Trouble ahead Source:The Economist The country is going downhill—and its neighbours could be affected, too Mar 29th 2014 | BUJUMBURA | From the print edition LONE joggers have become a common sight on the cobbled streets of Bujumbura, Burundi’s charming capital on the shore of Lake Tanganyika. Running in groups used to be a popular weekend pastime, but the government has become increasingly allergic to public gatherings, so it is wiser to trot along alone. An attempt on March 8th by the opposition Movement for Solidarity and Democracy to stage a rally in the capital led to violent clashes with the police; 21 of the party’s activists arrested that day have since been jailed for life for “insurrection”. The party has been suspended, its headquarters placed under police guard. Its leader, a lively former radio journalist, Alexis Sinduhije, has fled, and a warrant put out for his arrest. The tension stems mainly from the desire of Pierre Nkurunziza (pictured), Burundi’s president since 2005, to run for a third term in elections next year. The constitution allows for only two terms, so he is pressing parliament to change it. But the ruling party, the National Council for the Defence of Democracy, has so far failed to get a single parliamentarian from another party to back an amendment. Unbowed, Mr Nkurunziza will now stage a referendum on the issue. The last round of elections in 2010 were boycotted by most opposition groups amid allegations of fraud, so no one can be sure how much support the ruling party has. The economy is a mess. Coffee production has slumped. Foreign donors, including the World Bank, Belgium and America, which supply more than half the country’s budget, bailed out Burundi last year as it teetered near bankruptcy. Mr Nkurunziza’s crackdown on dissent and his economic mismanagement have turned Burundi, in the words of a foreign diplomat, into a “hybrid of Rwanda’s authoritarian politics and Congo’s disastrous economy”. Part of the problem is that, though similar in geography and size of population to Rwanda, its neighbour to the north, Burundi struggles to attract equivalent attention. The country was ruined by a 12-year civil war that claimed as many as 300,000 lives before it ended in 2005, yet that conflict was overshadowed by the magnitude of Rwanda’s genocide in 1994, when 800,000 people perished in three months. While Rwanda’s recovery was accompanied by an edict against mentioning divisions between Hutus and Tutsis, Burundi chose to recognise ethnic tensions overtly. Peace was built on a system of quotas in parliament and other public institutions to protect Burundi’s Tutsi minority from outright domination by the Hutus, who make up some 85% of the population. Mr Nkurunziza’s party, a former Hutu guerrilla movement, was not among the signatories to the Arusha accord, named after the town in neighbouring Tanzania where the Burundian formula was negotiated. His party joined the peace process later and now seems keen to remove any checks on its power. His party’s increasingly militant youth wing, known as the Imbonerakure, is causing particular alarm. Its members have been seen marching in military uniform. In some rural areas they have taken over from the police, openly beating and murdering some government critics. A serving Burundian general says that the Imbonerakure is acting as a paramilitary organisation reminiscent of Rwanda’s notorious Interahamwe, the Hutu militia which did much of the killing in 1994. The Imbonerakure, he says, has absorbed most of the 50,000 former Hutu fighters demobilised after Burundi’s civil war; its full strength may now be twice that. “If people don’t pay attention, Burundi could slide back into war,” warns the general. Meanwhile Burundi has sunk near to the bottom of the corruption-perceptions index published by Transparency International, a Berlin-based lobby. The British agency that disburses aid has closed its local office owing to spiralling fraud. A land commission that was meant to resolve disputes between ethnic groups and the competing claims of hundreds of thousands of returning war refugees has been nobbled by the ruling party. Gabriel Rufyiri, who runs Olucome, a local anti-corruption outfit, says that graft has “become the mode of government.” He has a portrait in his office of a colleague killed in 2009 while investigating government links to arms and mineral-smuggling operations. Despite the economic decline, grand new mansions have been rising on the hillside in Kiriri, Bujumbura’s fanciest suburb. Cynics joke that the civil war was more about who would get to live in Kiriri than it was about ethnic rivalry. The president’s residence is just a stone’s throw from those of several of his rivals. At the top of the hill, with views westward across the mountains towards the Democratic Republic of Congo, lives Sylvestre Ntibantunganya, a Hutu who was Burundi’s president between 1994 and 1996 until deposed in a Tutsi-led coup. He likes to remind visitors that the assassination of one of his predecessors in 1993 stoked the genocidal Hutu movement in Rwanda. Foreign governments should pay attention to Burundi’s crisis, he says, because, if trouble comes, “it will not stay within our borders.”
Posted on: Mon, 31 Mar 2014 14:18:35 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015