Parliament passes genocide law

Legislators in Burundi voted 99-3 on Tuesday in favour of a bill repressing genocide and other crimes of war. There were 26 abstentions. "This law will enable [Burundi] to break with the culture of impunity," Terence Sinunguruza, the minister of foreign affairs, told parliament. He was one of the drafters of the bill when he was justice minister. The law provides for the constitution of an international judicial commission of enquiry for crimes committed between 1 July 1962 and the date of law’s promulgation. Following adoption of the bill, the leader of an association against genocide, known as AC Genocide, said he was "deeply disappointed" that the law was neither applicable for "the past genocide" nor for "the present or a future genocide." The AC Genocide leader, Venant Bamboneyeho, told IRIN that a "neutral" commission carried out an enquiry in 1996 and determined that genocide was committed against ethnic Tutsis in 1993 after the killing of President Melchior Ndadaye, a democratically elected Hutu. Bamboneyeho said a report of the enquiry was forwarded to the UN Security Council. "It is meaningless, we cannot [effectively] investigate crimes committed over a period of 40 years, we can investigate within a well-determined period when the crime was committed and recognised as such [because] in Burundi, genocide against Tutsis occurred in 1993," Bamboneyeho said. The adoption of the law was among the conditions that President Pierre Buyoya set out to fulfil before 1 May when he is due to hand over to his successor, current Vice-President Domitien Ndayizeye. The law was one of the conditions of as three-year transitional government in the war-torn country. The Burundian parliament also adopted on Wednesday a law on the formation of a truth and reconciliation commission.