DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO

UN airlifts DR Congo refugees out of C.Africa

NEWS STORY

Source: AFP

3 August 2015 - The UN said Monday it had begun repatriating more than 600 people who had fled to the now violence-torn Central African Republic from the Democratic Republic of Congo six years ago.

The United Nations' refugee agency said it had airlifted a first group of 39 Congolese refugees from Zemio in southeastern CAR to the remote, eastern DR Congo province of Ango on Monday.

"Over the next three weeks, UNHCR plans to repatriate a total of 628 refugees on 12 chartered flights, including the one on Monday," the agency said in a statement.

The refugees were among some 5,000 people who fled DRC in 2008 and 2009 to escape attacks by the notorious Ugandan rebel group Lord's Resistance Army (LRA).

The group was at the time running rampant, robbing villagers, looting property, torching homes, kidnapping people, raping women and girls and using children as soldiers and sex slaves, UNHCR pointed out.

The LRA continues to spread terror in the region, and is still present in the Ango area, but UNHCR said all the returnees had said they preferred leaving the Zemio camp, run by the agency, over fears of the volatile security situation in CAR.

Thousands have died and hundreds of thousands of people have fled deadly civil unrest in the landlocked nation since late 2012, including at least 2,800 Congolese refugees who have returned home.

The Congolese government had said it believed the situation in the Ango region was stable enough to allow for return, UNHCR said.

"The refugees were fully informed about the security situation in return areas before they made a final decision to go back," it said.

UNHCR meanwhile said it was trying to find a lasting solution for the refugees wishing to remain in Zemio, which is facing funding shortages and is in a volatile part of CAR and difficult to access.

It said lacking roads made it impossible to repatriate the refugees over land.

The agency said each returnee would be given $60 to pay for their travel to their villages, and that each adult would receive an additional repatriation grant of $150, while children would get $100 each.

The UN's World Food Programme (WFP) would also provide cash vouchers for food, it said.

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RWANDA

Fragile Burundi Casts a Wary Eye on Rwanda

OPINION

Source: New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/04/world/africa/after-unrest-a-fragile-bu...)

By Marc Santora

Kigali, 3 August 2015 - Burundi and Rwanda can seem deceptively like conjoined twins. They share a common history, geography and language, and their populations are divided ethnically between Hutu and Tutsi. Both were devastated by some of the worst mass slaughter of the 20th century.

Since the guns fell silent, they have charted very different courses as they try to move beyond their bloody pasts. But trouble in one seems inevitably to spill into the other, and their politics are becoming intertwined again, in dangerous ways.

Burundi is in danger of collapse, its capital rocked by violence and divided by political intrigue. The country’s fragile democratic fabric has been shredded in recent months by President Pierre Nkurunziza, who brushed aside a constitutional bar to secure a third term in office and put down an attempted coup meant to stop him. As Mr. Nkurunziza struggles to retain control, his top officials accuse Rwanda of tacitly aiding his enemies.

Pierre Claver Ndayicariye, head of the electoral commission in Burundi, announced results on Friday in Bujumbura, the capital. He said that President Pierre Nkurunziza garnered 69.41 percent of the vote.Burundi President Wins 3rd Term in Election Boycotted by Rivals JULY 24, 2015.

Then on Sunday, a top general close to the president was assassinated, threatening to further inflame a volatile situation.

The general, Adolphe Nshimirimana, had an outsize personality. He was feared for his brutal tactics and a linchpin in the president’s control of his security forces. He played a major role in crushing protests in the spring, leaving scores of people dead, and was credited with helping foil the coup. No one has yet claimed responsibility for his death.

There is no suggestion that Rwanda had any hand in it. But top Burundian officials say that Rwanda played a part in the failed coup.

“We know that some of the coup leaders now live in Rwanda, at least three of them,” said the foreign minister, Alain Nyamitwe, in an interview on July 22, the day after the presidential election.

Mr. Nyamitwe said the disaffected officers, who have called for open rebellion, present a clear threat to Burundi, and he castigated Rwanda for allowing them to find sanctuary there.

