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U.N. Rights Council Presses for Inquiry in Burundi
GENEVA — Responding to chilling accounts of mass killings in Burundi, the United Nations’ top human rights body on Thursday called for an international investigation of abuses as part of an effort to curb the violence and prevent a wider regional conflict.
“Burundi is at bursting point, on the very cusp of a civil war,” said Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, the United Nations human rights chief, at a special session of the Human Rights Council in Geneva. “The time for piecemeal responses and fiddling round the edges is over.”
The Human Rights Council’s 47 members, including 13 African states and all five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, unanimously backed a resolution that called for a team of independent experts to go to Burundi as soon as possible to investigate abuses and to report back in March.
The resolution was an attempt to avert the escalation of killings and prevent mass atrocities, Keith Harper, the United States ambassador to the council, told reporters after the session.
The council’s session echoed deepening alarm in the Security Council and in African capitals over the wave of killings by government security forces and other armed groups in Burundi since April, when protests started over President Pierre Nkurunziza’s decision to run for a third term.
At least 400 people have died as a result of the conflict in Burundi since April, many of them in extrajudicial killings, Mr. al-Hussein reported.
More than 3,496 people have been arrested, and human rights activists and independent journalists have fled in the course of a political turmoil that is also now creating a humanitarian crisis.
“There is a growing, alarming risk of regionalization of this crisis,” Mr. al-Hussein said, noting that about 220,000 people had fled to neighboring countries to escape the violence and intimidation that is catapulting Burundi back to its “deeply troubled, dark and horrendously violent past.”
The United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, on Wednesday decided to send a special envoy, Jamal Benomar, to Burundi and the region for urgent talks to defuse the crisis. The African Union’s Peace and Security Council posted a message on Twitter on Thursday saying that “Africa will NOT allow another Genocide to take place on its soil,” and calling for urgent action to stop the killings.
Mr. al-Hussein, the United Nations human rights chief, said the leadership in Burundi should disarm pro-government militias, halt torture and resume a dialogue with the political opposition. He added that sanctions, asset freezes and travel bans should be imposed on those responsible for abuses and that the country’s borders should be monitored, possibly using drones, to cut off the flow of arms.
The crisis calls for urgent, concerted, decisive attention from the international community, Mr. al-Hussein said, and “involvement of the International Criminal Court in this regard would be of great importance.”
Burundi’s population now lives in constant fear, witnessing extrajudicial executions on a daily basis, said Pierre Claver Mbonimpa, a prominent human rights activist who survived an assassination attempt in August. “Families no longer have the right to bury their dead, nor to mourn them,” Mr. Mbonimpa said.
At least 87 people were killed in the capital, Bujumbura, last Friday after unidentified gunmen attacked two military camps, Mr. al-Hussein said, and reports to his office suggested that the figure was much higher.
The police and security forces locked down opposition strongholds and conducted house-to-house searches, dragging young men from their houses and reportedly killing some of them on the spot, he said.
Opposition to the council’s resolution came only from Elisa Nkerabirori, a representative of Burundi’s Human Rights Ministry, who blamed the violence on radical members of the opposition and urban guerrillas, while praising the “professionalism” of the police and army.
“We have allegations that those individuals she’s calling professional tied people’s hands behind their back and shot them,” Mr. Harper, the American envoy, said to journalists in response to Ms. Nkerabirori’s remarks.
The inflammatory rhetoric coming from government leaders in recent weeks evoked memories of the genocide in Rwanda as well as Burundi’s 12-year civil war that left 300,000 people dead before it ended in 2005, Adama Dieng, the United Nations special adviser on genocide, reminded the council.
“We cannot afford to stand by as the international community did at that time,” he said.
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