Burundians had bigger things to think about this week than their peace
broker Jacob Zuma getting the sack.
With parliamentary elections less than three weeks away, Burundians are preoccupied with herding the last rebel group still at arms into the peace fold.
They are also dealing with the human rights implications of maintaining good relations with their tough Rwandan neighbour.
Nevertheless a spokesperson for the interim government praised Zuma’s ”crucial role” in the peace process that ended 12 years of civil war.
”We pay homage to Mr Zuma for his crucial role in the Burundi peace process, for his availability and the way he understood all the actors in this conflict,” said Burundi’s government spokesperson, Onésime Nduwimana.
”The peace process is today sufficiently advanced for Mr Zuma’s departure not to cause any problem.”
When history judges Zuma’s work, it will have to be kind about his three-year role as facilitator in Burundi’s labyrinthine negotiations, which ended both a 13-year civil war that claimed 300 000 lives and the decades of domination by the Tutsi minority.
Zuma took the mediation baton in 2002 from Nelson Mandela. He inherited a transitional arrangement — the so-called Arusha agreement — which took 18 months to launch.
Zuma’s response drew heavily on his high-pressure Convention for a Democratic South Africa negotiation experience. He got what protagonists he could to the table and kept them there until they signed something. Those who refused to attend were branded spoilers and, worse, terrorists.
This strong-arm stuff brought the largest guerrilla group, the Forces for the Defence of Democracy, led by Pierre Nkurunziza, into the process — probably Zuma’s major achievement as facilitator. But it made him the mortal enemy of
the oldest Hutu liberation movement, the Forces of National Liberation, led
by the wily, youthful Agathon Rwasa.
Interim President Domitien Ndayizeye and Rwasa were back in Dar es Salaam this week. Under Tanzanian facilitation, they tried unsuccessfully for six days to put some substance to the truce agreed to with a handshake at their first meeting in May. But that ceasefire didn’t even last 48 hours.
The rebels had been told by their Tanzanian hosts that they would be discussing government violations of the ceasefire. Ndayizeye, on the other hand, believed he was there to sign a permanent truce.
So FNL attacks on government troops continue in the hills around the capital, Bujumbura.
The situation is hardly conducive to peaceful elections on July 4.
Ndayizeye’s administration came under fire this week from the United States and human rights groups for returning refugees to Rwanda.
In Kigali, President Paul Kagame insisted that the refugees are in fact Hutu fugitives fleeing prosecution in Rwanda for the 1994 genocide of Tutsis.
The implication is clear: Rwanda is prepared to repeat what it did in the Democratic Republic of Congo and pursue what it regards as fugitives across the border.
Ndayizeye’s new Interior Minister, Jean-Marie Ngendahayo, says Rwanda is not at war and the refugees face no danger back home.
In Washington, a State Department spokesperson said the United States ”deplores the involuntary return of 10 000 Rwandan asylum-seekers from Burundi”, in violation of both the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention and the 1969 Organisation of African Unity Convention on Refugees, to which Rwanda and Burundi are signatories.
The US called on both governments ”to halt immediately their efforts to forcibly return asylum seekers and to uphold their commitments under international law regarding the basic right to seek asylum and protection in neighbouring states. Rwandan asylum seekers still in Burundi should be moved from the border to secure locations within Burundi.
”No asylum seeker in either country who can demonstrate a well-founded fear of persecution should be returned against his or her will.”