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Army chief says no peace without cease-fire |
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August 29, 2000
BUJUMBURA, Burundi (AP) - Hutu rebels killed six people and looted their homes in an attack that brought warnings and condemnation from Burundi's top officials, hours before a peace agreement was expected to be signed Monday. Bodies of five civilians, some with their throats cut, lay outside mud houses where the rebels launched an attack late Sunday, about 7 kilometers (5 miles) from the city center. "If Burundi is to heal, the mediation should ask for the rebels to put down arms," Minister of Interior Assencion Twagiramungu said after visiting the scene of the attack. "If that fails, I will call on all Burundians to rise up and fight the rebels." The rebels first hit a military outpost, then moved house-to-house searching for Tutsis they could kill, survivors said. One soldier also was killed in the attack. The rebels, who took up arms in 1993 after Tutsi paratroopers assassinated the first democratically elected president, a Hutu, have so far refused to sign the power-sharing agreement with the Tutsi-led government and 18 other political parties and interest groups. The agreement, mediated by former South African President Nelson Mandela, was expected to be signed later Monday in the northern Tanzanian town of Arusha, hours before U.S. President Bill Clinton was scheduled to arrive. Negotiators from seven political parties representing the Hutu majority, 10 parties representing the Tutsi minority and negotiators from the Tutsi-dominated government and army had failed to agree on the two key issues: a cease-fire to end their seven year civil war and who will lead a transitional government, a senior Burundi official said. The negotiators were scrambling to draft a compromise agreement. The original agreement called for the setting up of an ethnically balanced army, government and parliament, as well as a three-year transition period prior to elections. It would require the Tutsi minority, which has controlled Burundi's army and economy since 1962 independence, to give up power in exchange for constitutional guarantees that their rights would be fully protected. Most Tutsis in Bujumbura feel the agreement favors the Hutu majority, and without a cease-fire they believe it would make little difference to their lives. The army wants the cease-fire before the signing of the accord, while the rebels insist it should take effect only after the signing. "The mediators must put pressure on the rebels to sign a cease-fire," Defense Minister Col. Cyrille Ndayirukiye told The Associated Press outside the houses that were attacked and looted Sunday. "I don't see how we can continue without a cease-fire." "This attack is a boomerang for Mandela, the whole region and the international community," Twagiramungu said. Jocelyne Niyovima, a neighbor of one of the victims, said the lives of her two young sisters were spared by a rebel, while her mother hid in the toilet. "They stole everything from the house. But one young rebel covered my sisters with a blanket and told them to be quiet and that he could not kill them because they were so young," said Niyovima, who spent the night outside her home and only returned Monday morning. It was not the first time the rebels, hiding in the hills surrounding the lakeside capital, have attacked Bujumbura.
More than 200,000 people have died as a result of the fighting since 1993, most of them civilians from both Hutu and Tutsi communities. Bujumbura's streets were quiet early Monday with little traffic. In Nyakabiga, Tutsi-dominated neighborhood, commuters were prevented from using cars or buses to get to work. Students and radical Tutsi groups opposed to the peace accord warned that vehicles on the road would be stoned, and called on people to stay home as a sign of protest.
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