Svenska Dagbladet rapporterade på kvällen 19/12 under rubriken ”AU skickar 5 000 soldater till Burundi” att Afrikanska unionen har beslutat att sända 5 000 fredsbevarande soldater till Burundi för att skydda civilbefolkningen. Det är första gången AU sätter in militär i en medlemsstat utan landets medgivande.” Av artikeln nedan ser man att Burundis ledare nog är alltför självständig i USA-imperialismens smak. Burundi har en liten yta, som landskapet Småland, – men en befolkning som är större än Sveriges. Vad som sker där nu är viktigt och illavarslande.

Bilden från SvD visar hur ”Burundisk polis samlar ihop beslagtagna vapen i Bujumbura efter sammandrabbningar tidigare i veckan.” Foto: Jean Pierre Aime Harerimana/Reuters

Aftonbladet skrev 23/12 ”Rebellrörelserna i Burundi samlar sig för att kasta president Pierre Nkurunziza ur sadeln. Enligt besked på onsdagen tänker de göra gemensam sak under namnet Forebu – Burundis republikanska styrkor, i fransk förkortning….Afrikanska unionen (AU) vill skicka en fredsbevarande styrka på 5 000 man, men Burundis regering avfärdar det som ett invasionsförsök… Den 28 december hålls fredssamtal i Uganda. AU kommer då att pressa Burundis ledning att acceptera en afrikansk fredsstyrka.”

Även Blankspot ger en mycket negativ bild av Burundis president. https://www.blankspotproject.se/reportage/skymning-over-bujumbura/

Har vi här en afrikansk ledare med diktaturfasoner och en bra opposition? Mycket talar för att det främst inte är så.

SvD skrev vidare ”Afrikanska unionen ger regeringen i Burundis huvudstad Bujumbura fyra dagar på sig att acceptera styrkan, men varnar att man i vilket fall skickar soldater. AU-styrkan har fått mandat att ”hindra varje försämring av säkerhetssituationen” och att skydda civila.

Samtidigt meddelar USA:s finansdepartement att sanktioner har införts mot ytterligare fyra högt uppsatta burundiska ledare, som misstänks för att understödja våldshandlingar. Burundis medborgare har fått genomlida avskyvärda konsekvenser av den här krisen, säger departementets talesperson enligt nyhetsbyrån AFP. USA har även tidigare infört sanktioner mot flera uppsatta ledare, bland andra landets säkerhetsminister Alain Guillaume Bunyoni, rankad som den näst mest inflytelserika makthavaren i Burundi.

Minst 400 personer har dödats och nästan 3 500 människor har gripits i de oroligheter som utlöstes i våras när president Pierre Nkurunziza i strid med grundlagen meddelade att han gick till val för en tredje mandatperiod. Minst 20 000 personer har flytt landet sedan oroligheterna startade. Tidigare i veckan sade FN:s generalsekreterare Ban Ki-Moon att Burundi befinner sig ”på randen av ett inbördeskrig som riskerar att uppsluka hela regionen.”

Bakgrund.
Gearóid Ó Colmáin ger en bakgrund i en artikel i Globalresearch

”Since protests broke out in Burundi’s capital Bujumbura in April 25th 2015 against the decision of the ruling party to nominate the country’s leader Pierre Nkurunziza for a third term as president, the international press has published reports suggesting that the country is on the verge of civil war, as president Nkurunziza, portrayed as a dictator attempting to hold on to power, is confronted with an ever increasing movement of ‘peaceful protesters’, ‘human rights’ and ‘civil society’ activists who have an almost absolute monopoly on reportage concerning Burundi’s electoral controversy.
While the mainstream media continue to report on the activities of the ‘peaceful protesters’ who have lynched and murdered suspected members of the imbonerakure, the youth wing of the National Council for the Defense of Democracy, the country’s ruling party, the massive and entirely peaceful demonstrations by hundreds of thousands of government supporters have been completely ignored. [1]
It seems a consensus has rapidly been reached concerning who the good and bad guys are in this conflict. But all is not what is seems. In fact, the East African nation is currently experiencing the culmination of a US/EU backed regime change programme which has been conducted as a low-intensity media and covert operations war since 2005. The objective of this war is to redraw the map of the resource-rich Great Lake’s region of Central Africa in accordance with Western corporate and geostrategic interests.

Vem är president Pierre Nkurunziza?

Pierre Nkurunziza joined the National Council for the Defense of Democracy, Forces for the Defense for Democracy (CNDD-FDD) after the brutal murder of left-wing president Melchior Ndadaye in 1993, the country’s first democratically elected leader who stemmed from the Hutu, ethnic majority in the former German and Belgian colony. Burundi was traditionally ruled by the Tutsi minority ethnic group, whose elites ruled the country in the interests of European colonialism. Nkurunziza lost many members of his own family during the genocide of the Hutus by the Tutsi military regime which plunged the country into a decade long civil war causing the death of over 300,000 people.

Nkurunziza’s rebel movement signed an agreement with the Tutsi-dominated government of Burundi in Arusha, Tanzania in August 2000, according to which a transition government of power-sharing between Hutus, Tutsis and Twa would be put in place.

Although in power since 2005, sensu strictu, the country only became a democracy during the election of 2010, where Nkurunziza’s CNDD won a landslide victory. It is on this basis that Burundi’s constitutional council, the supreme legal authority in the country, judged correctly that the incumbent has the right to be nominated for another electoral term.

