The hills around town do not ring with gunfire anymore. Terrified civilians have stopped trudging down muddy paths seeking shelter. Areas that had been cut off for years because of fighting are finally opening up. And a cautious optimism seems to be spreading across the land.
“It looks like peace,” said Ama Hayyarimana, a father of eight. “But you never know.”
After 15 years of off-again-on-again civil war, the last of Burundi’s rebel groups has finally come to the negotiating table. A ceasefire signed late last month is still holding, and for the first time all the decision makers — including top rebel leaders who until recently had been demonized as terrorists and commanded troops from exile — are in the same place, here in the capital, Bujumbura.
PHOTO: AFP
COMBUSTIBLE MIX
Burundi, with a population of 8.7 million, is one of the smallest countries in Africa. The same combustible mix that exploded in neighboring Rwanda in 1994 exists in Burundi. Both countries are desperately poor, beautifully hilly and divided between Hutus and Tutsis. In both places, Hutus make up a vast majority of the population, while Tutsis hold much of the power and wealth. Resentment among Hutus had been bubbling for years, and in Burundi the spark was a 1993 coup by mostly Tutsi army officers who assassinated the country’s first Hutu president.
Burundi then cracked open into a violent free-for-all involving warring militias, rival politicians, criminal gangs and child soldiers. More than 200,000 people died.
“It was an inferno,” said Jean Marie Ngendahayo, an opposition member of Parliament.
He said the situation got so bad that mobs of children stoned people to death while their parents cheered them on.
The conflict soon morphed from Hutu against Tutsi to Hutu against Hutu. Peace deals in the early 2000s brought most of the Hutu rebel groups into the government fold — except for one, the National Liberation Forces. In 2005, Burundi held a landmark election, with Burundians choosing a Hutu-led government. Still, the National Liberation Forces fought on.
“We were fighting to end discrimination,” said Agathon Rwasa, the group’s leader. “Even with the new government, ethnic troubles are still a problem.”
Rwasa said that the government was corrupt and incompetent and that it had stunted development in Burundi, which remains one of the poorest nations on the planet.
RETURN OF RWASA
Last month, Rwasa returned to Bujumbura after nearly two decades in exile and fighting in the bush. In the past two weeks, rebel leaders have been meeting with Burundian government negotiators to put together a durable peace. The first step was last month’s ceasefire. The next will be getting the thousands of rebel fighters — the rebels say that they have 15,000, but the government says the number is closer to 3,000 — to disarm or to be integrated into the national army. Many rebels are teenage boys who seem confused about what they are actually fighting for.
“We are fighting the government army so we can join them,” said one young rebel soldier named Clapton, who had an AK-47 assault rifle slung over his shoulder and a steak knife tucked into his belt.
Clapton and his baby-faced, beret-wearing comrades are the beneficiaries of a new rebel feeding program, in which a German aid agency is providing beans, oil, rice and salt to rebel fighters who agree to participate in the peace process.
While the sacks of food were being unloaded, government troops in blue uniforms mingled with rebel fighters wearing a hodgepodge of camouflage.
“This has always been a complex war, a war between brothers,” said Lieutenant Colonel Adolphe Manirakiza, a spokesman for the Burundian army, referring to the fact that government and rebel leaders had been allies during the guerrilla fighting of the 1990s.
Russia and Ukraine have exchanged prisoners of war in the latest such swap that saw the release of hundreds of captives and was brokered with the help of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), officials said on Monday. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said that 189 Ukrainian prisoners, including military personnel, border guards and national guards — along with two civilians — were freed. He thanked the UAE for helping negotiate the exchange. The Russian Ministry of Defense said that 150 Russian troops were freed from captivity as part of the exchange in which each side released 150 people. The reason for the discrepancy in numbers
A shark attack off Egypt’s Red Sea coast killed a tourist and injured another, authorities said on Sunday, with an Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs source identifying both as Italian nationals. “Two foreigners were attacked by a shark in the northern Marsa Alam area, which led to the injury of one and the death of the other,” the Egyptian Ministry of Environment said in a statement. A source at the Italian foreign ministry said that the man killed was a 48-year-old resident of Rome. The injured man was 69 years old. They were both taken to hospital in Port Ghalib, about 50km north
BLOODSHED: North Koreans take extreme measures to avoid being taken prisoner and sometimes execute their own forces, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Saturday said that Russian and North Korean forces sustained heavy losses in fighting in Russia’s southern Kursk region. Ukrainian and Western assessments say that about 11,000 North Korean troops are deployed in the Kursk region, where Ukrainian forces occupy swathes of territory after staging a mass cross-border incursion in August last year. In his nightly video address, Zelenskiy quoted a report from Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi as saying that the battles had taken place near the village of Makhnovka, not far from the Ukrainian border. “In battles yesterday and today near just one village, Makhnovka,
The foreign ministers of Germany, France and Poland on Tuesday expressed concern about “the political crisis” in Georgia, two days after Mikheil Kavelashvili was formally inaugurated as president of the South Caucasus nation, cementing the ruling party’s grip in what the opposition calls a blow to the country’s EU aspirations and a victory for former imperial ruler Russia. “We strongly condemn last week’s violence against peaceful protesters, media and opposition leaders, and recall Georgian authorities’ responsibility to respect human rights and protect fundamental freedoms, including the freedom to assembly and media freedom,” the three ministers wrote in a joint statement. In reaction
RSS