Within range of rebel guns, Nelson Mandela presided over the inauguration of a new Burundian president yesterday, in his latest effort to end an ethnically based civil war which has been threatening a second genocide in central Africa for almost a decade.
The ceremony saw power pass from a member of Burundi’s powerful Tutsi minority, which has ruled for most of the past four decades, to President Domitien Ndayizeye, a Hutu.
Meanwhile, Hutu rebels held fire from their positions in the hills above Bujumbura, the capital of Burundi on Lake Tanganyika. But, with the rebels refusing to recognise Ndayizeye as their champion, and fighting intensifying throughout the country, the prospects for peace appeared little improved.
”This change is purely cosmetic,” said Peter Nkurunziza, the leader of the main rebel group, the Force for the Defence of Democracy (FDD), by phone from a fund-raising drive in Gabon. ”How do you expect us to give up 10 years of effort for nothing?”
In a brief and uncharacteristically sombre speech, Mandela acknowledged that yesterday’s transition had not delivered peace. ”We have not nearly reached the end of that road,” he said.
Ndayizeye’s accession to power follows the terms of a peace accord between Burundi’s main Hutu and Tutsi political parties, brokered by Mr Mandela three years ago. Three out of four Hutu rebel groups signed up to it, but the FDD, which views Ndayizeye as the stooge of Burundi’s Tutsi-dominated army, did not.
Two weeks ago, the FDD fired more than 100 rockets into Bujumbura, killing at least six civilians. Nkurunziza warned yesterday that its next attacks would be ”catastrophic”.
Ethnic conflict between Hutus and Tutsis over the last decade has claimed 300 000 lives, or 5% of Burundi’s population. In neighbouring Rwanda, a hard-line Hutu regime slaughtered around 800 000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in the genocide of 1994. Now, with the FDD effectively excluded from the peace process and rapidly rearming, some analysts are warning that the danger of a genocide in Burundi is increasing.
”If the rebels launch a total assault [the Tutsi elite] would be completely cut off from Rwanda and Tanzania,” said a leading western analyst, based in Bujumbura. ”This is the plan, it is a genocidal agenda.”
Others disagree, countering that Burundi’s army and the rebels are too closely matched, and the two tribes too internally divided to try exterminating each other.
”Considering the balance of power, I really doubt there could be a general massacre,” said Fabien Hara of the International Crisis Group, a thinktank focused on the region. ”The positions of the different parties are political, not ethnic.”
Time of fear
But no analyst disputes that unless the FDD can be brought into Mandela’s power-sharing plan, yesterday’s inauguration will be meaningless.
”Burundians see this transition as a time of fear, not a time of hope,” said Alison Des Forges of Human Rights Watch. ”Civilians still have no faith that they won’t become the targets of unpredictable violence, either from the government or the rebels.”
In Ruyigi, a small town 100 miles east of Bujumbura, there was little rejoicing early this week. In January, the army murdered more than 80 Hutu civilians and burned 420 huts nearby, according to Human Rights Watch. Now, FDD fighters are targeting Tutsi peasants and shelling the town by night.
Marie Bugusu (40) was among several hundred, mostly Tutsi, villagers trudging into Ruyigi at dusk, herding her four goats. Three weeks ago, the FDD attacked her village of Ruhuago, stealing her two cows, and raping her 13-year-old neighbour. ”There’s nobody there now, everyone’s too scared,” she said, heading for the mudhut room she shares with 30 other fugitives.
Next came 30-year-old Earnest Izoza, silently carrying his bed on his head. He was fed up with sleeping on the ground every night, he said, so he was bringing it from his village of Gesenyi five miles away. ”Nobody sleeps at home,” he said.
Genocide or no, Ruyigi’s beggarly people are dying fast, says the only western aid agency which has not yet pulled out. ”The population has been pushed around like a billiard ball for so many years. Imagine it, people sleeping outside just so they don’t get raped,” said Helen Rymshaw of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). ”This is creating serious health problems which we’re struggling to deal with.” MSF says about 200,000 people living outside Ruyigi have no access to basic medical care.
According to the UN World Food Programme, which feeds 36 000 malnourished Burundian children, around half of Burundi is now considered too dangerous for aid agencies to enter.
Sylvestre Ntibantunganya, one of Burundi’s three former, and all short-lived, Hutu presidents, might be expected to dismiss Ndayizeye’s prospects out-of-hand. He was installed by the army in 1994, before being forced to take refuge in the American embassy.
But he said yesterday: ”There are many Tutsis today who realise the country will remain ungovernable so long as Hutus are excluded from power. The question is whether the ruling class will heed that opinion.”
30 years of civil war
1972 Massacres of Hutu intellectuals by ruling Tutsis claim up to 250 000 lives, and see 150,000 Hutus flee into neighbouring Tanzania
1987 Major Paul Buyoya leads the last in a series of coups, and introduces political reform, leading to introduction of multipartyism
1992 Melchior Ndadaye wins first democratic elections and becomes first Hutu head of state
1993 Ndadaye assassinated after 100 days in power, leading to popular massacres of Tutsis and army reprisals claiming tens of thousands of lives. Up to one million Hutus flee into neighbouring Tanzania and Zaire
1996 The UN special rapporteur for human rights describes the continued massacres by each side as ”a genocide by attrition”. Buyoya seizes power from Sylvestre Ntibantunganya, a puppet Hutu president
2000 19 Burundian political parties sign a peace agreement in Arusha, Tanzania, under pressure from Nelson Mandela and Bill Clinton.
2003 Under the terms of the Arusha accord, Buyoya cedes power to a Hutu, Domitien Ndayizeye. The only rebel group now refusing to recognise the new pesident is the biggest, the Force for the Defence of Democracy. – Guardian Unlimited Â