Arusha accord “on verge of collapse”

With the international focus on peace moves in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), an “explosive situation” in neighbouring Burundi is being largely ignored, regional analysts warned on Friday.

Burundi analyst Jan van Eck of the Pretoria-based Centre for International Policy Studies painted a gloomy picture of the prospects for peace in the country, stressing that the Arusha peace accord was on the verge of collapse and there was a real prospect of Burundi returning to full-scale war.

“The situation is extremely dangerous,” he told IRIN. “Unless the parties [negotiating in Arusha] develop a greater realism, we will lose the whole Arusha process.” He said the spirit of compromise had been lost, with all the parties playing their own card and growing polarisation between “those who want to keep power and those who want to take power”. He believed the army however was rallying around the government, afraid of a transitional government that would be even more unstable than the current one.

“The negotiations on the transition should be between the government and the [opposition] FRODEBU-led political group, including the rebels who have been excluded from the peace process from the beginning,” he said. “If they don’t accept each other, I can’t see any progress and there will be a permanent deadlock.”

Van Eck told IRIN that a regional anti-Tutsi alliance was developing, as Burundian rebels and other Hutu rebellions based in the DRC were now moving their strongholds to Burundi and Tanzania with the ultimate objective of toppling the governments in Burundi, Rwanda and Uganda. Once the Burundi government - seen as the weakest of the three - had been overthrown, the country could then be used to launch attacks on the other two. Van Eck said Rwanda was very worried by the situation and warned that it would not stand back and watch if its borders were threatened. “The war is shifting from Congo to Burundi and if this happens, it is inevitable there will be some attacks on the [Burundi] refugee camps in Tanzania,” he said.

Van Eck emphasised the point in a recently-issued report on the threat to the Burundi peace process. “Unless the international community can persuade Tanzania to do something soon about the destabilising situation in these camps, situated within 5 km of the Burundian border, nobody should be surprised if - sooner rather than later - either ‘some unofficial elements’ from Burundi, or even more official ones, are provoked into resorting to military action against those refugee camps which are being used by the armed movements,” he said.
He stressed that the current situation on the Tanzania-Burundi border was similar to that of the border between Rwanda and Zaire from 1994-1996. “The international community was also regularly warned by Rwanda to take action against the armed groups who were using the refugee camps just across the border in Zaire...but the world ignored all these warnings,” the report stated. “The result: Rwanda invaded Zaire to solve the problem itself.”

“As the war in Burundi escalates and the prospects of a real peace decline on a daily basis, nobody should be surprised if the Rwandan example is repeated,” the report said. {Full copy of report available from [email protected] ].

[See also IRIN report of 18 April 2001: “BURUNDI: Peace in Congo may prolong war in Burundi” http://www.reliefweb.int/IRIN/cea/countrystories/burundi/20010418d.phtml]