Chris McGreal
BURUNDI’S Tutsi-dominated military regime was grappling with renewed Hutu rebel attacks on the capital this week as the country’s largest political party threw its support behind the insurgents in a struggle it compared to black South Africans’ fight against apartheid.
Within hours of the announcement the army said rebels had launched a fresh attack near the capital, Bujumbura, which was shaken by mortars and gunfire on Tuesday night. Fighting was also continuing in the north of the country where guerrillas are trying to cut access to Rwanda.
A United States military transport plane evacuated some embassy staff and other expatriates from Bujumbura on Wednesday, but American officials said the aircraft had been scheduled before the latest rebel assault. It was expected to be the last such flight for some time.
Exiled parliamentarians of the mainly Hutu Front for Democracy in Burundi (Frodebu) have come out publicly in support of the rebel cause saying that since the military overthrew civilian government in July, and banned political parties, there is no choice but to fight. A representative in Nairobi, Joseph Ntakirutimana, said they had given their backing to the National Council for the Defence of Democracy (CNDD), a splinter group from Frodebu launched after Tutsi soldiers murdered Burundi’s first elected and Hutu president three years ago.
”From now on we are together with the CNDD. We are going to reinforce them because we have the same enemy the Tutsi army,” Ntakirutimana said. ”We are fighting a minority system in Burundi similar to what the blacks were fighting in South Africa and it is important that we stand united, we wage the resistance.”
Other prominent Frodebu politicians are still sheltering at various foreign embassies in Bujumbura. They include Burundi’s deposed president, Sylvestre Ntibantunganya, who has been a not altogether welcome guest at the US ambassador’s residence.
Frodebu’s announcement came shortly before renewed rebel attacks around the capital. The army used helicopter gunships and mortars to battle rebels in fresh fighting a day after insurgents dropped mortars on Bujumbura and fired automatic rifles from surrounding hills. An army spokesman, Lieutenant Colonel Isaie Nibizi, said the latest clashes were on the eastern outskirts of the city which was ethnically cleansed of most Hutus by the military last year.
The CNDD said the attacks, the most serious on the capital since the coup, are a warning to the army that the rebels can descend from the hills at any time. Although the military tried to play down the significance of the attack by saying there were no deaths and no real damage, the rebels added to the psychological pressure on a city without electricity after rebels sabotaged power lines , and which is also suffering severe fuel shortages because of a regional economic blockade in protest at the coup.
Frodebu’s backing for the rebels is a blow to attempts by Burundi’s military leader, Major Pierre Boyoya, to isolate the insurgents and win the endorsement of prominent Hutu politicians by promising an ordered transition to a stable democracy and to impose greater discipline on an army heavily implicated in atrocities against Hutu civilians.
Frodebu won the presidency and the overwhelming majority of seats in Parliament in the 1993 elections, which much of the Hutu majority viewed as a liberation from Tutsi minority domination akin to the downfall of white rule in South Africa the following year. But after President Melchior Ndadaye’s assassination in 1993, Frodebu’s power was rapidly eroded by the army and Tutsi establishment.
The former Tanzanian president, Julius Nyerere, who has been mediating in Burundi’s crisis, this week held out the possibility sanctions might be relaxed if Buyoya began a serious dialogue with Hutu opponents, including the rebels.
Nyerere said the talks are more important than other demands by regional leaders for the restoration of constitutional rule, Parliament and political parties.
But Buyoya has so far stood by his insistence that there can be no negotiations until the rebels lay down their weapons.