Scattered violence forced the early closure of more than 250 polling stations in Burundi on Friday, threatening to mar local elections critical to the country’s peace process after more than a decade of civil war.
The attacks, including grenade blasts and the shooting of a United Nations peacekeeper, left one dead and several wounded and came as Burundians chose municipal councillors in the country’s first vote for elected officials since the ethnically driven war erupted in 1993.
The violence caused 260 of about 6 000 polling stations to close at midday, by which time an estimated 40% to 45% of Burundi’s 3,4-million registered voters had cast ballots, the UN said.
However, Burundian and UN officials stressed the violence was limited to areas in and around the capital, where the country’s last remaining Hutu rebel group is active, and that polling in much of the country was peaceful.
Carolyn McAskie, chief of the UN mission in Burundi (Onub), which has about 5 000 peacekeepers assisting the country’s security forces in providing security for the polls, commended voters on a ”good turnout”.
Most attacks occurred in the capital, where three people were wounded in a grenade attack; the adjacent province of Bujumbura Rural, where a grenade killed one person and injured another and a South African UN peacekeeper was shot and wounded; and the neighbouring province of Bubanza, officials said.
”It is clear there is someone who wants to disrupt elections in Bujumbura Rural and Bubanza,” army spokesperson Adolphe Maniarakiza said. ”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.”
Neither the police nor the army could say immediately who was responsible for the violence, but blamed it on people intending to disrupt the election, a sentiment shared by Onub, which urged Burundians to vote despite the attacks.
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.”
Complex series of polls
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 a 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 on July 29 choose members of the Senate, who, along with members of the National Assembly elected in July 4 legislative polls, will select a new president on August 19.
Hence, Friday’s election is expected to indicate which Hutu party — Frodebu or the FDD — will have the advantage in choosing the next president.
Polling stations are to close at 6pm local time and initial results are expected to start coming in Saturday. — Sapa-AFP