Burundi president’s faces emerging armed rebellion as vote looms

NAIROBI Burundi’s President Pierre Nkurunziza will discover an choice prosperity the man is sure in this week all of a sudden obscured from the introduction associated with an armed insurgency inside a every country in the middle of 1 of Africa’s most flamable zones.

Opposition groups say Nkurunziza’s re-election bid is unconstitutional and a violation of a peace deal that ended a dozen years of civil war in 2006.

Burundian rebel general Leonard Ngendakumana – who took part in the failed coup in May to topple Nkurunziza – has confirmed that soldiers loyal to the coup plot were involved in the fighting.

A flare-up in Burundi risks repercussions well beyond the borders of the tiny nation of 10 million people and will create fresh instability in a region with a history of ethnic conflict.

Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni will fly to Burundi on Tuesday to mediate between government and opposition leaders, an official said, a personal intervention underlining the scale of regional alarm over an increasingly violent stand-off.

The violence, meanwhile, has fueled fears of a repetition of the country’s 1993-2005 civil war, during which an estimated 300,000 were killed.

Rwanda, with the same ethnic mix as Burundi, suffered a genocide in 1994 in which 800,000 mostly Tutsis, as well as moderate Hutus, were butchered.

Twelve people were killed on Friday in an exchange of fire with the army when a rebel group attacked the town of Kabarore, on the border with Rwanda.

In remarks before the start of the talks, Museveni urged Burundi’s leaders to strive for unity and said sectarianism is a threat to development. “There will be lots of refugees and potentially the ethnic card could be taken up again“. Nkurunziza, who has mixed parents, led a Hutu force.

Parliamentary polls, in which Nkurunziza’s ruling CNDD-FDD scored a widely-expected landslide win, were held on May 29 but boycotted by the opposition and internationally condemned.

Bakundukize reportedly told a Rwandan radio station that Burundi’s police officers, who had refused to cooperate with the Imbonerakure in suppressing protest efforts, were later found dead.

The five-nation East African Community (EAC) last week called for elections to be delayed by two weeks, to July 30, to allow time for more talks between Nkurunziza’s ruling CNDD-FDD party and opposition groups – although these talks have so far made no progress.