Bujumbura | Tuesday
More than 2 000 people fleeing attacks in northeast Burundi by Hutu rebels of the Forces for the Defence of Democracy (FDD) have sought refuge in Muyinga province, a local official said on Monday.
“The rebels attacked the camp for displaced people at Nganji, six kilometres from Muyinga, and then torched the dispensary and some offices, which led the displaced persons and several inhabitants of the zone to seek refuge in Muyinga,” Muyinga Province Governor Lazare Karekezi said.
“We have more than 2 000 refugees in the centre, a large majority of them women and children, but we are coping well from a humanitarian point of view,” Nearly 800 (Tutsis) came from the displaced persons’ regroupment camp in Nganji, where they have been living for their safety since 1993,” the governor said.
The remainder of the refugees were mainly Hutus who “fled their homes in the hills out of panic”.
Tutsis are the ethnic minority in Burundi, but long held the political power. Civil war broke out in 1993 after the first elected Hutu president, Melchior Ndadaye, was assassinated.
Earlier in the day, the same group of rebels was reported to have “set fire to a military truck, but there were no victims because the truck was broken down,” said the administrator of the Gasorwe commune, Leonard Waka.
“They also opened fire on a bus carrying passengers,” Waka said, adding there were no casualties in that attack either.
FDD rebels are blamed for the deaths on Saturday of three civilians, including a town administrator, killed when the rebels attacked Mutumba in the central province of Karuzi.
The group of rebels that carried out the attack in Mutumba was believed to be part of a larger rebel force which attacked and torched a market in the town of Bibara overnight on Saturday.
In the eastern province of Cankuzo, FDD rebels clashed early on Saturday with the Burundian army three kilometres from the Mutukura military camp, the biggest in the east of the country, a military source said.
Earlier, in the same province, another FDD rebel group attacked the town of Nyakibanda, in Kigamba commune, the same source reported.
No casualty figures were available for either attack.
On Friday evening, nine houses were reportedly set on fire and 17 homes ransacked by FDD rebels on Karehe hill in the Buhinyuza commune.
Rebels have stepped up attacks on civilians and kidnapped hundreds of youths since a transitional power-sharing government was sworn in on November 1 as part of a peace process.
Most of the youths have escaped, but the army says that the rebels are forcibly giving military training to those still in captivity.
The FDD and the National Liberation Forces have rejected a ceasefire and refused to sign a peace agreement reached in August 2000 by political parties.
Some 250 000 people, mostly civilians, have died since the Hutu rebel insurgency began in 1993. – AFP