Sanctions against Burundi are falling away, writes Gregory Mthembu-Salter
Sanctions imposed by East African countries against Burundi in the wake of the military coup in July 1996 are nearing their end. Of the six original participants, Kenya, Ethiopia and Zambia abandoned sanctions months ago and the Rwandan government believes their usefulness is over, leaving only Uganda and Tanzania with a semblance of a political commitment.
Former Tanzanian president Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, who facilitates Burundian inter-party talks in Arusha, Tanzania, last month reluctantly announced that he will recommend to regional leaders that they suspend sanctions.
Meanwhile, embargo violations are so systematic that most goods are actually cheaper in Burundi in terms of the United States dollar than in either Rwanda or eastern Congo, and are not much more expensive than in Kenya or Tanzania, both of which have sea ports.
The sanctions main economic effect has been the devaluation of the Burundi franc, which has crippled the buying power of most Burundians, already battered by years of civil war and stagnant wage levels.
Subsistence farmers, who make up the majority of the population, are less affected than town dwellers, but still struggle to afford the rising cost of health care and education.
Until June this year, international and national political opinion was divided on the embargo’s political effect.
The predominantly Hutu Frodebu party, which ruled from 1993 until the coup that put Pierre Buyoya in power, initially supported sanctions.
Frodebu said they were the only way to force Burundi’s mainly Tutsi army to restore constitutional order and go back to the negotiating table.
For its part, the Buyoya regime has now restored constitutional order and restarted talks, all along insisting that it would have done so anyway, but has made no significant concessions in Arusha, claiming that Tanzania is biased and the sanctions prove it.
The government has also claimed that Burundi’s Hutu militia, engaged in a vicious civil war with the army, is secretly backed by Tanzania. The Tanzanians deny the charge and claim merely to be applying pressure to restore constitutional rule.
Western governments have never liked the sanctions, but having earlier endorsed Nyerere’s mediation role and called for “African solutions to African problems” felt unable to speak out against them.
What changed in June was that senior Frodebuists inside Burundi struck a deal with Buyoya.
In return for key government posts and a commitment from Buyoya to address their key concerns, they agreed to recognise him as president. Since then Frodebu Foreign Minister Severin Ntahomvukiye has toured the world appealing for an end to sanctions so that the peace process can be revitalised by economic improvement.
The Tanzanian government has been caught out by this turn of events, and has argued that the government’s Frodebuists are cowards being used by the Tutsi military to fool the outside world, and that nothing inside Burundi has really changed.
However, this view simply does not gel with most observers’ experiences of the Frodebu politicians in question, who are clear-headed, realistic and anything but cowardly and naive.
International donors paying for the Nyerere foundation to host the Arusha talks, while reserving judgment on Tanzania’s intentions towards Burundi, recently sharply stepped up the pressure on Nyerere to recommend the lifting of sanctions.
Nyerere, who apparently still favours the embargo, has concluded that he has no choice but to yield to it. He has correctly judged that failure to do so would only make his position as Arusha facilitator untenable, granting Buyoya the propaganda victory of having Nyerere, who is believed to covet the Nobel peace prize, cast as the villain of the piece.
Will lifting sanctions help bring peace? The Tanzanian government says it will not. It claims that if sanctions are lifted, the Burundian government will not negotiate seriously at Arusha, and that it may take drastic measures, like expulsion, to solve its Burundian refugee problem.
But, in fact, the Burundian government is not negotiating seriously at Arusha anyway, partly because the real Hutu militia leaders it wants to talk to are not present, having split from their Nyerere-recognised official representatives some months ago, and vowing to fight on until accorded recognition in Arusha.
Meanwhile, the internal partnership between Frodebu and Buyoya is going reasonably well, and would probably be boosted by the end of sanctions.
Frodebu is gambling that the military will keep its promises, eventually presenting Frodebu supporters with a tangible alternative to the militias’ endless civil war, while Buyoya hopes that Frodebu will continue to tolerate the pace of change being very slow indeed.
Such hopes and gambles are currently plausible and provide grounds for cautious optimism. But there is always the risk of derailment. Rebel militias intend provoking an army massacre of civilians. To provide provocation, the militias will keep killing and have indeed already started, with a series of attacks reported on camps for the displaced in early December. So we can expect yet another bloody Christmas in Burundi.