The Trumpet Newspaper Issue 564 (February 9 - 22 2022)

News
FEBRUARY 9-22 2022
Burundi’s vicious crackdown
never ended
TheTrumpet
Page11
Continued from Page 3<
and President Évariste Ndayishimiye’s
pursuit of reforms across multiple
sectors.” In October, the EU indicated
that even as it renewed targeted sanctions
against some senior Burundian officials,
it would also resume direct budgetary
support to Burundi’s government.
These overtures toward a government
that continues to torture and kill its own
people risk emboldening Burundi’s
leaders to crack down even harder on
their opponents. Instead of hoping that
the Burundian government will change
its ways, the United States and the
European Union should publicly push the
country’s leaders to take concrete and
measurable steps to improve their dire
human rights record.
False promises
Burundi descended into chaos and
violence in April 2015, after Nkurunziza
announced a controversial bid for a third
term in office, sparking months of
protests and a failed coup attempt.
Government security forces and members
of the ruling party’s youth league, known
as the Imbonerakure - meaning “those
who see far” in the Kirundi language -
arrested or shot protesters and critics. By
mid-2015, hundreds of people had been
killed, and almost all of Burundi’s
opposition leaders, independent
journalists, and civil society activists had
fled the country. Some 400,000 people
sought refuge in neighboring countries.
In 2018, Nkurunziza unexpectedly
announced that he would not seek
reelection in 2020. Ndayishimiye, a
former army general who was Secretary-
General of the ruling party at the height
of the crisis, became the party’s candidate
for president, winning in an election
marred by violence and allegations of
rigging. In June 2020, two months before
he was set to step down, Nkurunziza died
suddenly under mysterious
circumstances.
Ndayishimiye was sworn in early
during a hastily arranged ceremony.
Although he had overseen the party while
it committed grave human rights abuses,
Ndayishimiye promised to promote
political tolerance, make the justice
system more impartial and fair, and hold
accountable those responsible for past
crimes.
Ndayishimiye did release some
human rights advocates and journalists
from jail and lift some restrictions on the
media and civil society, but his
government continues to use repressive
tactics against its opponents. Tony
Germain Nkina, a lawyer and former
human rights defender, was convicted on
baseless charges of collaborating with
rebels that were confirmed on appeal in
September 2021. The government has
also used arrest warrants, convictions in
absentia, and life sentences against
human rights defenders in exile to silence
the country’s once-thriving human rights
movement.
“Our province has become a
graveyard.”
Then there are the killings. Carried
out by security forces, Imbonerakure
members, and other unknown
perpetrators, they have sowed terror
among the population. “Our province has
become a graveyard,” one resident of
Cibitoke told my colleagues and me last
August. Another man said he witnessed
four men in military attire beat to death
Emmanuel Baransegeta, a 53-year-old
fisherman, as he returned from work on
the Rusizi River the evening of July 8,
2021. Two days later on the banks of the
river, residents found the body of a man
who looked as if he had been beaten.
They said they believed he was
Baransegeta, but the local authorities
buried him without investigating the
circumstances of his death or even trying
to confirm his identity.
For many, these killings evoke
memories of Burundi’s violent past. The
banks of the Rusizi have historically been
dumping grounds for bodies of people
killed in political or ethnic strife. During
Burundi’s brutal civil war, which raged
from 1993 to 2009, an estimated 300,000
people were killed in fighting that broke
down largely along ethnic lines. Both the
Tutsi-dominated military and the armed
Hutu opposition forces committed
serious war crimes, including killings and
President Évariste Ndayishimiy
rapes of civilians.
Nkurunziza’s first term, from 2005 to
2010, offered hope for a break with that
history. A Hutu rebel leader during the
war, he took office under a new
constitution that guaranteed powersharing
between Hutus and Tutsis and
among political parties. Despite
continued bouts of violence, the country
achieved a degree of stability and made
some progress toward peace,
reconciliation, and economic
development. It developed a burgeoning
civil society and independent media
landscape. But this fragile progress
suffered serious setbacks during and after
the 2010 elections as political tensions
rose and security forces and armed
opposition groups committed scores of
killings. In Cibitoke, residents once again
found mutilated bodies of opposition
supporters near the river. Now, they are
encountering them with appalling
frequency.
Dangerous gamble
In September 2021, the UN
Commission of Inquiry on Burundi,
which has documented grave human
rights violations in the country every year
since its creation in 2016, presented its
last report to the UN Human Rights
Council. The Commission concluded that
under Burundi’s new government, “no
structural reform has been undertaken to
durably improve the situation.” It
expressed alarm about continuing human
rights violations and the progressive
erosion of the rule of law. Yet the Human
Rights Council, in a resolution led by the
EU and supported by the United States,
ended the Commission’s mandate in
favor of a Special Rapporteur with fewer
resources to investigate human rights
violations. The resolution claimed that
progress “has been made in the field of
human rights, good governance and the
rule of law,” citing the limited, largely
symbolic gestures by the Burundian
government. Unsurprisingly, in
December, Burundi’s Foreign Minister
said it would “never” work with the
Special Rapporteur.
Ending the Commission’s mandate
and lifting international sanctions and
other punitive measures in the absence of
real progress on human rights or
democratic reforms is a dangerous
gamble. The United States and the EU
may hope that doing so will encourage
reform, but it will more likely embolden
human rights abusers who already
operate with near-total impunity. To
many victims of abuses, the willingness
of Washington and Brussels to trust the
same officials who have overseen the
killing, disappearance, and brutal torture
of thousands of people since 2015 is
inexplicable - as is their silence in the
face of persistent human rights violations
under Ndayishimiye.
The United States and the EU should
publicly press the Burundian government
to release all political prisoners, including
Nkina, and overturn unfair convictions
and drop arrest warrants against human
rights activists and journalists in exile.
The government can prove it is serious
about reform by allowing the UN Special
Rapporteur to access the country and by
conducting credible investigations into
killings, disappearances, and instances of
torture. Any members of the security
forces or Imbonerakure who are found to
be responsible for these abuses should be
immediately arrested and prosecuted.
“Please, I am asking you to tell as
many people as you can about what is
going on here. The international
community must know about these
killings,” an official in Burundi’s
National Defense Force told us. He spoke
on the condition of anonymity, defying
his superiors in order to call attention to
the dead bodies he was regularly finding
along the Rusizi. But the problem is not
that the United States and the EU don’t
know what is going in Burundi. The
problem is they are choosing to ignore it.
Mausi Segun is the Executive
Director (Africa) for Human Rights
Watch.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/02/0
8/burundis-vicious-crackdown-neverended