BURUNDI-POLITICS: Kenyan Politician Calls for Lifting of Embargo

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru

NAIROBI, Nov 19 1996 (IPS) - The camera focuses on a patient lying in a hospital ward, then swings over to a doctor complaining about the shortage of medicine.

Next, come boys washing vehicles grounded by the shortage of gasolene, keeping them clean for the day when fuel will start flowing into the country again. Then the screen is dominated by hundreds of thousands of people, displaced by the ethnic violence in their country.

More than an hour long, the video ends with Burundi’s junta leader, Major Pierre Buyoya, being interviewed by Kenyan opposition leader Raila Odinga, who visited the Central African state between Nov. 8 and Nov. 12 on a fact-finding mission.

Odinga, leader of the Forum for the Restoration of Democracy in Kenya (FORD-Kenya), showed the video to journalists at the end of a press conference here on Tuesday to support his call for an end to the embargo against Burundi.

He was the first African political leader to travel to Burundi since East and Central African heads imposed sanctions on the country on July 31, six days after Buyoya — a member of the minority Tutsi ethnic group — deposed then president Sylvestre Ntibantunganya, who come from Burundi’s Hutu majority.

“Everybody has forgotten Burundi. Everybody is concentrating on Zaire, while Burundi is being strangled by the blockade. By the time the world realises it may be too late for Burundi. It will be a catastrophe,” Buyoya said in the video.

He said his government would step down as soon as a four- point programme it had set out to implement was accomplished.

Odinga, who met the Burundian leader twice during his visit, explained that “the programme … comprises the restoration of the authority of state, dialogue with all armed factions, internal national debate and economic recovery.”

It “is estimated to last a maximum of three years but Major Buyoya is willing to quit even within 18 months should the objectives be achieved earlier,” Odinga said.

However, Buyoya complained in the interview that efforts to bring peace to Burundi were being undermined by the blockade: “Sanctions are killing peace. And to kill peace means to kill the region.”

Landlocked Burundi imports all its fuel. It also relies on coffee and tea exports that pass through Tanzanian and Kenyan Indian Ocean ports for 90 percent of its export earnings. Prime Minister Pascal Firmin Ndimira said last month that the embargo had cost Burundi some 162 million dollars.

Odinga, who calls himself a “Friend of Burundi”, confirmed that the embargo had halted inter-state trade and communication: “Hundreds of trucks, trailers and lorries packed with goods to Burundi are trapped at the Tanzania/Burundi border. Petrol, salt, sugar and paraffin prices are now five times higher than before the sanctions.”

He said there were no medicines at the University Hospital at Kamenge, on the outskirts of Bujumbura.

“Patients were lying in agony. Shelves of St. Luke’s Pharmacy in Bujumbura were empty. Businessmen, market women, customers all complained of either lack of business or high prices of consumer goods,” he added. “The worst experience was at the intensive care unit of the University Hospital where patients were dying due to lack of supplies.”

According to Odinga, by refusing to lift sanctions, regional leaders are pushing Burundi towards genocide of the type that left up to one million people dead in Rwanda in 1994.

“The danger of explosion and ethnic conflagration is real and the situation is not helped by taking partisan positions in the conflict,” Odinga cautioned. “It would be tragic if, as a result of inconsiderate external pressure, political control were to slide into the hands of extremists who would not hesitate to unleash terror and mayhem on their perceived enemies.”

He said an unstable and ethnically divided Burundi was a problem not just for Burundians, but the entire Great Lakes Region.

“Therefore the blockade imposed by the regional leaders should be lifted as a first step to resolving the conflict,” he recommended. “This should be followed by inter-parties negotiations leading to the formation of a government of national unity and reconciliation like in South Africa.”

Odinga appealed to regional leaders to give Buyoya a chance claiming that: “Major Buyoya, a moderate, needs understanding, support and assistance. His words at the time of take over, that his coup was different from other coups, that he did not want power but was helping to restore peace in Burundi, should be taken seriously by members of the international community.”

Odinga is the second legislator in Kenya to publicly challenge the embargo on Burundi. Farah Maalim, another opposition parliamentarian, warned in the independent ‘Daily Nation’ newspaper last week that any peace initiative that did not guarantee the security of Tutsis in the light of Rwanda’s genocide was bound to fail.

“No Tutsi will gamble away his life for a mere United Nations guarantee,” he said.

But Burundi’s opposition National Council for the Defence of Democracy (CNDD), a mostly Hutu-rebel group which is fighting the Tutsi-dominated army in Burundi, said it supported the sanctions as the only means to force the regime in Bujumbura to restore civilian rule in the country.

“The sanctions should be maintained until the junta gives up power,” a CNDD official who refused to be named, told IPS on Tuesday.