Renewed fighting between rebels and government forces in Burundi erupted in the capital Bujumbura yesterday, leaving streets littered with bodies and doubts about a peace process intended to end almost 10 years of civil war.
Up to 200 people are thought to have died in the past six days as rebels armed with mortars, rocket-propelled grenades and rifles pushed deep into the central African city in one of their biggest recent offensives.
The Tutsi-dominated army claimed on Saturday to have repelled the mainly Hutu attackers with the help of helicopter gunships, but explosions and gunfire rocked the north and east and reporters counted 28 bodies in one neighbourhood alone. Many of the dead were teenagers dressed in civilian clothes, some clutching grenades. They were assumed to be members of the National Forces of Liberation, known by the French initials FNL.
Witnesses said the bodies of two senior rebel commanders, Colonel Raphael Barankitse and Major Giovanni Kwizera, were among those found in a rural part of Gikoto district.
”I can hear the rebels singing gospel songs near my house and bullets flying everywhere,” said a western aid worker.
By late afternoon the fighting had subsided, but a rebel representative, Pasteur Habimana, said they would continue until the government was ousted: ”We will attack again when the time comes.”
The FNL is estimated to have thrown three battalions, numbering about 2 100 fighters, into the week-long offensive. Dozens of civilians and up to 30 government soldiers are thought to have died, but most of the casualties appeared to be among the rebels.
”Our leaders told us that God had revealed to them that we would be successful with this attack and we would not retreat,” said one young rebel.
The army chief of staff, General Germain Niyoyanakana, said it was the biggest attack the rebels had ever carried out on Bujumbura.
”We are controlling the situation very well,” he said. ”If we look at the losses we inflicted on the rebels, we think that they will stay quiet for a while.”
But many residents spent a sixth night in makeshift camps in the city centre rather than risk returning home amid rumours that rebels were killing civilians.
Wedged between Congo, Rwanda and Tanzania, Burundi is a tiny country with a complicated conflict. Some 200 000 people have died since the civil war flared, and the fighting goes on despite recent peace deals.
Tutsis are a small minority but they control the army and senior government positions and are accused of lording it over the Hutus, who took up arms after Tutsi paratroopers assassinated a democratically elected Hutu leader in 1993.
But the conflict is not a straightforward ethnic clash, since the ruling elite includes Hutus, and some rebel groups are backed by Tutsi factions. Competition for money and power is considered just as important as ethnic differences.
South African-brokered talks, chaired initially by Nelson Mandela, succeeded in creating a power-sharing agreement: the Tutsi president, Pierre Buyoya, stepped aside in April for a Hutu, Domitien Ndayizeye, for the transition to multi-party rule. Hopes were high that this could lead to peace since the main rebel group, Forces for the Defence of Democracy (FDD), had signed a ceasefire with the government last December and there was pressure on the FNL to follow suit.
The key to ending the conflict is control of the army. The Tutsis want to keep command as insurance against the sort of genocide that took place in Rwanda in 1994. However, the rebels want the army to reflect Burundi’s ethnic balance.
Perceptions that the Tutsis are refusing to relinquish control of the military, and that they are still the power behind President Ndayizeye’s throne, have prompted the FDD to disregard the ceasefire it signed and to continue fighting. The rival FNL is a smaller force but has been more active. – Guardian Unlimited Â