Burundi’s last active rebel group launched mortars at the capital Bujumbura in an attack hours after the country’s army claimed to have killed 41 insurgents in recent weeks, the military said on Friday.
The National Liberation Forces (FNL), the country’s lone remaining Hutu guerrilla army, fired three 60mm shells on Bujumbura’s eastern Mutanga and Mutanga south districts late on Thursday, without causing casualties, it said.
Army spokesperson Adolphe Manirakiza said the rebel shells were launched from hills in Bujumbura Rural province, which abuts the capital and is the FNL’s main zone of operation.
Hundreds of residents fled when the military responded to the shelling that Manirakiza said was an apparent attempt to remind authorities that the FNL was still a force to be reckoned with.
“We think the FNL wanted to show that they are still present, that they are still strong even though they are under pressure in Bujumbura Rural and Bubanza provinces,” he said.
On Thursday, the army said it had killed 41 rebels and captured 80 others since the start of the month in the two provinces in operations ordered after the FNL failed to meet an October 31 deadline to join peace talks.
The FNL is the only one of Burundi’s seven Hutu rebel groups to remain outside a 2000 peace process that brought a new power-sharing government to power in August and is aimed at bringing an end to a bloody 12-year civil war.
It has refused the legitimacy of President Pierre Nkurunziza, himself a former Hutu rebel leader, and has carried on fighting despite peace overtures and an apparent split in their leadership between hardliners and doves.
Burundi is struggling to recover from the ethnically-driven conflict that erupted in 1993 with the assassination of its first democratically-elected president, a Hutu, by members of the minority Tutsi-dominated military. – AFP