More prisoners join strike action by detained soldiers

Thousands of detainees in Burundi's prisons on Monday joined a strike started on 9 July by soldiers held at Mpimba, the country's main prison in the capital, Bujumbura, to demand their unconditional release, according to statements issued from five prisons. The statements, issued from the prisons of Mpimba, Gitega, Ngozi, Muramvya and Ruyigi, said prisoners who considered themselves to be political prisoners had joined strike, which entails barring new detainees from entering the prisons and preventing others from appearing in court for the hearing of their cases. The striking prisoners, estimated to be at least 4,000, include government soldiers held over various crimes, including the 1993 coup d'etat; prisoners charged over the massacres or looting perpetrated in the course of the decade-long civil war; combatants from the former rebel Conseil national pour la defense de la democratie-Forces de defense de la democratie (CNDD-FDD) faction headed by Pierre Nkurunziza; combatants from the Forces nationales de liberation rebel factions; members of a Tutsi militia known by its French appelation, "sans echec" ("without restraint"; and members of a Hutu militia known as Generation démocratique burundaise (Burundi Democratic Generation). According to the statements, the prisoners have given the justice minister up to 2 August to look into their cases or they "would take other measures". Court hearings involving the detainees have been suspended since Monday as the striking detainees prevent others from appearing in court. The strikers have also prevented any new detainees from entering the prisons or any others from leaving. In the prison of the northwestern province of Bubanza, detainees have been on a hunger strike since Monday, and have refused all medical care until their demands are met. The detainees also want to be considered under a provisional immunity stipulated in the Peace and Reconciliation Accord signed in Arusha, Tanzania, in August 2000, and the global ceasefire accord. A military prisoner at Mpimba said that inasmuch as political leaders had been granted immunity, there was no way detainees who committed various offences under the direction of those leaders could remain in prison. "We simply refuse to be scapegoats," he said. A commission was set up on 23 March 2004 to look into the cases of the detainees and determine who should benefit from the provisional immunity. The commission's chairman, Elysée Ndaye, told reporters on Tuesday in Bujumbura that his team was mainly concerned with former CNDD-FDD combatants, CNDD-FDD militants, and government forces and their collaborators, a group of youth going by the name of Gardiens de la paix (Peace Guardians). The commission had proposed the release of 101 military prisoners and 1,370 CNDD-FDD combatants. However, so far, only 11 military prisoners and 443 combatants have been released since May. Pierre Claver Mbonimpa, the chairman of the Association Burundaise pour la defense des droits humains et les droits des détenus (Association for the Defence of Human Rights and the Rights of Detainees) told IRIN on Wednesday that the government was making a mistake by not extending the provisional immunity to the prisoners who had committed the same offences as political leaders. He said detainees accused of participation in the former CNDD-FDD rebel movement had been released, while those from other rebel movements were still detained. "If I were detained, I would start the same movement to claim my rights," he added. According to Mbonimpa, at least 7,000 people are detained in prisons across the country, 4,000 of them accused of crimes linked to the 1993 Burundian civil war following the assassination of the country's first democratically elected president, Melchior Ndadaye. Since then, civil war pitting the minority Tutsi government and several pro-Hutu rebel groups has claimed up to 300,000 lives and brought about the displacement of hundreds of thousands of other Burundians.