Bad news from Burundi

On Twitter on Saturday 2 November 2019 at 1.21pm Sydney time I saw a tweet from @iBurundi that went, “Burundi controversial ruler @pnkurunziza plans to create an exclusive law for only himself. He reportedly wants to have a special status that will transcend the government ‘when he leaves’ his current role in August 2020. He wants to become a monarch.” Until 1.55pm on that day the only tweets that had appeared with the #Burundi hashtag were one about soccer and one about a Burundi ambassador on an official visit although it was very early in the morning in Burundi. 

When I saw a tweet about Evangelique Inamahoro I asked a few direct questions. She had been shot outside her home by a man on a motorcycle – who shot her? why? Five minutes later I got a call from a man. We agreed to meet and I gave him a location that suited me. On 7 November I went there in the early evening and waited until a man wearing a purple shirt came up to me. He greeted me politely and I suggested going to my house but he didn’t want that so we went to a café and sat down. I ordered a flat white and he ordered a sparkling mineral water. The waitress also brought a bottle of tap water for us to drink, and two glasses with it.

He said that the government of Burundi – a nation of 10 million people – is abusing human rights. “They talk to God everyday but they behave like monsters,” he said. There would be elections held in 2020 and the president – a man named Pierre Nkurunziza – would try to run again for office even though he had already had the allowed two terms in office. He had been brought to power initially in 2005 and there had been elections in 2010, which he had won, and in 2015. Now, he had extended the presidential term to seven years and said that the first term he had served – after being elected by a limited franchise of people acting as an “electoral college” – did not count.

This part of the story matched what I had learned online. For example at about 2pm on Saturday 2 November a tweet appeared from a person named MissyMunezer (with 909 followers) who used the #Burundi hashtag and said, “Nkurunziza replacing the few who might resist his succession roadmap: Steve Ntakarutimana has been silenced & replaced by a loyal Ndakugarika. What will be Niyongabo army Chief of Staff[‘s] fate?” Her tweet, a retweet from a person named Albert Rudatsimburwa, contained an image of the same official letter that had appeared in the tweet already mentioned. The letter appears below. Rudatsimburwa has “Rwanda” as his place of residence in his Twitter profile. He has about 41,900 followers.

Apart from these two tweets, the hashtag had gone virtually silent for an hour, and it wasn’t clear, even then, that Twitter had not been shut down. MissyMunezer might have been using a clever means to bypass a block but I don’t know enough about the internet to accurately speculate as to why her tweet had gotten through when everyone else in the country, it seemed, had suddenly shut up. Perhaps she was accessing her account overseas?

I asked the man I met, and he said that he wasn’t sure if Twitter had been blocked by the government of Burundi but that people were telling him that YouTube had been blocked in the country.

The tweet about the dead woman went, “Évangélique Inamahoro, a mother of 3 children[,] was shot and killed at home in Kanyosha by two assaillants [sic] who took off on a motorcycle.” It had gone up on Friday 1 November at 12.15am Australian Eastern Daylight Time, which would have been on Thursday evening in Burundi.

The document shown in the above image is a letter from the presidency of the republic, the secretary-general of the government. It is titled, “Press release from the meeting of the council of ministers of Wednesday 30 October 2019.” The document says:

The council of ministers met this Wednesday 30 October 2019 under the leadership of his excellency the president of the republic, Mr Pierre Nkurunziza.

The following points were discussed:

1. Legislative project carrying modification of the law No. 1/20 of 9 December 2004 in regard to the status of the head of the state at the termination of his functions, presented by the minister for justice, of civil protection and keeper of the seals.

The head of state is an important figure for the country. During the exercise of his functions and even at the termination of the same, he deserves to be treated with dignity. 

Therefore, the legitimacy of the head of state depends on the manner whereby he gained power. A president who acceded to power by a coup d’état or by the simple consensus of a group of politicians should not be treated the same as a president who has been democratically elected. 

The law in force relating to the status of the head of state at the end of his functions has not made a distinction with regard to that which concerns the treatment reserved for the old heads of state relating to the manner in which they have come to power. 

The current project wants to make such a distinction. It will also conform to the Constitution in foreseeing the benefit of replacing the privilege of automatically incorporating the Senate, which shall no longer figure in the Constitution.

After discussion, the project was adopted with a number of changes.

I tried contacting the shadowy black man again. In March 2020 we exchanged some words in WhatsApp and I tried again this year but with no success. The things he’d told me were still in my mind. Teachers who rape their students with impunity. People being imprisoned. Refugees fleeing across borders to safety in other countries. It all became relevant in January this year when Margaret Court had her honours upgraded – her husband Barry is Burundi’s consul in Perth – and while I’d had no luck getting the mainstream media interested in his story back in 2019, I thought it might fly now that Court was in the news. Hence this blogpost.

I asked @iBurundi about the 2020 election – Nkurunziza had died in 2020 and a new president was now leading the country – and the account sent me a link to a UN website that chronicles abuses at the election. “Elections happened but they weren’t free or fair,” the account operator told me via DM. The report’s summary contains this:

Numerous serious human rights violations have been documented since May 2019 in connection with the 2020 elections. The perpetrators were seeking to deprive the main opposition party of any chance of winning the election. These violations were mainly committed by members of the Imbonerakure youth league of the ruling party and by local officials who continue to enjoy nearly total impunity. Officers of the National Intelligence Service and the police often participated in or supported such violations or, in the case of the police, sometimes stood by and allowed the perpetrators to act. The judiciary has also taken part in this repression.

The “Imbonerakure” is a terrorist group. Anyone who wants a copy of the UN’s PDF with their report, please contact me and I will email it to you. Burundi’s problems continue and Barry Court continues to be associated with a dangerous regime.