HUMAN RIGHTS-TANZANIA: Beefed-up Police Presence In Refugee Camps

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru

NAIROBI, Feb 18 1998 (IPS) - The number of Tanzanian police in refugee camps in the west of their country, which host mainly Burundians, is to be beefed up, according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

Announcing the increase, High Commissioner Sadako Ogata, said the measure was being taken so as to maintain the “civilian character” of those camps. “There have been a lot of allegations from Burundi that the camps in Tanzania are being used for military and political purposes,” said Ogata.

She told a press conference here on Tuesday that some 500 police officers would be drafted to maintain order in the camps, which host 260,000 refugees, mostly from Burundi’s conflict. “We shall train, provide logistics and stipends to the police,” she said.

The number of police officers stationed by Tanzania in the camps was not immediately available.

Pearce Gerety, who is the UNHCR director of Operations for the Great Lakes Region, said the UN refugee agency has been supporting Tanzanian police for some time. “I think what we are doing now is reinforcing that idea,” he said.

“We don’t want any military activities in the camps. We don’t want camps to become a hotbed for opposition,” said Gerety.

Late last year the Burundi and Tanzania armies exchanged fire across their common borders, resulting in the death of many people, mostly civilians. Burundi’s strongman Major Pierre Buyoya, a Tutsi, had charged that Tanzania was training and arming Hutu elements among the refugees to invade the tiny Central African country.

During a meeting with Ogata last week, President Benjamin Mkapa of Tanzania denied Burundi’s allegations that its camps were used as military training centres for rebels from Burundi’s Hutu majority.

The tiff between the two countries led Bujumbura to reject Tanzania’s mediation role in Burundi’s conflict. Buyoya said former Tanzanian president, Julius Nyerere, was supporting the views of the Hutu rebels and was therefore not fit to mediate.

Responding to a tirade of similar accusations that have come since then from Bujumbura, Nyerere told journalists in the northern Tanzanian town of Arusha on Jan 23 that the problem in Burundi was “not Tanzania or Nyerere but Buyoya”.

“If he (Buyoya) doesn’t want to come to Tanzania, I am prepared to travel up to the moon and meet with him there,” he said.

Burundi has been in turmoil since 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 150,000 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 refugees camps in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Tanzania.

Emphasising the need to separate genuine refugees from fighters, Ogata said the UNHCR would like to maintain the “civilian character” of the refugees camps.

Ogata arrived here on Feb 16 to consult with Kenyan President Daniel arap Moi. Nairobi was on the fifth stop of a nine-nation African tour that also took to Tanzania, Burundi and Rwanda. On Feb 17, she flew to Uganda, from where she would proceed to the DRC, the Republic of Congo and Ethiopia.

“In my consultations with the African leaders, I have requested them to support UNHCR efforts to obtain a recomitment to refugee protection principles while carefully considering their concerns,” she said here.

Ogata described the idea of policing the refugee camps in Tanzania as building bridges. “I think this is a good start,” she said. “It will build confidence between Burundi and Tanzania.”