Burundi police shot and killed an insurgent during a clash with a splinter faction of the country’s last active rebel group in the west of the tiny Central Africa nation, officials said on Wednesday.
In the first such attack since the government signed a truce with the main faction of the National Liberation Forces (FNL) this month, police shot dead the man late on Tuesday in a skirmish with the group’s dissident wing.
Interior Minister Evariste Ndayishimiye said that in addition to the death, the police had disarmed dozens of rebels loyal to Jean-Bosco Sindayigaya, who broke away from the group’s hard-line leader Agathon Rwasa last year.
”A group of [Sindayigaya’s] FNL attacked people at Giko in Bubanza province,” he said. ”Police intervened and an FNL fighter was killed as he prepared to throw a grenade at the security forces.”
”The other about 60 who were with him were disarmed without much resistance,” Ndayishimiye added.
Sindayigaya broke ranks with the main FNL group in November, citing differences with Rwasa and favouring peace talks with the government, and announced a unilateral ceasefire.
Since then, however, the group has not entered peace talks with the government while Rwasa’s faction changed course and earlier this month inked a ceasefire at tempestuous South African-mediated negotiations in Tanzania.
That deal is a step toward forging a final settlement and which calls for Rwasa’s rebel faction to gather at a camps to eventually disarm or be integrated into the army.
The September 7 accord has yet to be fully implemented because a joint verification and follow-up commission, comprising representatives of Bujumbura, the FNL, the African Union and the United Nations, has not been created.
Still, Rwasa’s forces are gathering at the camps and about 800 of Sindayigaya’s men have attempted to join them, but have been rebuffed by the government, which says they are not parties to the ceasefire.
Burundi is emerging from the devastation of a 13-year ethnically driven civil war that began with the assassination of the country’s first election president, a member of the Hutu majority, by elements in the then minority-Tutsi dominated military.
The conflict has claimed about 300 000 lives and the FNL is the only one of seven Hutu rebel groups not to have signed on a 2000 peace process that last year saw the election of a new power-sharing government headed by a Hutu ex-guerrilla chief. — Sapa-AFP