Tag Archives: East Africa

Former peacekeeping role model tries to reject peacekeepers

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2015 Burundian Constitutional Crisis

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Burundi has consistently been one of the largest contributors to African Union peacekeeping forces for years, but when it comes time for an AU deployment in Burundi suddenly Burundi is a champion of national “sovereignty” and freedom from peacekeeper interference…

“Burundi lawmakers reject AU peacekeeping offer despite spiralling violence” – France24:

Burundi’s parliament on Monday criticised a proposed African Union peacekeeping mission already dismissed by the government as an “invasion force”.

 

Burundi: Political mass murder or ethnic mass murder?

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2015 Burundian Constitutional Crisis

Flag of Burundi

Flag of Burundi

Cold comfort from Human Rights Watch — France 24 – “Burundi’s worsening crisis ‘is political, not ethnic’”:

“It’s a different situation from the 1990s,” she said. “This is not an ethnic conflict but a political one, pitting a president who is clinging on to power against a variety of opponents.”

Tertsakian said a handful of politicians had indulged in some sort of ethnic rhetoric to whip up support, but that they had largely failed to ethnicise the crisis.

She added that people targeted by security forces included both Tutsis and Hutus opposed to Nkurunziza.

 
Nearly a hundred people were killed on a single day in capital clashes with security forces last week.

Last month:
“Burundi appears to be sliding into full-blown meltdown”

Rwanda hit squads keep targeting hit squad whistleblowers

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Arsenal Bolt: Quick updates on the news stories we’re following.

“Rwandan officer who leaked assassination-list evidence becomes a target” – The Globe and Mail

The U.S. State Department warned former Rwandan Major Robert Higiro of a “credible” threat to his life (while residing in Belgium) after his evidential participation in efforts to stop the current Rwandan regime from continuing its global hit squad operations against critics and opposition figures. (This has been an ongoing crisis for many years now.)

Interesting to watch the U.S. State Department finally cooling significantly on its past enthusiasm for the Kagame regime in Kigali, Rwanda — in large part due to Kagame’s bid for an infinite presidency.

Eritrea joins Saudi Arabia’s Yemen war after inducements

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Sanction-laden Eritrea is expected to receive a huge cash and fuel payout from Saudi Arabia for the use of Eritrean air space, an air base, a seaport, and 400 troops in Yemen, according to a report by the UN Monitoring Group on Somalia and Eritrea.

The country is just a short hop away from southwestern Yemen. Neighboring (and opposing) Ethiopian media reacted very negatively to the report. The findings were summarized as follows:

Recent reports show that Eritrea is officially involved in the Yemeni crisis allowing the Saudi-led Arab coalition to use its Assab port, airspace and territorial waters in fighting the Houthi rebels.

 
Eritrea now joins fellow African states Sudan, Egypt, and Morocco in the Saudi quagmire in Yemen, along with several Gulf states.

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Burundi appears to be sliding into full-blown meltdown

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2015 Burundian Constitutional Crisis

Until recently, a major African ally of the United States and a purported model for other African nations. Now, a mass exodus from the capital, daily body dumps of assassinated figures, and a fracturing military.

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“Burundians flee capital over fears of violence” – France24, November 6, 2015:

Thousands of residents have fled the Burundian capital of Bujumbura in recent days over fears of escalating violence as the United Nations warned there was a risk that the central African country could slip back into civil war.
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Meanwhile, the Brussels-based International Crisis Group (ICG) also drew attention to dangerous “hardline rhetoric” in Burundi, drawing parallels with the hate-filled climate that led to the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

 
United Nations statement, via AllAfrica.com, November 7, 2015:

The statement said the Secretary-General is alarmed that in recent weeks, the discovery of the bodies of civilian victims, many apparently summarily executed, has become a regular occurrence in several neighbourhoods of Bujumbura, where just today, Welly Nzitonda, the son of prominent Burundian human rights defender Pierre-Claver Mbonimpa was found dead following his arrest by the police in the morning.

Further, Mr. Ban in the statement also condemned public statements that appear to be aimed at inciting violence or hatred towards different groups in Burundian society.

“Inflammatory rhetoric is reprehensible and dangerous; it will only serve to aggravate the situation in the country. [The Secretary-General] calls for accountability for those who have engaged in publicly inciting violence,” the statement said.