He was careful to say that there was no evidence of official Rwandan state support for the rebels, but there were many indications, he said, that Rwanda was being “unhelpful.”

Rwandan officials categorically deny that the coup leaders are in their country and said Burundi’s problems were of the government’s own making. “When you have a deep crisis, looking for a scapegoat is normal,” a senior Rwandan official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity about diplomatic matters.

Rwanda has concerns about how the crisis next door could embolden another group of rebels who pose a threat to its own government. The remnants of the losing side in its long civil war, a Hutu militia force known as the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, or F.D.L.R., fled to the forests in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo. For a while, Burundi cooperated with Rwanda in hunting the rebels, but according to the Rwandan government official, that cooperation stopped suddenly last year.

“We know that some leaders of the F.D.L.R. met with officials in Burundi,” the official said. “The F.D.L.R. is a cancer because it espouses an ideology of genocide.”

Mr. Nyamitwe denied that Burundi was assisting the group and said there was not “a single F.D.L.R.” soldier in Burundi.

Against a backdrop of deepening distrust, the assassination of General Adolphe, as he was widely known, sent tremors throughout the region. President Nkurunziza went on state radio to urge calm, calling on “every Burundian, in the hills and the capital, to stay united.” And the State Department issued a statement calling “on all sides to renounce violence and to redouble their efforts to engage in a transparent, inclusive and comprehensive political dialogue.”

In another ominous turn, the leading human rights lawyer in Burundi, Pierre Claver Mbonimpa, was shot by unknown assailants outside his home in Bujumbura on Monday night and was hospitalized in critical condition.

The United Nations condemned the attack.

“This incident, which comes only a day after the killing of Gen. Adolphe Nshimirimana, is part of a growing pattern of politically motivated violence in Burundi that must be broken before it escalates beyond control,” a spokesman for Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said in a statement.

Filip Reyntjens, a professor of African law and politics at the University of Antwerp, said that if history was a guide, the current crisis could quickly spread to engulf the region.

He said Rwanda and Burundi “are really false twins” that “have always had perverse influences on one another.”

In Rwanda, where Tutsi rebels won a clear victory in the civil war, the Tutsi-led government “follows a policy of what you could call ethnic amnesia,” Mr. Reyntjens said, by essentially making it illegal to talk about ethnicity. But under the surface, he said, some field research suggests that ethnic divisions are worse now than in the 1990s.

Rwandan officials call that analysis deeply flawed and say the country has worked hard to encourage citizens to see themselves as Rwandans, not Hutu or Tutsi, and to hold perpetrators from both groups to account for atrocities committed during the war.

But in Burundi, there was no clear victory, and peace was achieved only through painstaking negotiations over power-sharing along ethnic lines. Mr. Nkurunziza, who came from the Hutu side of the conflict, often points out that in the decade of his leadership since the peace agreement, there has been no ethnic killing.

Scores of interviews in the capital and in the countryside of Burundi suggest that people are aware of the dangers of allowing old ethnic scars to be ripped open. But outside experts worry that those vying for power in Burundi could try to manipulate ethnic divides in dangerous ways.

Though many countries condemned Mr. Nkurunziza for evading the two-term limit in the peace agreement, Rwanda has notably not objected on that ground. Instead, President Paul Kagame of Rwanda said Mr. Nkurunziza should not run again because he had failed his people, a remark that angered Burundian officials. Mr. Kagame appears likely to seek a third term of his own, after the Rwandan Parliament recently amended the constitution to allow it.

Mr. Kagame, 57, has led Rwanda since 1994, when an offensive by his Rwandan Patriotic Front rebels put an end to a genocide campaign by Hutu extremists. He is widely credited with helping bring peace, stability and what the World Bank has called “impressive development progress,” visible in the spotless streets of Kigali, the capital, and the construction cranes dotting the skyline.

Burundi, on the other hand, remains one of the poorest countries in the world, with a fragile economy and a dependence on foreign aid for half the national budget.

The experience of Evode Nkeshima, 31, offers a glimpse at the complexities in Burundi. When he was 14 in 1993, the rest of his family was slaughtered in Cibitoke, a part of Burundi where there were clashes last month.