Western backed opposition activists have admitted that the government has not violated the constitution, but insist instead that the constitutional council is corrupt as its members were nominated by the president. No one would claim, for example, that the French constitutional council is corrupt because its members are nominated by the President of the French Republic. But in the case of Africa, constitutional councils are regularly scoffed at by Western powers when their decisions do not conform to neo-colonial interests and neo-colonial interests, not disputes over interpretations of the country’s constitution, are the key issue in the current Burundian crisis.

Since coming to power in 2005, Pierre Nkurunziza has done a remarkable job in re-uniting and re-building a country ruined by internecine war.

Education has been a key focus of the Nkurunziza administration. Burundi has built more schools since 2007 than any previous government since independence almost 50 years ago. Nkurunziza wants to transform Burundi’s economy into a major exporter of fruit and has implemented an ambitious fruit tree plantation programme to this effect.
The Burundian president spends much of his time doing manual work with the peasants of Burundi. After coming to power, the Burundian government passed a law according to which citizens are required to preform community labour on Saturdays in order to expedite the construction of vital public infrastructure.A key role in this endeavour is played by the Imbonerakure, the youth wing of the ruling CNDD party.

The Burundian government has made modest progress in reducing poverty, and has promised to increase economic growth from 4.5 percent to 8.5 percent from 2015 from investments made in nickel mining, fruit production and tourism.

Since 2005 gross domestic product levels have increased significantly. In 2012 Nkurunziza won the Pan-African prize for the fight against Malaria. [2] This has been due to the construction of health centres throughout the country, the provision of free health care for children under five years old and pregnant mothers.

Deeply patriotic and highly popular, having fought a long battle for his country’s liberation, Nkurunziza has succeeded in creating a modest form of national voluntarism, nascent self-reliance and a sense of optimism about the country’s future. He has increased ties with China, India and Brazil, taking advantage of inter-imperialist rivalry for access to African markets by signing several important trade deals with Japan.
Due to the implacable hostility of the neocolonial powers and their press agencies, Burundi will now most likely have no choice but to increase its links with the BRICS powers. Nkurunziza’s decision in 2010 to sign an agreement with Beijing that provides for closer Sino-Burundian military cooperation is of tremendous significance. Closer relations with China will enable Burundi to strengthen its defense forces from what Burundian patriots refer to as the BHBFC, the Burundi-Hima-Belgian-French Connection, that is to say, the incessant hostility of the neo-colonial powers and their local collaborators.

Who are the Burundian opposition?
The opposition party Movement for Solidary and Democracy (MSD), part of the umbrella organization, the Alliance for Democratic Change Ikibiri (ADC Ikibiri) is led by Alexis Sinduhije, a protégé of US ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power. In the general election of 2010 the The MSD gained a mer 4 percent of the popular vote. They claimed the elections were unfair, in spite of the fact that international observers did not report any irregularities. Sinduhije does not fear violence from the Burundian government but, on the contrary, the Burundian government does fear violence from Sinduhije and his armed bandits. [3]

Sinduhije has been accused of terrorism by the Burundi governmentafter it was revealed that he was forcibly recruiting youths in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Eastern Kivu region for the formation of a rebel group with a view to seizing power in Bujumbura.

The MSD leader was arrested in Tanzania in January 2012 where he was accused of forming a terrorist group for the invasion of Burundi. He was subsequently released by the Tanzanian authorities and escaped to Europe,where human rights groups closely linked to the US State Department and Western intelligence agencies such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have hailed him as a champion of ‘human rights.’

Sinduhije does have the support of the European Union and the United States, who never wanted the Hutu majority to rule Burundi, as imperial divide and rule policy dictates that post-colonial countries should remain internally divided on ethnic lines with a militarized minority constituting a neo-colonial comprador bourgeoisie eternally dependent on their foreign masters.

A 2011 UN report on the situation in Eastern Congo identifies many of the so-called Burundian oppositionists as involved in smuggling of gold and terrorizing the inhabitants of Southern Kivu.

Notwithstanding the official criminal evidence against the Burundian ‘opposition’, however, the ‘international community’ chooses to present them as heroes attempting to free their country from ‘corruption’. [4] None of these fake opposition parties should be confused with the 17 democratically elected deputies of the opposition party Uprona. As in the case of Syria, one must distinguish between the legally constituted opposition and the US and European sponsored gangster networks posing as oppositionists.

Presidentval i Afrika

I flera stater i Afrika finns en strid om återval av presidenter. Utan protester från Väst då dessa presidenter för en politik som kan gynna Västs ekonomiska intressen. Ann Garrison diskuterar detta i en artikel. Jag citerar här bara ett utdrag ”Presidential succession struggles continue in many nations on the African continent, including the vastly resource rich Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and its neighbors to both the east and west. The succession struggles in the DRC’s neighbors are important to the DRC as well, because so many of its neighbors, most of all Rwanda and Uganda, have invaded DRC, leaving millions dead and plundering its resources during the past two decades. President Obama and the U.S. State Department, however, express far more concern with the presidential succession struggle in Burundi than with those in Uganda and Rwanda, or in the Republic of Congo and the Democratic Republic of the Congo itself. President Obama has even excluded Burundi fromt the African Growth and Opportunity Act trade agreement.”

i Andra om: Burundi, Rwanda, demokrati,Kongo, imperialism, desinformation, Krig, USA, Politik, FN, massmedia FN-stadgan opposition, terrorism

SvD 19/12 Aftonbladet 23/12 Stödjer USA terrorism i Burundi Ann Garrison Stars and Stripes Blankspot