Way forward to end Burundi crisis

THE mission of UN secretarygeneral, Ban Ki-moon, and five AU leaders in Burundi this week must be to get human rights monitors on the ground immediately and to kick-start stalled peace talks.

Those are the shared priorities in the region and the international community, the US special envoy for the Great Lakes, Tom Perriello believes.

“And the question to the Burundi government right now is whether they want to respond to that or not. That’s the core issue here. And everything else is either a distraction or a side issue,” he said in an interview.

Perriello stressed that the monitors be deployed with terms of reference that allowed them to do their job properly.

He noted that the government of President Pierre Nkurunziza had been trying to set conditions that would defeat the object of the monitors, such as insisting a government representative be present with them whenever they spoke to anyone.

Ban arrived in Bujumbura on Monday and was expected to meet Nkurunziza yesterday.

Tomorrow, President Jacob Zuma will lead four of his fellow African leaders to Burundi as part of an AU High-Level Panel, which has been mandated by the AU to try to resolve the Burundi crisis.

Part of the panel’s mandate is to try to persuade Nkurunziza to allow a proposed 5 000-strong AU peacekeeping mission to be called Maprobu to deploy in Burundi to protect civilians and bolster the peace talks.

However, Perriello suggested Maprobu was not a priority, but should rather be seen as part of the contingency planning of the region and the international community in case the violence in Burundi got a lot worse.

Nkurunziza has firmly rejected Maprobu and at the AU summit in Addis Ababa at the end of last month, AU member state leaders could not agree to deploy the force against Nkurunziza’s will.

They decided instead to appoint the five-leader, high-level panel to visit Burundi to try to persuade Nkurunziza to accept Maprobu and to kick-start the stalled peace talks between the government and its opponents, being mediated by Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni for the East African Community of which Burundi is a member.

Perriello said it was unfortunate that the message from the AU summit had been: “Government of Burundi defeats Maprobu at AU”, when it should have been: “We do consider this a crisis. We don’t think the status quo is working. And we want to find a constructive way to engage.”

He said the Burundi government did not want the high-level panel which would bring a clear message to him to move forward with the existing AU monitors in Burundi and to almost double their number to 250.

Perriello said South Africa, Tanzania and Angola had crucial roles to play in supporting Museveni’s mediation.

When these three countries joined forces and made demands, Burundi listened, he said. – ANA