Leonard Nyangoma, a founding member of the Council.

“We have decided to expel Nyangoma and to replace him by Col. Jean Bosco Ndayikengurukiye to head both the CNDD military and political wings,” CNDD spokesman Jerome Ndiho told reporters in Brussels last week.

Nyangoma has been accused of corruption and dictatorship for unilateraly sacking “a number of top CNDD members in November 1997.”

Nyangoma, a former Minister of Health, served under the short- lived administration of the late President Melchior Ndadaye, a Hutu, who was assassinated by renegade Tutsi soldiers in October 1993.

Nyangoma himself narrowly escaped death and fled to neighbouring Rwanda where he immediately began urging Burundi’s Hutus — who make up about 80 percent of the country’s 6.8 million people — to resist the putchists. To show his seriousness, he formed the CNDD to fight a regime that was put in place in the wake of the 1993 violence.

Nyangoma’s shortcomings, in the eyes of his oponents, include “misdirecting” the struggle. His colleague, Innocent Nimpagaritse, who is CNDD’s representative in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, alleged that Nyangoma wanted to turn the CNDD into “a private movement.”

Ndiho announced that the movement would soon convene a meeting to replace Nyangoma and appoint new leaders.

A split has also been reported in the Front for Democracy in Burundi (FRODEBU), a political opposition group, most of whose members still operate inside the war-torn country.

Led by the Speaker of the Assembly, Leonce Ngendakumana, FRODEBU officials in Burundi have shown willingness to co-operate with the regime of Major Pierre Buyoya. But a radical wing in exile, led by Jean Minani, advocates armed struggle.

“In all these scuffles, it is President Buyoya who will emerge as the main winner,” an African diplomat here told IPS. “The only impediment to his success is the economic strangulation of his country by neighbours.”

Neighbours imposed sanctions against Burundi a week after Buyoya, a Tutsi who was president from 1987 to 1993, seized power in a bloodless putsch on July 25, 1996, deposing Sylvestre Ntibantunganya, a Hutu.

The sanctions were imposed by regional leaders of Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Cameroon, Zambia and Ethiopia to force Buyoya to return Burundi to civilian rule.

The quarrels within the CNDD may be bad news for the mediator in the Burundi conflict, former Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere who, after a period of lethargy, planned to revive the talks in the northern Tanzanian resort town of Arusha in mid- June.

Political pundits here say the split in the CNDD and last week’s visit by the UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to the capital Bujumbura are a blessing to Buyoya’s regime.

Another piece of good news for the Burundi government is the acknowledgement by Tanzanian President Benjamin Mkapa that Buyoya was making some progress towards a negotiated peaceful settlement in Burundi.

Mkapa, whose country played the leading role in imposing and enforcing the embargo, said last week that the time had come to reassess it.

All in all, excited politicians in Bujumbura seem to be enjoying CNDD’s fragmentation even though, despite their apparent elation, they claim indifference. “The government has no comments about the quarrels,” the Minister of Communications, Pierre Claver Ndayicariye, told IPS in a telephone interview from Bujumbura this week.

More than 200,000 people have died in Burundi since the current conflict erupted in 1993, according to aid agencies operating in the tiny central African country.