Burundi’s new President, Pierre Nkurunziza, was sworn in Bujumbura on Friday as the country’s first elected leader after 12 years of war at a ceremony attended by several other African heads of state.
The 40 year-old Hutu ex-rebel leader took oath of office for a five-year period under the terms of the country’s power-sharing Constitution endorsed in February.
”I pledge to fight all ideology and acts of genocide and exclusion, to promote and defend the right of individual and collective freedom of the citizen,” swore Nkurunziza.
The swearing-in also marked the end of an extended four-year transitional period that ushered in democratic rule in a country struggling from the devastation of a civil war that has claimed the lives of 300 000 people.
Nkurunziza called on the National Liberation Front (FNL) rebels, who have continued with deadly raids against civilians and army positions, to resume talks with the new government immediately.
”We cannot forget that the FNL have not laid down arms,” he said. ”We ask them to immediately return to the negotiating table for their good and the good of Burundians.”
All of Burundi’s former seven rebels have taken part in the country’s marathon elections that begun on June 3, with the exception of the FNL.
Outgoing president Domitien Ndayizeye handed over the country’s flag and the baton of the army commander in a symbolic gesture of power transfer before the national anthem was played to usher in Burundi’s new leader.
Nkurunziza congratulated leaders and other foreign dignitaries who attended the ceremony, which also fully opens the way for a new power-sharing balance between the traditionally dominant Tutsis, who make up about 15% of the population, and the Hutu majority.
Foreign leaders, including South Africa’s President Thabo Mbeki, Kenya’s Mwai Kibaki, Tanzania’s Benjamin Mkapa, Mozambique’s Armando Guebuza, Rwanda’s Paul Kagame and Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, attended Nkurunziza’s swearing in.
About 30 foreign dignitaries, including United States Under-Secretary for African Affairs Donal Yamamoto, Belgium’s Foreign Minister Karel de Gucht and European Union commissioner for development Louis Michel, were in attendance.
The event also marks the official end of the political transition process started four years ago after the signature of a peace deal in Arusha in Tanzania in 2000.
That process drew in all the country’s political parties and then it took time and efforts, particularly by South African mediators, to integrate virtually all rebel forces into the deal.
The one-time sports instructor elected to the Presidency last week by Parliament has acknowledged the difficulties he faces and placed reconciliation, reconstruction and security at the top of his agenda.
Six small radical Tutsi groups have challenged the election of Nkurunziza, accusing him of leading an organisation guilty of genocide and saying he was condemned to death in 1996 for laying anti-tank mines that took the lives of several civilians.
On Wednesday, the FNL wounded several people in an attack on the market in Gitaza, about 30km south of Bujumbura, that sent others fleeing for their lives, officials said.
The army said it had bolstered patrols in Bujumbura Rural province where the attack took place and elsewhere to prevent any disruption to Friday’s ceremonies.
The conflict erupted in 1993 after the country’s first democratically elected president, a member of the Hutu majority, was assassinated by members of the Tutsi-dominated military. — Sapa-AFP