“Burundi is sitting on a time-bomb and it’s sad that the
outside world does not care,” Justin Rwasa, one of around 4,000
Burundians to have sought refuge in neighbouring Rwanda, told IRIN.
Burundi is wracked with uncertainty over whether President
Pierre Nkurunziza will run for a third term, a move many say would
violate the constitution as well as the terms of the peace accord that
ended a brutal civil war which cost some 300,000 lives.
Nkurunziza met Rwandan counterpart Paul Kagame on Monday
and detailed the measures taken to ensure the pre-electoral period in
Burundi would remain peaceful. Officials said they also discussed ways
of returning the refugees to Burundi so that they could take part in the elections.
Refugees who spoke to IRIN in Rwanda’s eastern Bugesera
district, where most of them are being housed in two transit centres,
said they fled because they were afraid of the Imbonerakure, the youth
wing of Burundi’s ruling party.
Youth members are frequently accused of harassing,
abducting and even killing opposition figures and supporters. Last
weekend, Nkurunziza’s government denied reports that arms had been
distributed to the Imbonerakure.
Burundian officials have visited refugees in Rwanda in a bid to persuade them it is safe to return home, but to no avail.
Internal Affairs Minister Edouard Nduwimana has tried to
reassure the refugees, saying there is “no merit” to claims that the
Imbonerakure have carried out extrajudicial killings.
He said Burundi’s government did not accommodate “mobs”
and that whoever was harassing civilians was doing it individually with
no army or police “blessing.”
But the refugees told IRIN there was no way they were going back now.
“Some of our relatives have disappeared, but the government has continued to deny this,” said Rwasa, 34.
Beata Mukamusoni alleged that hitlists had been drawn up and houses marked to identify those being targeted.
Mukamusoni, who hid close to the border for a week before
slipping across into Rwanda, said some of her relatives had made a show
of being Nkurunziza supporters so as to be safe “in case violence
erupts.”
“We can’t go back now. Maybe after the elections,” Stan Rutskikiri, another refugee, told IRIN.
Human rights activists in Burundi have long reported that
the Imbonerakure have more power and influence than the legitimate
authorities in some rural areas.
Yvette Ndikuman, 25, said that in her village, in Kirundo
province, policemen are afraid of reprimanding Imbonerakure members
“since they are supported from above.” “We are not politicians. We dig [our fields] so that we feed our families,” she told IRIN.
Some refugees claimed they were being targeted because
they were from the minority Tutsi community. One told IRIN the
Imbonerakure are threatening them, saying: “You (Tutsis) survived in the
past but you will see this time round.”
Burundi’s civil war was fought along ethnic lines, and the
essence of the 2000 peace and reconciliation accord was to ensure,
through a quota system, a balance of power between the long dominant
Tutsi and the Hutu majority, which makes up 85 percent of the
population.
Recent years have delivered significant reconciliation
and Burundi’s political fault lines are less defined in Hutu-Tutsi
terms than they used to be, with the fulcrum of tension being whether
Nkurunziza should be allowed to run again.
The president does have his supporters: around 20,000 of
them took to the streets of the capital on Saturday to sing his praises
and urge him to run again.
But tensions have already created major splits within the
ruling party, with 140 senior members signing a petition demanding the
president not run. Thirty have since been expelled from the party, while
the country’s intelligence chief, Godefroid Niyombare, was sacked after
advising Nkurunziza against seeking a third term.
Five opposition parties have called on all those opposed
to Nkurunziza running to take part in a peaceful demonstration in the
capital on Wednesday.
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