Crisis and repression in Burundi: one year later

It has now been a year since last April 25 Pierre Nkurunziza, to power in Burundi since 2005, announced he would run for a third term in presidential elections despite the fact that Constitution provided for a limit of two.
The new nomination and subsequent Nkurunziza re-election have unleashed a wave of violence across the country, so far resulting in 439 confirmed victims and forcing more than 250 thousand people to flee their homes to seek shelter in overcrowded refugee camps in Tanzania, Rwanda, Uganda and DR Congo.
The current situation is described in the last Burundi Crisis Watch carried out by International Crisis Group (ICG). The influential Brussels observatory warned that violence in the country has increased while the government, under international pressure, has made only cosmetic concessions the opposition, but continued repression.
The ICG naturally takes account of the deteriorating political crisis and violent reprisals that in recent months Nkurunziza has unleashed against his opponents and their supporters in neighboring Rwanda.

The resolution of the Security Council

An alarming scenario, which last April 1 prompted the UN Security Council to unanimously adopt the resolution n. 2279, submitted by France to ask the sending and the deployment of police forces to protect the civilian population in Burundi.
The resolution followed by the opening of Bujumbura government, which welcomed the green light by the highest political organ of the United Nations to sending a UN force to stop the violence in the country.
However, it must consider that the resolution does not provide for the deployment of peacekeeping forces, which according to the Burundian opposition could prevent the outbreak of another civil war.
On the substance of the case, last Friday, the Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon presented a report to the Security Council. In the eleven pages of the document, Ban Ki-moon expressed his concern about security in the country, calling it “precarious and alarming” and pointing out that the deployment of a new force would be “the only option capable of providing physical protection to the population”.
However, the text produced shows that the deployment of a police force on the ground could take several months and would involve considerable logistical challenges.
There are three options provided. The first includes the sending of three thousand men to provide physical protection to the population, but the logistics appears complicated and more Burundian President has already returned to sender. The second reduces sending to no more than fifty units, while the third sending 228 agents for working in synergy with human rights activists and the 100 African Union observers already in place.
So far, it is certain that the United Nations seem determined to prevent the situation deteriorates even further, after that the African Union has abandoned plans to intervene with a peacekeeping mission, because of the organization internal reluctance.
No wonder that at the UN are trying to speed up the process, since the situation in the country remains critical and non-governmental organizations continue to report numerous violations of human rights, summary executions and targeted assassinations. Not to mention, the satellite photos of the five possible sites of mass graves published in late January by Amnesty International.

Brutal torture

In addition, on Tuesday, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Jordanian Ra’ad Zeid al Hussein, reported the sharp rise in the use of torture in the country, where since the start of the violence have been recorded 595 cases of torture and ill-treatment, 345 of which from the beginning of the year.
Hussein explained, however, that the real numbers are probably higher and that most of the violations have occurred in facilities run by the Burundian intelligence services, which allow offenders to remain “unpunished”.
A survey published last April 10 in the British newspaper Guardian, shows the experiences of violence suffered by people from different parts of the country. In some areas, the repression became so common that in some areas young men would stay inside their homes for weeks at a time, to avoid being picked up in the street by chasing rebel militias.
The most common forms of torture range from the security forces’ use of bayonets to slash and stab to the gruesomely obscure. Several recounted militias tying tubs of water to men’s penises with a short string and forcing them to stand up and down, their genitals strained by the weight.
The perpetrators of many atrocities are masked, anonymous men, but a name that recurs repeatedly in the stories of the abuse is that of ‘Imbonerakure’, the feared youth group of the ruling party, which is apparently trying to turn the conflict into an ethnic one. 
@afrofocus