“They were all sleeping when the rebels came in and took my father, three brothers and two sisters,” he said, adding that he survived only because was sleeping somewhere else that night.

His family was Tutsi, and its members were killed by Hutu. But Mr. Nkeshima is now the president of a local branch of the governing party’s youth wing, the Imbonerakure, in Bujumbura.

Rwandan officials view the Imbonerakure as a danger and compare it to the youth militia known as the Interahamwe, which carried out some of the worst atrocities in the genocide. Western officials have accused the Burundian government of arming the group and using it to stifle dissent.

Mr. Nkeshima said ethnicity had nothing to do with his support for the president.

While Rwanda might view Mr. Nkurunziza with suspicion, stemming from his days as the leader of a Hutu militia group — he was accused and sentenced to death in absentia for murdering Tutsi civilians, and then pardoned under the peace accords — Mr. Nkeshima said that since then the president had helped the country heal.

“We are all the same,” he said. “We are all people.”

Even so, he said there could still be war. And when he expressed worry about Rwanda’s role, he cast it in ethnic terms.

“Rwanda is a bad country,” Mr. Nkeshima said. “The Tutsis in the government there are helping the Tutsis in the Burundi opposition. We cannot allow the opposition to take our country.”

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BURUNDI

Ban greatly concerned over ongoing deterioration of security in post-election Burundi

NEWS STORY

Source: UN News Centre

2 August 2015 - Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today voiced concern over the situation in Burundi, where the security situation continues to worsen following the recent elections, and strongly condemned the assassination yesterday of General Adolphe Nshimirimana.

A statement issued by Mr. Ban’s spokesperson said the UN chief “notes with great concern the continuing deterioration of the security environment in Burundi following an electoral period marked by violence and the violation of human rights, including the right to life.”

In the wake of yesterday’s assassination, the Secretary-General welcomed President Pierre Nkurunziza’s message to the nation to remain calm and to the competent authorities to expeditiously investigate and bring the perpetrators to justice.

“The Secretary-General renews his appeal to all Burundians to resume an inclusive dialogue without delay and peacefully settle their differences under the facilitation of President Museveni as mandated by the East African Community,” the statement added.

The UN Electoral Observation Mission in Burundi (MENUB) last week stated that while the 21 July election in Burundi that won Mr. Nkurunziza a controversial third term was relatively peaceful and conducted adequately, the overall environment was ‘not conducive’ for an inclusive, free and credible electoral process.

The polls took place after two postponements in an environment of “profound mistrust” between opposing political camps, the Mission noted, adding that the decision of the incumbent President to run for another term precipitated a deep political and socioeconomic crisis.

Outcry after journalist beaten in Burundi; leading activist injured in shooting

NEWS STORY

Source: Mail & Guardian Africa

3 August 2015 - MEDIA watchdog Reporters without Borders lashed out Monday at the “despicable assault” against an AFP reporter in Burundi, who says he was detained and badly beaten after a top general was assassinated.

Esdras Ndikumana, a prominent Burundian journalist who works for Agence France-Presse and Radio France Internationale (RFI), said he was held for around two hours, during which he said he was subjected to severe beatings on his back, legs and the soles of his feet.

He was later released and hospitalised, with the injuries also including a suspected broken finger.

Ndikumana said he was taking pictures on Sunday at the scene of the general’s assassination in the capital Bujumbura when he was arrested by members of the National Intelligence Service (SNR) and taken to their offices.

The secretary-general of Reporters without Borders, Christophe Deloire, said he was “shocked and angry” over the attack.

This “despicable assault” is “tantamount to torture,” added Deloire, who called on the authorities to “immediately open an enquiry to identify and punish those who carried out this barbaric act.”

AFP’s global news director Michele Leridon said in a statement Sunday she was “very shocked” by the attack.

“We will seek explanations from the authorities in Burundi and an assurance that such an incident will not happen again,” she said.

“Our correspondent must be able to continue to carry out his work in complete safety.”

RFI said Ndikumana’s life was not in danger but that he was “in shock and has severe bruising”.