Burundi in 2004
Burundi in 2004
Area: 27,816 sq km (10,740 sq mi)
Population (2004 est.): 6,231,000 (excluding about 500,000 refugees in Tanzania)
Capital: Bujumbura
Head of state and government: President Domitien Ndayizeye
In late 2003 the oppositional Forces for Defense of Democracy (FDD) signed peace accords, but the Hutu rebel group, the National Liberation Front (FNL), single-handedly maintained the civil war in Burundi by continuing to attack government troops and civilians throughout most of 2004. The agreement brokered in November 2003 brought about peace to all of Burundi’s 17 provinces except one, which suffered clashes between FNL forces and the country’s army.
As many as 27,000 people were displaced and 21 persons were killed in April 2004 when fighting erupted between FNL rebels and the army near the capital, Bujumbura. By May the FDD had pulled out of the coalition government. In June a flood of 30,000 refugees crossed into Burundi from Bukavu in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to escape attacks. Many of the Congolese refugees were Tutsi. On August 13 the FNL launched a well-organized nighttime assault on Gatumba camp, a UN refugee centre near Burundi’s western border, from an over-the-border base in the DRC. Rebels shot or hacked to death more than 160 refugees, most of them Tutsi women and children. The FNL claimed responsibility for the assault. The Burundi and Rwandan governments threatened to invade the DRC to disarm Hutu rebels sheltered there. A month after the assault on the camp, many of the refugees returned to the DRC amid concerns from the UN that their safety was still at stake.
The coalition government, which shared power between the majority Hutu and the minority Tutsi, was dealt a blow in August in Pretoria, S.Af., when the FDD and 10 Tutsi-led groups refused to sign the power-sharing agreement. During 2004 more than 52,000 refugees returned to Burundi as part of a United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees effort to repatriate the 500,000 Burundians who had fled the country since 1993. Ahead of elections planned for October, the five-member Independent National Elections Commission was appointed in early September. The elections, later postponed until April 2005, were the final step in the three-year peace process to end the decade-long civil war that had claimed more than 300,000 lives.
Mary F.E. Ebeling