South African troops preparing to police the peace process in Burundi have been warned by the largest rebel group in that country that they will be seen as the enemy.
Pierre Nkurunziza of the Forces for the Defence of Democracy (FDD) said at the end of February he had not been asked about the deployment of South African, Mozambican and Ethiopian troops to supervise the ceasefire he signed with President Pierre Buyoya on December 2. If these forces arrived without consulting him, they would be regarded as ‘peace disrupters”.
Nkurunziza, who this week suspended talks with Buyoya, charging bad faith by the Tutsi president, has also threatened the 37 African Union ceasefire monitors who arrived in Bujumbura at the end of February.
‘If something happens to them, we should not be blamed. We make no commitments for their safety,†he said of the troops from Burkina Faso, Mali, Togo and Tunisia.
South Africa already has 700 soldiers in Bujumbura protecting political figures in Burundi’s transitional government.
Nkurunziza and Buyoya last met in Pretoria on February 15 to put political flesh on the bones of the ceasefire they signed in December.
At the end of that round, Deputy President Jacob Zuma, who is facilitating the Burundi peace process, reported ‘substantial progress”.
Zuma’s confident assertion cannot disguise the reality of Burundi coming apart.
The deputy president has not responded to Nkurunziza’s threat.
He is going to Dar es Salaam on Saturday where he expects to see both Nkurunziza and Buyoya.
‘Fragmenting” is how Jan van Eck of the Centre for International Political Studies at the University of Pretoria characterises the Burundi situation.
The former African National Congress MP, who has spent the past eight years studying the conflict in this divided country of 6,2-million, says: ‘The very survival of the peace process is at stake. In the eight years that I have been going to Burundi, I have not seen it as fractured and factionalised,” says van Eck.
‘More than 100 000 people are being displaced internally every month. People are just moving from hill-top to hill-top.”
Observers say thousands of armed FDD fighters are roaming the countryside in search of food. The rebels have been forced to do this because hungry and jealous government forces blocked the food supplies being sent to the designated rebel containment areas.
The food and other comforts were going to the rebel fighters as a dividend for their finally joining the peace process signed in Arusha 15 months ago. Zuma is credited with getting the FDD aboard as well as two breakaway rebel groups. However the smaller, but effective National Liberation Forces remain at large, regularly attacking the capital.
Their leader, Agaton Rwasa, has declared the current peace process
a failure and will have nothing to do with it. Van Eck maintains the Arusha process, launched by former president Nelson Mandela, ‘can no longer claim to be representing a genuine national consensus among Burundians.
‘On the contrary, it has in fact become one of the major sources of dispute and contention.”
It was agreed at Arusha that Buyoya would hand over the presidency to Hutu Vice-President Domitien Ndayizeye after 18 months. That deadline looms on May 1 without Buyoya having attained the ceasefire and other goals set for him.
Burundians, van Eck believes, ‘are heading towards the critical date of May 1 with totally different, contradictory and conflictual agendas.
‘Despite the peace process they have not achieved the minimum degree of trust and consensus about the way forward which was so badly needed.
‘May 1 hovers like a dark cloud over the Burundian political landscape,” he says. ‘If not managed calmly and in a spirit of what is in the interest of Burundi as a whole, this date will result in further unraveling of the whole process — and worse.”