– Echoes of Rwanda –
The UN Security Council is to meet on Monday to discuss the crisis.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said Friday that the discovery of bodies – “many apparently summarily executed” – has become a “regular occurrence” in Burundi’s capital Bujumbura.
Bloodshed has risen ahead of the deadline to return weapons, and on Friday the son of a leading Burundian rights activist was found dead hours after he was arrested in the capital, his family and witnesses said.
Last week, the country’s Senate president Reverien Ndikuriyo threatened to “pulverise” regime opponents who do not lay down arms before the deadline which expires later on Saturday.
“Today, the police shoot in the legs… but when the day comes that we tell them to go to ‘work’, do not come crying to us,” he said.
The loaded term “work” was a euphemism used in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide to describe the mass killings of at least 800,000 mainly Tutsi people by extremist Hutu militias.
“The language is unambiguous to Burundians and chillingly similar to that used in Rwanda in the 1990s before the genocide,” the International Crisis Group (ICG) think-tank said.
Minister of public security and regime number two Alain-Guillaume Bunyoni this week reminded inhabitants of the restive neighbourhoods – particularly Tutsis – that they were a minority compared to the Hutus who back Nkurunziza.
“If the police fail, there are nine million citizens to whom it would be enough to say: do something,” he said.
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