 

The ethnically mixed military from the 2005 peace accords, even in the face of a renegade coup attempt in May, had largely been a lone rock of stability in the face of mounting ethno-political tensions earlier this year. Less than a month ago, reports emerged that that too looks increasingly precarious…

“Burundi: Cracks Widen Within Burundi’s Army,” IRIN, October 12:

A recent post on a Burundi news blog by Thierry Vircoulon of the International Crisis Group (ICG) said the [integrated military] was “dangerously close to rupture.”

IRIN’s interviews with more than a dozen people, including leading Burundian civilians, analysts and members of the military, indicate that a faction of former Hutu rebels has embarked on a campaign of harassing, abducting, detaining, and in some cases killing, members of the army’s old guard, as well as others perceived to oppose President Pierre Nkurunziza, himself a former rebel leader.

 
This October assessment marks a stark contrast with International Crisis Group’s prior assessment that institutional divisions designed in by the Arusha Accords of 2005 “could ironically help the army stay together.”

One wonders if it could, after all, go the way of South Sudan’s “unified” military which has now splintered back into rival ethnic groups from the former rebel factions before independence.

The United States suspended military cooperation and its major training program in Burundi back in July. In August, the president openly announced his intention to expand “patriotic” teenage death squads.

Burundi president pledges to expand teen death squads

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2015 Burundian Constitutional Crisis

Agence France-Presse: “Groups threatening Burundi security must be destroyed: president”

Burundi’s president on Wednesday called for groups that threaten national security to be “destroyed”, setting a combative and hardline tone as he begins a controversial third term in office.

In a speech read out on state media, Pierre Nkurunziza said young people would be given “patriotic, theoretical and practical training” to work alongside the central African nation’s security forces.

“These mixed security committees will be asked to work day and night so that groups which seek to only kill and upset security, especially inside Bujumbura, will be destroyed and so that we won’t be talking about them two months from now,” he said.

He urged “all people to rise up as one, and to work with security forces so that this promise can be kept”.

 
Burundi has a very low median age — half the population is aged 17 or younger, according to the CIA World Factbook — although a number of other sub-Saharan African countries actually have even younger populations. Just shy of 1 in 10 people in Burundi is a young man or boy in the 15-24 age bracket.

Well before the violent election cycle the President had essentially created paramilitary teen death squads by arming teenage members of his political party’s “youth wing,” known as the Imbonerakure. This was particularly troubling to many in light of its similarities with the Interahamwe Hutu militias in neighboring Rwanda during its 1994 genocide. (Burundi’s ruling CNDD-FDD party is the political arm of a Hutu rebel force from its own civil war period.) The new announcement from President Nkurunziza can be interpreted as a call to expand these Burundian youth militias significantly.

In early July, UN Human Rights High Commissioner Zeid Raad al-Hussein specifically condemned the Imbonerakure’s role in the political violence surrounding the election:

He said his office has documented dozens of killings in the past two months, most of them shootings of demonstrators and human rights defenders by the youth wing and security forces. Zeid urged the government to disarm the Imbonerakure youth wing of the ruling CNDD-FDD party immediately.

 
Earlier, at the end of May, leaders of the other four East African Community member countries (that is, not including Burundi) met in Tanzania to discuss the crisis and issued a statement also spotlighting the Imbonerakure:

“The summit, concerned at the impasse in Burundi, strongly calls for a long postponement of the elections not less than a month and a half,” said the statement on Sunday.

The leaders also called for the “disarmament of all armed youth groups” and for the “creation of conditions for the return of refugees”.

 
The United States suspended one of its largest security training programs in Africa in response to widespread violence by Burundian security forces.

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Flag of Burundi

Remembering East Africa’s WWI fallen

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Did You Know: World War I included battles in East Africa by local conscripts and produced widespread famine in the East African colonial system…

More than one million people died in East Africa during World War One. Some soldiers were forced to fight members of their own families on the battlefield because of the way borders were drawn up by European colonial powers, writes Oswald Masebo.

 
There are still guns and other battlefield artifacts in place since 1916.

John Iliffe’s archival research suggests that Germany had about 15,000 soldiers in south-west Tanzania in 1916 out of whom about 3,000 were Germans and the remaining 12,000 were Tanzanians whose names are not recorded.

The Tanzanian carrier corps also played a central role in sustaining the war. Their story should be recovered.

It is estimated that during the peak of military operations in 1916 the German colonial state conscripted some 45,000 African carrier corps.

 
After the German colonies collapsed or were seized, many who had benefited from German colonization or had been forced to serve it had to hide their identities or change their stories to avoid being branded collaborators by fellow locals and the new British authorities.