Minister explains transition agreement

Burundi’s Peace Process Minister Ambroise Niyonsaba on Tuesday told journalists that the government had found itself in a situation where it was “in a minority, that it was alone and had to accept the setting up of the transitional institutions because alone it could not hold for long”. “We did everything,” Burundi radio quoted Niyonsaba as saying. “To begin with, at the time of the signing of the agreement we expressed some reservations, the most important of which was the lack of the ceasefire,” he explained. “However, we were reduced to a minority by the signatories themselves. Apart from one party or two...everybody else demanded the immediate setting up of the transitional institutions,” he said. “Everybody accused the government of being the obstacle.”

He also said that foreign troops which will be deployed in the country to observe an eventual ceasefire would be a “very small force which should not scare anybody”. “To give an illustration, I would like to tell you that only a 3,500-strong force was sent to the DRC, which is 80 times larger than Burundi. One would imagine that in Burundi we should have very small force and this should not scare anybody since its mission would not be to fight but to help,” Niyonsaba added.