Tag: Rwanda’s Mahama Refugee Camp

U.S. U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, the U.S. State Department, the E.U. and Belgium have fiercely advocated for the deployment of 5,000 African Union troops in Burundi, whether Burundi agrees or not. Senegalese diplomat Ibrahima Fall, the African Union’s special representative to the African Great Lakes Region, told Radio France International that deploying AU troops without Burundi’s consent was “unimaginable.”

The argument over atrocities committed in Bujumbura, the capital of the East African nation of Burundi, continues. Who is responsible and why is it happening? Western policymakers, press and some Burundian opposition figures accuse the government of President Pierre Nkurunziza and call for an intervention by African Union troops that Burundi has said it will respond to as invaders. KPFA’s Ann Garrison has more.

Western press and officials now warn that the Rwandan massacres of 1994 are close to a replay in Rwanda’s neighbor Burundi, which shares its Hutu-Tutsi-Twa demographic. In “Burundi’s dangerous neighbor,” a letter to the Washington Post, former U.N. official Jeff Drumtra argues that the Rwandan government’s conscription of Burundian refugees to fight in a new, so-called “rebel force” is a grave danger that the international community should recognize before it’s too late.