Groundhog day in Burundi as Rwasa declares an end to his campaign of violence - again

Rwasa (r) promising to stop killing people in 2005

Rwasa (l) promising to stop killing people in 2006

Rwasa (c) promising to stop killing people in 2008

It happened in 2005, it happened again in 2006, and now we're back here for round three: the FNL leader Agathon Rwasa has declared his intention to stop killing people, and affirmed his commitment to peace, democracy etc. while the UN and the international media look on and applaud.

Strangely absent, as usual, from the media coverage of Rwasa's latest rebranding exercise, are the names of his many victims: - Pasteur Jacques Rutekereza, one of the 156 Congolese Tutsis murdered by a coalition of FNL, Mai-Mai and FDLR killers in the August 2004 Gatumba refugee camp massacre. Arthur Kabunda, Charlotte Wilson and Richard Ndereyimana, three of the 21 passengers who were massacred after the Titanic Express bus was ambushed close to Bujumbura in December 2000. The thousands of others killed in other bus ambushes around Bujumbura between 1993 and 2005. And the hundreds - if not thousands - of Hutu residents living under the paranoid tyranny of FNL control in Bujumbura Rurale, who have been tortured and killed on suspicion of disloyalty.

Burundian government promises of justice for the victims of the Titanic Express and Gatumba massacres have so far come to nothing - and there is little to show for all the talk of the Gatumba massacre being referred to the International Criminal Court.

It would be nice to think that the international mediators falling over themselves to take credit for "restoring peace" are right this time, and that giving in to the FNL's demand for a blanket amnesty and government posts (without, of course, the formality of actually having to be elected) are all that it will take to persuade them, at last, to stop killing and torturing people. But history would suggest otherwise, and tragically the UN's wishful thinking on this issue is likely only to embolden Burundi's criminal elite, and lead to yet more killings. War criminals tend not to make great politicians.

Take action - Fax your MP!
Take action - sign the Gatumba petition

Burundi, human rights, Current Affairs, Politics, Africa

"We have to kill Tutsis wherever they are" - Guardian interviews the FNL's allies in Eastern DRC

From the Guardian

Child soldiers can be found across Africa. Sometimes they are responsible for appalling atrocities; sometimes it is because their minds have been twisted by powerful drugs. But nowhere on the continent are they as driven by hate and ideology as among the Rwandan Hutu refugees in eastern Congo. Here, after more than a decade of invasion, civil war and slaughter - rooted in the genocide - a second generation of killers is being imbued with the mind-altering ideology of extermination and reared to hate and murder Tutsis.

Some of the children learn it from fathers who were responsible for the mass killings the first time around, back in Rwanda. Others, like the boy, are raised by the extremist Hutu rebels who control large areas of eastern Congo and are among the most important causes of the conflict there that has claimed an estimated five million lives or more over the past decade and continues to kill about 45,000 people each month in Congo through the effects of war - principally starvation and disease.

These children are led by men with multimillion-dollar rewards on their heads offered by the United States for their capture to stand trial accused of the murder of thousands in the 1994 Rwandan genocide. America has listed their armed group, the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), as a terrorist organisation, but some of its political leaders have found safe haven in Europe. And while their army is fighting, the leadership is raking in millions through the smuggling of gold and diamonds, and extortion.

See also:
De Lorenzo's testimony to the United States Senate

Fighting broke out again in the early 1990s, before the Rwandan genocide took place. Bukavu and Uvira in South Kivu were cleansed of Tutsi in 2004 after Nkunda withdrew his forces from Bukavu after trying to capture the city. They have not been allowed to return, and local leaders in the city have expressed satisfaction that it is finally "clean". That was followed by the massacre of 150 Congolese Tutsi refugees at Gatumba refugee camp in Burundi by a joint
force of FNL, Mayi-Mayi, and FDLR units, apparently with links to some Congolese officials.

The FDLR's representatives in Europe can be contacted directly here: http://www.fdlr.org/

Take action - sign the Gatumba petition

Burundi, human rights, Current Affairs, Politics, Africa, Congo, Rwanda

FNL demand immunity from prosecution and government posts - again

The BBC is reporting that some members of the FNL leadership have returned to Bujumbura, again, declaring their intention to talk about peace.

The report notes that "FNL leaders in exile in Tanzania want full immunity from prosecution and a share of government jobs. But this would require constitutional changes which the government - wracked by a parliamentary crisis - does not have the power to deliver."

No mention is made of the fact that granting of blanket immunity to Rwasa and his fellow indicted war criminals would be a violation of Burundi's obligations under international law to uphold victims' rights - or that giving government posts to unelected warlords would not simply be "unconstitutional" - it would effectively bring to an end Burundi's short experiment with electoral democracy.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/7405552.stm


Burundi, human rights, Current Affairs, Politics, Africa