Skip to main content

SEAT THIGHT PRESIDENT CAUSES AU TROOPS TO VISIT COUNTRY

The African Union said on Friday it was preparing to send 5,000 peacekeepers to Burundi to protect civilians caught up in a growing crisis, for the first time using powers to deploy troops to a member country against its will.
Burundi dismissed the announcement, saying no foreign force would get in without permission. But its neighbours have grown increasingly alarmed about the violence in the central African state which the United Nations says is on the brink of civil war.

Tensions have been running particularly high since gunmen attacked military sites in the capital Bujumbura last week, unnerving a region where memories of the 1994 genocide in neighbouring Rwanda are still raw.

The African Union's Peace and Security Council said in a statement it had drawn up plans for the force - to be called MAPROBU - and had asked the U.N. Security Council to give it the final clearance it needed to get boots on the ground.

The U.N. Security Council has already been looking at ways to tackle the crisis, including sending in peacekeepers.
"(The AU body) decides that MAPROBU shall have an initial strength of up to 5,000 military personnel and police," as well as human rights observers and military experts, it added.
A diplomat told Reuters late on Thursday the resolution marked the first time the AU had decided to invoke its charter's Article 4, that gives the bloc the right to intervene in a member state "in respect of grave circumstances, namely: war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity".

Burundi's government spokesman, Philippe Nzobonariba, said the force would not be allowed in without permission. "They can't invade a country if the latter is not informed and allow it," he said on state radio.

"It would be better if they go to those camps in Rwanda where troublemakers train," Nzobonariba added. The government has accused Rwanda of supporting rebels who are recruiting Burundian refugees - a charge Rwanda denies.

The United Nations says at least 400 people have been killed since April when President Pierre Nkurunziza's decision to seek a third term in office triggered protests and a failed coup.
Rights groups have reported violent clashes between protesters and authorities, gun attacks and detentions of government critics. The government denies responsibility for any rights abuses.
Hundreds of thousands have fled the worst violence to hit the country since it emerged from an ethnically charged civil war in 2005.

Demonstrators said the president's decision to stand in an election he eventually won broke constitutional term limits, while his supporters pointed to a court ruling allowing his bid.
Much of the latest violence appears to be along political divides. But diplomats fear a prolonged conflict could reopen old ethnic rifts.

The civil war pitted the army, which was at the time led by minority Tutsis, against rebel groups of the Hutu majority, including one led by Nkurunziza - an ethnic split mirrored in Rwanda.
The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights accused Burundi's authorities on Thursday of dragging the country towards full-blown civil war and called for travel bans and asset freezes targeting key officials to try to halt the bloodshed

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Sphere

Photograph by Elena Saavedra Buckley. Once when I was about twelve I was walking down the dead-end road in Albuquerque where I grew up, around twilight with a friend. Far beyond the end of the road was a mountain range, and at that time of evening it flattened into a matte indigo wash, like a mural. While kicking down the asphalt we saw a small bright light appear at the top of the peaks, near where we knew radio towers to occasionally emit flashes of red. But this glare, blinding and colorless, grew at an alarming rate. It looked like a single floodlight and then a tight swarm beginning to leak over the edge of the summit. My friend and I became frightened, and as the light poured from the crest, our murmurs turned into screams. We stood there, clutching our heads, screaming. I knew this was the thing that was going to come and get me. It was finally going to show me the horrifying wiring that lay just behind the visible universe and that was inside of me too. And then, a couple se...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Year in Reading: Daniel Torday

I’ve been on leave from teaching this year, so it’s been a uniquely good 12 months of reading for me, a year when I’ve read for only one reason: fun. Now when I say fun … I’m a book nerd. So I tend to take on “reading projects.” The first was to work toward becoming a Joseph Conrad completist. I’m almost there. I warmed up with critic Maya Jasanoff ’s The Dawn Watch: Conrad in a Global World , which granted me permission to remember the capacious scope of his perspective, his humanistic genius. His masterwork was hard work, but Nostromo belongs on the shelf of both the most important and most difficult of the 20th century. The Secret Agent blew the top of my head off—it’s funny and deeply relevant to our moment, about a terrorist bombing gone horribly wrong. Under Western Eyes is all I got left. 2018 isn’t over yet. But then much fun came in reading whatever, whenever. That started with a heavy dose of Denis Johnson . The new posthumous collection of his short stories, The Lar...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Historical Future of Trans Literature

  Whatever happens against custom we say is against Nature, yet there is nothing whatsoever which is not in harmony with her. May Nature’s universal reason chase away that deluded ecstatic amazement which novelty brings to us.  —Michel de Montaigne If you were trying to get anywhere in the late thirteenth century, the Hereford Mappa Mundi would not have been particularly helpful; the map is rife with topographical omissions, compressions, and errors—the most egregious of which is perhaps the mislabeling of Africa as Europe and vice-versa. Of course, as any medievalist will tell you, mappa mundi were not intended for cartographic accuracy anyway. Rather, they were pictorial histories, encyclopedias of the world’s mythological and theological narratives, records of medical fact and fable. Notable places—Carthage, Rome, Jerusalem, Alexandria, Jericho—appeared, but their placement on the map emphasized their symbolic import, rather than their geographical specificity. Thus, ...
Post a Comment
Read more