Burundi leader misses summit
REPLACEMENT: SENDS FOREIGN MINISTER IN HIS PLACE President says at home to canvass for votes for third term as East African leaders seek peace.
Bujumbura
Burundi’s president skipped regional talks yesterday aimed at brokering a deal to end weeks of unrest in the country, choosing instead to campaign for his controversial third term.
Leaders of the five-nation East African Community ( EAC) bloc had been due to meet yesterday in Tanzanian city Dar es Salaam.
“President Pierre Nkurunziza will not attend the summit,” said spokesperson Gervais Abahiro, adding Burundian Foreign Minister Alain Aime-Nyamitwe would take his place.
Nkurunziza would instead lead his presidential campaign in Burundi’s central Mwaro and Gitega regions.
The crisis in Burundi surrounds Nkurunziza’s bid to stand for a third consecutive five-year term in office, a move branded by opponents as unconstitutional and a violation of a peace deal that brought an end to years of civil war in 2006.
More than 70 people have been killed in more than two months of protests and a failed coup attempt, with almost 144 000 refugees fleeing into neighbouring nations.
Parliamentary and local elections held last Monday were boycotted by the opposition.
The UN electoral observer mission said the polls took place “in a tense political crisis, and a climate of widespread fear and intimidation”. Results are yet to be released.
There are fears the crisis could plunge the impoverished, landlocked country into another civil war.
During the first summit, on May 13, a general staged a failed bid to unseat Nkurunziza while Coup still brewing Burundian rebel General Leonard Ngendakumana, who took part in a failed coup in May to topple President Pierre Nkurunziza, has vowed further attacks until the government is overthrown. “After we saw that we could not succeed our coup on May 15, we found it was necessary to keep fighting so we can push Nkurunziza to keep thinking about what the president attended the talks. Nkurunziza did not attend a second summit on May 31.
The EAC bloc includes Burundi, as well as Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda. But Rwandan President Paul Kagame, who has called on Nkurunziza to step down from power, is also not attending the summit, officials in Kigali said. – he is doing and maybe just resign,” Ngendakumana told Kenya’s KTN news channel in an interview broadcast late on Sunday. “All those actions that are going on in the country, we are behind them and we are going to intensify them until Pierre Nkurunziza understands that we are there to make him understand by force that he has to give up his third term.”