Scattered violence at and near polling stations, including a deadly grenade attack and the shooting of a South African peacekeeper working for the United Nations, threatened to mar key local elections in war-ravaged Burundi on Friday.
The attacks in and around the capital, where the country’s last remaining Hutu rebel group is active, come as Burundians are choosing municipal councillors in the country’s first vote for elected officials since war erupted in 1993.
Most of the violence appeared to be centered in the capital, the adjacent province of Bujumbura Rural and the neighbouring privince of Bubanza, according to Burundian security officials and the United Nations.
In Bujumbura Rural, one person was killed and another wounded in a grenade blast near a polling station while the UN peacekeeper, a South African, was shot and wounded when gunmen fired into another voting site, they said.
The injured soldier, whose wounds are not life-threatening, is being treated in a Bujumbura hospital and was one about about 5 000 UN peacekeepers helping Burundi’s army and police oversee the elections.
In the northern part of the capital, a grenade explosion wounded three people while gunfire in Bubanza province caused no casualties but prevented at least 14 polling stations from opening as scheduled, officials said.
”It is clear there is someone who wants to disrupt elections in Bujumbura Rural and Bubanza,” said army spokesperson Adolphe Maniarakiza.
”These are clearly shots meant to intimidate.”
”They are sporadic shootings intended to intimidate people from going to vote,” said Edouard Nibigira, the commissioner of Burundi’s internal security police. ”It is not a question of a generalised violence.”
The FNL, which signed a tentative truce with the government last month, has pledged not to disrupt the vote unless attacked but has been blamed for several raids since the ceasefire was agreed.
Neither the police nor the army could say immediately who is responsible for the violence but blamed it on people intending to disrupt the vote, a sentiment shared by the United Nations Operation in Burundi (Onub) which urged Burundians to cast their ballots despite the attacks.
”We regret the incidents that are happening in Bujumbura Rural, but we call on the people to go out and vote massively regardless of acts of intimidation,” said Onub spokesperson Penangnini Toure.
He noted that voting was proceeding peacefully elswhere and, despite the security breaches, many of Burundi’s 3,4-million registered voters jostled to cast ballots in most of the 129 constituencies.
”I came because I want to live peacefully,” said one young woman in Bujumbura, a university student who gave her name as Clarisse.
”We should be led by the people we have chosen.”
Friday’s election of 3 225 municipal councillors is the first in a complex series of polls aimed at replacing the current transitional government, created as the result of a five-year-old regionally backed peace process.
It is the country’s first exercise in democracy since the overwhelming approval in a February referendum of a power-sharing Constitution aimed at ending the rifts between the Hutu majority and Tutsi minority which exploded into civil war in 1993 that has claimed about 300 000 lives.
Because of the referendum, Tutsis, Burundi’s traditional powerbrokers, are widely expected to lose the political dominance they have held since independence from Belgium in 1962 despite accounting for only 14% of the population.
Most analysts and observers are convinced that Tutsi parties will be largely marginalised in races for local leadership that will be key to who eventually controls the national government.
Despite the presence of candidates from 31 political parties, including six former Hutu rebel groups, and 19 independents — the election is seen as a contest between transitional President Domitien Ndayizeye’s Front for Democracy in Burundi (Frodebu) and its chief rival, the ex-rebel Forces for the Defence of Democracy (FDD).
The winners of Friday’s elections will choose members of the Senate on July 29, who, along with members of the National Assembly elected in July 4 legislative polls, will select a new president on August 19.
Friday’s election is expected to indicate which Hutu party — Frodebu and the FDD — will have the advantage in choosing the next president.
Polling stations are to close at 6pm (4pm GMT) and initial results are expected to start coming in Saturday. – Sapa-AFP