MIKE CRAWLEY, Bujumbura | Tuesday
TREES and thick bushes sprout up from the layer of rubble that carpets Burundi’s former presidential palace, a ruined shell amid hotels and office buildings in the centre of the lakeside capital.
This is the spot where Burundi’s deadly civil war was triggered in 1993 when ethnic Tutsi soldiers stormed the palace and assassinated elected president Melchior Ndadaye, a Hutu.
The palace grounds are now the main base for a new peacekeeping mission by 701 South African troops.
Soldiers clean their weapons and clear the overgrown brush against a backdrop of camouflaged tents and the palace’s bombed-out walls.
Their mission is far less classic peacekeeping – when troops wearing United Nations blue helmets help maintain a ceasefire between two warring factions – than a bodyguard operation.
They are protecting Hutu political leaders who have returned from exile to participate in Burundi’s government of national unity – sworn in last week – but who don’t feel safe around the Tutsi-dominated military.
Burundi’s peace talks facilitator, former South African president Nelson Mandela, brokered the arrangement, which began a week ago when the first South African troops arrived. So far, just four politicians have asked for protection, making the European Union-funded operation arguably the most elaborate bodyguard arrangement in the world.
It’s believed that more politicians will ask to be guarded, says the South African Protection Support Detachment’s deputy commander, Colonel Laurens Smith.
In an interview, Smith stressed that the unit is made up not only of VIP protectors, but also support elements such as headquarters staff, engineers and medical crew.
An airborne unit and an infantry battalion are on hand to keep the protectors safe themselves.
”If things go wrong, we will be able to protect ourselves,” says Smith, a pipe-smoking veteran of 26 years in the military, including stints in Angola and Namibia.
Much evidence points to the hardline elements within the Burundian military as the most likely source of trouble for the South Africans. The minority Tutsis have controlled Burundi’s government for all but a few months since its independence and extremist Tutsis are refusing to recognize the transitional government in which the two ethnicities are sharing power. Twice in the past seven months, army factions attempted coups against President Pierre Buyoya as he negotiated the deal.
Asked about the potential threat, Smith takes a lengthy pause, then says, ”The Burundian army is an instrument of the government. What would they gain by something like that?”
The South Africans are scheduled to be here for one year.
The arrangement envisions that they will train a mixed Hutu-Tutsi force to take over their protection duties, as a pilot project toward integrating the entire military, which some observers see as the toughest challenge to making peace in Burundi.
”There’s a lot of work to be done on reform of the army,” says Francois Grignon, Burundi analyst with the International Crisis Group. ”We have not reached a stage where everybody is ready to have this reform of the army taking place.”
Given what has happened since the end of apartheid, it’s believed the Burundian military can learn something from the South Africans about integration.
”The first thing is a commitment to make it work,” says Smith.
”The second thing is professionalism.”
But he says it would be naive to claim South Africa’s integration took place without a hiccup, adding: ”It’s a challenge to integrate former enemies into one force.”
South Africa’s military has experienced both triumph and disaster outside its border within the past three years.
While the soldiers were lauded for their role in helping to save flood victims in Mozambique last year, their incursion into Lesotho to avert the fall of its unstable government was met with fierce resistance.
While some extremists here have denounced the troops’ arrival as an invasion, ordinary Burundians simply appear to be curious about the force and open to tentative interactions in halting English.
Like most visitors here, South African soldiers can be seen changing dollars on the street, for 20% more than Burundi’s low official exchange rate. They carry pocket-sized books that translate useful words into French, like numbers, directions and such essential phrases as: ”Stop or I will shoot!”
Back at the palace-turned-camp, a corporal cleaning his weapon says: ”We met one guy who said he was happy to meet South Africans. He had never seen any before except on TV.”
Around him, fellow soldiers have cleaned the rubbish from the palace’s kidney-shaped swimming pool to help create a source of water for showers.
They’ve also put up a sheet-metal wall between their tents and the corner of the palace grounds containing the graves of assassinated president Ndadaye and those who died with him in the 1993 attack. Some soldiers believe in ghosts, explained a captain. – Sapa
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