Milestone on Road Towards Burundi Peace

Thirteen of the 19 warring parties of Burundi signed in Arusha, northern Tanzania on Monday a historic peace agreement aimed at ending a seven-year civil conflict in the country.

Among the signatories are the Burundi government, the Burundi National Assembly, seven Hutu parties and four major Tutsi parties.

The 175-page Arusha Peace and Reconciliation Agreement, a blueprint for founding a new Burundi characterized by peace, democracy and equality, sets up a milestone on the road for a lasting peace in the war-torn tiny central African state.

The agreement contains five protocols dealing with nature of the conflicts, democracy and good governance, peace and security, reconstruction and development, and guarantees on agreement implementation.

"We are determined to put aside our differences in all the manifestations in order to promote the factors that are common to us and which unite us, and to work together for the realization of the higher interests of the people of Burundi," the agreement reads.

With a territory of only 26,000 square kilometers and a little more than six million inhabitants, Burundi has witnessed five military coups which killed two of its seven presidents since independence in 1962.

More than 200,000 Burundians, mostly civilian, have been killed and about 300,000 fled to neighboring countries since October 1993 when Burundi's first democratically elected president Melchior Ndadaye, a Hutu, was assassinated by pro-Tutsi soldiers.

The fifth coup on July 25, 1996 brought Major Pierre Buyoya, a Tutsi by ethnic, again to power, inflicting all-out economic sanctions by neighboring states effective on July 31, 1996.

Official statistics show that the current bloody civil war has brought 40 years back the country's economic and social development, making it among the 10 poorest countries in the world with a per capita gross domestic product of only 106 U.S. dollars in 1999.

It is recognized in the agreement that the long-term turmoil in Burundi was rooted deeply into the past colonial period. During the pre-colonial period, all the ethnic groups inhabiting Burundi owed allegiance to the same monarch and everyone recognized himself as Burundi.

But under the colonial administration, first German and then Belgian, since 1890, the ethnic awareness was enhanced by propping up the Tutsis, who account for 14 percent of the total population, over the Hutus, who account for 85 percent, with the intention of instigating political violence.

From that period through to the present, the minority Tutsis have been monopolizing the leadership in political, economic and military sectors with the majority Hutus under their rule, incurring widespread resentment.

A difficult national reconciliation in Burundi took a turn for the better in June 1998 as Tanzanian founding president Julius Nyerere initiated the peace talks in the northern Tanzanian town of Arusha to provide a forum for all the warring parties to explore ways on a equal basis for ending the conflicts.

The peace talks were encouraged by the Great Lakes region states which suspended in January 1999 their economic sanctions against Burundi. However, the sudden death of Nyerere of Leukemia in October 1999 brought the talks to a deadlock.

With the support of the Great Lakes region and the international community, former South African president Nelson Mandela succeeded Nyerere as the new facilitator. Mandela managed to resume the peace talks, paid two visits to Burundi on site probing, and invited the armed rebels active in Burundi to carry forward the on-going peace process.

Mandela, a 82-year-old anti-apartheid hero, presented a draft peace agreement to the negotiators, culminating in the signing ceremony on August 28.

However, it should be pointed out that a peaceful future is still under the threat by some instability factors.

Firstly, two main pro-Hutu armed rebel groups, the CNDD-FDD and the PALIPEHUTU-FNL, have stayed away from the peace talks from the very beginning and refused to join the signatories, casting a shadow on the smooth and effective implementation of the agreement.

Secondly, the final agreement retains what all the parties agree with as well as those they do not. The disagreement, especially on the arrangements of cease-fire and transitional leadership, may leave the agreement a pact without cease-fire.

Thirdly, many negotiators at the peace talks complained that a final peace agreement probably would bring instability, instead of peace, to the future generations if it was not discussed and debated thoroughly but rushed for signing.

Observers here said if peace is not set on a solid base, Burundi Tutsis would probably suffer the tragedy like that happened in neighboring Rwanda in 1994 when more than half a million civilians, mostly Tutsis who shared the ruling power with Hutus, were brutally killed.

A perpetual solution of the Burundian conflict is that the ruling power should be fairly and reasonably distributed between the two ethnic tribes, they said.

All the parties, including the facilitation team, should undertake discussion patiently and meticulously to try to find the road to a lasting peaceful coexistence, they warned.

Nevertheless, the signing of the peace agreement shows that the African states have improved their conflict-solving abilities and that the Burundians are more and more tired of the endless bloodshed and are increasingly admiring peace and development.

Laying a milestone in the history of Burundi, the Arusha peace agreement reminds the Burundians of the long way ahead to a peaceful and destination, which commands courage and vision.



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