Burundi : the lower house renewed the CVR team without the presence of the CNL
This Friday evening, the National Assembly adopted and renewed the team of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (CVR). The activity took place in the absence of deputies of the main opposition CNL party which denounces “a sham vote”. INFO SOS Médias Burundi
Commissioners of the most controversial commission remain the same except for a member of the Batwa minority group who replaced a commissioner who recently joined the East African Legislative Assembly, EALA.
The team is made up of 7 Hutus, 5 Tutsis in addition to this Mutwa. It has 2 pastors, an abbot and a representative of the Muslim community.
Five of its members are women.
The vote was taken in the absence of deputies of the main opposition CNL party which denounces “a sham vote”.
“This is not the first time, the bureau of the National Assembly seems rather to bend to the will of the executive board of the CNDD-FDD party. We go to the CNDD-FDD office to come back with the final list of those who will have to be elected or at least appointed if I can put it that way. Indeed we come with a list that we simply have to bless. In other words, we are doing a sham vote but the vote is already done long before”, regretted Agathon Rwasa, the CNL leader in a press conference organized for this purpose in the commercial city Bujumbura this Friday afternoon.
He finds this to be an attitude to be banished.
“We should discourage these attitudes of leaders who shirk their responsibility and rely on the party, forgetting that the party is less than the nation. The speaker of the National Assembly and his bureau are there to manage this institution, they do not have no injunction to receive from anywhere else”, he said.
The CVR is one of the instruments provided in the 2000 Arusha Peace and Reconciliation Agreement. It remains the most decried of the commissions set up within this framework. It is attacked by associations for the defense of the rights of Tutsis who accuse it of being concerned only with the massacres which took the lives of more Hutus than Tutsis.
On December 20, 2021, the chairman of the highly controversial commission declared that the 1972 massacres which killed more Hutus than Tutsis constituted “genocide against the Hutus of Burundi”.
It was on the sidelines of a presentation of a third progress report to both chambers of parliament in the commercial capital Bujumbura. But President Évariste Ndayishimiye indicated last May that it was not yet time to declare that “the killings of 1972 constitute genocide”.
According to the CVR, nearly 20,000 remains of human bones have been exhumed, thousands of documents relating to these killings studied, over the past two years.
Burundi has the same ethnic makeup as Rwanda, its northern neighbor where the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi was recognized by the UN.
In Burundi, despite the recognition of the 1972 massacres commonly known as “the events of 1972” as “a genocide against the Hutus” by the majority Hutus in power today, the two ethnic groups are still struggling to agree on the naming of the crises which carried off theirs.
So far, Tutsis remain convinced that the tragedy that befell their people following the assassination of the first democratically elected Hutu president, Melchior Ndadaye in 1993, is “genocide against the Tutsis”, which is of less concern Mr. Ndayicariye and his commission who refused in certain provinces to visit sites where mass graves of Tutsis were reported to them.
