Attacks on Tutsis may set Burundi alight

BUJUMBURA, BURUNDI • A little more than a week ago, Benny Uwamahoro went out for a beer. He met up with some friends, listened to some music and then received a mysterious call around 8: 30 p.m. asking him to goto a neighbourhood shop.

The next morning, Uwamahoro, a minibus driver with soft, hooded eyes, was found dead on his back on a dirt path, a bullet hole in his head, his tongue sawed out.

“Was he targeted because he joined a couple of protests?” his distraught sister asked. “Or was it because he was a Tutsi?”

In Burundi, dangerous times lie ahead if that question is being asked, and right now a lot of people are asking it. Ethnic rivalries have set off several devastating wars in this part of Africa, but none come near the deadly legacy of the Hutu-Tutsi divide, which plunged Rwanda into genocide in 1994, wiping out nearly a million lives.

Though analysts caution that Burundi and Rwanda are very different from each other, that same politically manipulated fault line killed tens of thousands of people during the civil war here in Burundi as well, casting a shadow that continues to loom over the turmoil in the country today.

This is why western leaders, including U.S. President Barack Obama, have tried so assiduously in the past months to get out in front of Burundi’s conflict and press its leaders and opposition politicians to negotiate before it is too late.

According to witnesses, human rights monitors and western officials, government forces — mostly the police — went on a rampage in midDecember after rebels staged a simultaneous sneak attack on several military bases. Burundi’s government is led by Hutus; witnesses said most of the victims in the revenge attacks were Tutsis. Fears are now growing that this conflict is becoming more ethnically driven and that Burundi is rapidly sliding in the wrong direction.

“We are looking into multiple reports that those killed during retaliatory attacks, allegedly by the government, were disproportionately from one group of Burundians,” said Tom Perriello, the American special envoy for the Great Lakes region of Africa.

The government denies any ethnic bias, saying all those killed were “enemies.” But what is undeniable is that a wave of suspicion and anxiety is moving at great speed across the sunny streets of Bujumbura, the capital, where people sold Christmas trees and shiny tinsel next to men walking around with rocketpropelled grenades. Many Tutsis are terrified.

The biggest worry now turns on what is happening inside the army. Burundi’s military is commanded by Tutsi and Hutu officers who have mostly resisted getting dragged into the troubles that started this spring when Burundi’s president, Pierre Nkurunziza, a Hutu, announced that he would run for a third term, disregarding those who said the constitution barred him from doing so.

He was re- elected in July. Since then, several hundred people have been killed in protests, assassinations and a wave of gruesome mysterious murders. All analysts interviewed said the surest recipe for all-out war was if Burundi’s military split along ethnic lines, and that seems to be what is beginning to happen.

Last Wednesday, a Tutsi lieutenant colonel in the army announced that he was forming a new rebel group — the sixth. This was precisely the worry: that Tutsi military officers would begin to turn against the government if the reality, or even the perception, was that government police forces were singling out innocent Tutsis.

Few were surprised when the colonel, Edouard Nshimirimana, claimed that his mission was to “protect the population.”

According to several analysts, Nkurunziza is now restocking the military, removing Tutsi officers he does not trust from vital positions and disarming others. One member of the security services said many Tutsi police officers were now being blocked from going on patrol and reassigned to tasks like guarding banks.

After the rebels attacked several military bases on Dec. 11, which demonstrated the most organized and lethal rebel action yet, government forces stormed their own military academy, killing a number of students suspected of collaborating with the rebels and arresting others. Some suspects were Hutu, two people with knowledge of the operation said; the majority were Tutsi.

The government also encountered stiff armed resistance in several predominantly Tutsi neighbourhoods in Bujumbura and then went door to door in those areas, witnesses said, pulling scores of young men out into the street and shooting them in the head.

Some opposition politicians have been quick to accuse the government of genocide, deliberately harking to Rwanda in 1994. The two countries do share many similarities: their size, their ethnic breakdown of about 85 per cent Hutu and 15 per cent Tutsi, and their legacy of mass murder. More than 100,000 lives were lost in Burundi during its civil war in the 1990s.

The hope is that political negotiations that began Monday will defuse this crisis and present a path out, though few expect Nkurunziza to step down or even significantly change the composition of his government.

The best the opposition can hope for, analysts said, is a commitment to overhaul the police and intelligence services; disband the governing party’s youth militia, which is accused of many human rights abuses; and lift restrictions on the news media. Those actions would level the playing field for the next presidential election in 2020.

But five years is a long time. Especially in a place where nearly each dawn, more bodies are found strewn across Bujumbura’s streets, many mutilated like the body of Uwamahoro, the man whose tongue was cut out.

The army pulled young men into the street and shot them in the head