Yearbook 2009
Burundi. A more than two decades-long civil war ended in January when the last remaining Huturebel National Liberation Forces (FNL) announced that they had canceled the armed struggle. In return, the government released 247 imprisoned FNL members. The complicated civil war in Burundi is estimated to have killed some 300,000 people. See ABBREVIATIONFINDER for abbreviation BI which stands for the nation of Burundi.
In April, FNL was registered as a political party and declared its intention to participate in the 2010 parliamentary elections. Before that, the disarmament of the former militia had been initiated under the surveillance of soldiers from the African Union. Under the peace agreement, 3,500 people would be included in the army and the national police, and an additional 5,000 would be paid for 18 months while searching for other jobs.
| Land area | 27,830 km² |
| Total population | 11,865,821 |
| Population density (per km²） | 426.4 |
| Capital | Gitega |
| Official language | Kirundi, French |
| Income per capita | 700 USD |
| Currency | Burundi Franc |
| ISO 3166 code | BI |
| Internet TLD | .bi |
| License plate | RU |
| Telephone code | +257 |
| Time zone UTC | + 2 |
| Geographic coordinates | 3 30 S, 30 00 O |
After lengthy negotiations, Parliament was able to agree on a new election law in September. The members were subjected to severe pressure from the outside world to reach an agreement not to jeopardize the elections in 2010. Other countries’ governments account for 80 percent of the costs of the equivalent of about SEK 300 million to conduct the election. The new law provides that all political posts from president to municipal leader must be elected in general elections.
According to countryaah, nine people were sentenced to prison, one by one for life, for the murder of at least twelve albinos. The victims had been mutilated and sold to witch doctors in neighboring Tanzania, where rumors of magical properties of albinos’ body parts were widely circulated.
History
The instability of the internal and interregional political situation of the 1990s, together with the repeated institutional crises, aggravated the conflict between the Hutu majority of the population and the traditionally hegemonic Tutsi minority, repeatedly plunging Burundi to the brink of inter-ethnic civil war.
The policy of national reconciliation promoted by P. Buyoya at the end of the 1980s seemed to have started the country towards the constitution of a multiethnic and democratic society: in this sense the charter of national unity against all forms of discrimination and exclusion (approved by referendum in February 1991), as well as the introduction of multi-partyism, guaranteed by the new Constitution of March 1992. However, Buyoya’s ‘power-sharing’ principle did not undermine Tutsi dominance in the army (one-third made up of Hutu elements who were barred from officer ranks) or in the judiciary. Furthermore, Union pour le progrès national – UPRONA – hegemonized by the Tutsis, but in which Hutu elements also militated), caught the main Hutu opposition movement unprepared, the Front pour la démocratie au Burundi (FRODEBU, an underground party formed in Rwanda by expatriates in 1986), still lacking a leadership capable of assuming governmental responsibilities, while the Tutsi minority began to fear strongly the consequences of a foreseeable defeat of the UPRONA.
The general elections of March 1993, preceded by an electoral campaign aimed at stigmatizing the ‘enemy’ in the opposite party to be canceled in order to guarantee its survival, ensured victory for FRODEBU, which obtained 65 of the 81 parliamentary seats, while in the presidential elections it won, with 64, 8 % of the vote, the Hutu M. Ndadaye. The new president appointed the moderate Tutsi S. Kinigi as head of the government, authorized the repatriation of former president JB Bagaza, while granting amnesty to Hutu terrorists belonging to the Parti pour la libération du peuple hutu (PALIPEHUTU, a ‘fundamentalist’ movement widespread above all in Rwanda and Tanzania) and therefore proceeded to drastic replacements in the public administration, without however affecting the composition of the army.
In a political and social climate already disturbed by the massive repatriation of refugees, which caused numerous armed clashes, especially in the north of the country, the assassination of President Ndadaye, which took place on 20 October 1993 following a failed coup, caused an irreparable fracture. in the fragile process of democratization and aggregation of Burundian society.
In fact, after Ndadaye’s death there was a resumption of inter-ethnic clashes in most of the country, which caused more than 100. 000 victims: to the violence of the Hutu armed organizations, which purged cities and entire provinces of Tutsi citizens (and of the Hutus affiliated to the UPRONA), the army responded by destroying the Hutu peasant villages in central and eastern Burundi Hundreds of thousands of Hutus sought refuge in Rwanda and Tanzania, while the Tutsis, displaced from their lands, were forced to live, in dramatic conditions, in camps set up in Burundi, from which the younger elements soon began to flee. gathered in terrorist gangs.
Only in January 1994, the National Assembly (protected by the French army) was able to appoint as the new President of the Republic the Hutu C. Ntaryamira of FRODEBU who, in turn, appointed the Tutsi A. Kanyenkiko of UPRONA to lead a government of coalition.