AFRICA-POLITICS: Hands-on Experience in Conflict Prevention

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru

ARUSHA, Tanzania, Jan 22 1998 (IPS) - The list of countries serving as the raw material for lessons on conflict in Africa at a meeting this week in this north Tanzanian town was anything but short.

The some 100 experts from Africa and Europe looked at Somalia and Rwanda, scrutinised Congo and Ethiopia, and examined Sudan and Sierra Leone, just to name a few of the nations referred to at the Jan. 21-23 conference on conflict mediation in Africa, co- organised by the Mwalimu Julius Nyerere Foundation here.

In one case, though, the organisers have had to put their conflict prevention skills to the test — they have had to keep Burundi’s rival delegations apart, according to Leonce Ndarubagiye of the National Council for the Defence of Democracy (CNDD).

“A member of the government delegation came to provoke us and I reported the matter to the chair,” Ndarubagiye told IPS. “He was moved away from where we were sitting. In fact, we have been asked by the chair not to cause any problem at the conference.”

The CNDD, an armed group, is seeking to topple the government of Major Pierre Buyoya. Both are represented at the conference along with a third delegation sent by the Front for Democracy in Burundi (FRODEBU), the former ruling party replaced by Buyoya’s regime following a military coup in July 1996.

The CNDD is an offshoot of FRODEBU, whose former leader, late president Melchior Ndadaye, was assassinated by renegade soldiers from Burundi’s Tutsi minority in October 1993, three months after he became the first president from the country’s Hutu majority.

Although bitter rivals, both the CNDD and FRODEBU delegates at the Arusha conference rejected a statement made here on Wednesday by Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni in which he linked the war in their country to ethnic conflict between Hutus and Tutsis.

“This is a misrepresentation of facts,” charged Ndarubagiye, himself a Tutsi. “When you look at the three delegations here you find that all of them have Hutus and Tutsis among them.”

Thousands of people, both Tutsis — who form about 14 percent of Burundi’s 6.1 million people but wield military and political power – and Hutus have died in the insecurity that has followed Ndadaye’s assassination.

Appealing to the experts for help, Burundi’s Foreign Minister Luc Rukingama said sanctions imposed by Burundi’s neighbours following the 1996 coup were harming the country’s poor. “The rich are becoming richer and the poor poorer because they don’t have the purchasing power,” he said.

He added that the rate of vaccination had fallen from 70 percent before the sanctions to less than 40 percent at present, while primary-school enrolment, which used to be 80 percent, was now also less than 40.

“This shows that sanctions do not work. It is only undermining the peace process in the country,” said Rukingama, who urged the international community to put pressure on East and Central African nations to lift the embargo.

The on-going conflict in Burundi and those in other parts of the continent have served to illustrate one of the recurring themes at the meeting: the importance of diagnosis and prevention.

In this regard, Pascal Gayama, assistant secretary-general of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), urged the press, non- governmental organisations (NGOs) and civil society to resort to early warning systems to avoid crises like those in Burundi, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Rwanda, Angola and Sudan.

“It is the belief of the OAU that early warning signals remain the only alarm bells to prevent Africa from sliding into the abyss of genocide,” Gayama said.

“The whole world knows that the sad events that occurred in 1994 in Rwanda (in which up to a million people were slaughtered) could have been averted if military and intelligence reports on their emerging crisis were taken seriously,” he added. “Even now, the Great Lakes Region (Rwanda, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Tanzania and Uganda) remains very restive. There are rumblings elsewhere on the continent.

“In West Africa, in the Horn of Africa, from North Africa, there are potential and real threats to the real stability of the continent. Our preoccupation at the OAU remains to understand the root cause of these problems to deal with the future.

“Prevention is always better than cure.”